This year, we embarked on a journey with Heart of Glass, together with Youngsook Choi, and Á Space, together with Linh Le and Van Do, in a collaborative project Connecting Ecological Grief. From fieldworks in Vietnam and Malaysia emerged the collaborative publication, A Guide to Living Well With All Beings that gathers our research, reflections, stories, and memories.
This publication contains the wonderings, dreamings, rememberings and, occasionally, knowings of the team who held this project as well as those of the artists, community members, water bodies and other beings we were privileged to meet through our work. It represents the traces of time spent together, connecting across distances or situated in time and place.
Central to Connecting Ecological Grief is a shared enquiry exploring ecological damage, focusing on the meeting points of land and water—coastlines and rivers. The project seeks to highlight how the process of gathering, storytelling, collective reflection, and interspecies solidarity could reconcile the human-ecological divide, act as witnesses to the changes to our environments and our ecological relationships, and at the same time call for possible action towards climate change, environmental degradation, and species displacement.
Connecting Ecological Grief is a collaborative project between Á Space (Vietnam), Heart of Glass (UK), and Gerimis Art (Malaysia). It weaves artistic research practices, transnational narratives, and community knowledge between Vietnam, Malaysia and the UK. The work forms a part of In Every Bite of the Emperor, initiated and led by Youngsook Choi and Heart of Glass, this growing long-term collaborative project explores the climate crisis through the experience of individual and collective grief in connection to environmental damage and community destruction within the UK, Malaysia, South Korea and Vietnam.
Commissioned and produced by Heart of Glass, supported by Arts Council England and British Council.
