ISM's Religion, Ecology and Expressive Culture Initiative: Reflections on the first year

Tuesday, May 21, 2024

In its first full year of programming, the ISM’s Religion, Ecology and Expressive Culture initiative featured a wide variety of events—exhibitions, plays, workshops, panels, conferences— that drew attention to the rich and growing body of work at the intersection of religion, ecology, and expressive cultures. In diverse and powerful ways, this year’s events explored the three themes that are at the core of the initiative’s work.

The first theme, Sacred Cosmologies, Environmental Change, and Expressive Culture, was featured in the play, When Wajcha Meets Pachamama. Written by the liturgical scholar Claudio Carvalhaes, the play told the story of a clown, Wajcha, who encountered Pachamama, the figure of the Earth in Indigenous Andean cosmology. The play combined narrative, humor, puppetry, and a variety of non-human characters to illustrate how damage inflicted upon Pachamama damages us as well.

The second theme, Ritual Natures: Expressive Culture and the Natural Forms of Trees, Water, and Rocks, was a central motif that emerged during the conference, “Ecologies, Environmentalisms, and the Black Sacred Arts”, the third annual ISM conference in a series on the Black Sacred Arts. The significance of water was a central topic discussed throughout the conference, found in the dialogic keynote, in panels, and in musical and ritual examples. Considering the Middle Passage, Professors Tracy Hucks (the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), and Dianne Stewart (the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University) used the dialogic keynote to explore “waterscapes of terror and ‘teachment,’” and an “eco-sono-ritual” called Mudfish, was created by Viktor Ewing-Givens and Roman Norfleet who ritually guided participants into the imagined worlds of mudfish, which enter a dormant state during dry seasons and return to life with the return of water.

The final theme, Extraction and Disposal in Expressive Culture, was the focus in two projects: “Last Dance” and “Biodegradable Blessings.” Last Dance, a semi-improvised performance piece by the British group, Feral Theatre, featured a suspended bag from which sand drained throughout the performance. While the draining sand symbolically evoked the passage of time and the approach of death, Feral Theatre also insisted on attending to the materiality of sand, discussing the site of its extraction and intentionally disposing of it on a local beach.

Biodegradable Blessings explored the disposal of Buddhist prayer flags and their afterlives in the Himalayan region. Because of their sacred nature, prayer flags cannot be simply thrown away and they are typically left to naturally biodegrade. This practice creates problems with newer and inexpensive synthetic prayer flags, which do not biodegrade but instead slowing breakdown into microplastics. The panelists described their work to recover traditional practices of making biodegradable prayer flags and led several workshops in which participants made their own prayer flags.

All three themes were present in the art exhibition, Biophilia: In Excelsis, curated by M. Annenberg and featuring work by twenty-two artists. Noreen Dean Dresser situates the climate crisis within the sacred Biblical cosmology with her piece, “The Root Amidst Good and Evil No. 1,” which asked viewers to reimagine the object with which the serpent tempts human beings: not the fruit but the root, the buried carbon whose power we continually release to become powerful like God.

Susan Hoffman Fishman’s hauntingly titled painting, “The Earth Is Breaking Beautifully” depicted stunningly beautiful sinkholes that evoke the sacrality of water as a natural form even while displaying the dangerous new movements of water on a rapidly heating planet. Walter Brown’s “Quick Lunch” pieces, which are created from melted and partially reconstituted plastic packagingand utensils, highlighted the extraction and disposal surrounding a simple meal—and, with its polysemous title, reminds us that our disposed plastics might become a (deadly) lunch for our fellow creatures in the oceans. Read a review of the exhibit by New York based art writer, cultural critic, and curator, Eleanor Heartney. Watch the exhibit opening panel conversation—where artists engaged with Dr. Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies—and the exhibit’s closing webinar. Read a review of the exhibit by Brian Slattery of the New Haven Independent: Artists Open Path To Grappling With Climate Change.

The work of the ISM’s initiative on Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture to explore the three themes will continue! Please check back to our website in August 2024 to see the events planned for the 2024-25 academic year.