Part of ProtoZone17: Stories of those left behind, 15.11.2024-12.01.2025
With Ends in Mind
Workshop, 16.11., 11:00-ca.12:30. Followed by lunch for those who want to stay.
With Ends in Mind is an on-going project by Undead Matter. This edition is hosted by Sophie J Williamson and Sarah Doerfel.
please register for the workshop here
Death and dying are ever-present. We live through an era of mass extinction, reverberating with grief of colonial violence, capitalist extraction, environmental destruction and climate catastrophe. How can we learn from holistic palliative care practices to bring our personal experiences of loss to planetary care?
“With Ends in Mind” is a series of itinerant gatherings convened by “Undead Matter”. The workshops bring together practitioners across fields engaged in being with the dying, from palliative care workers and death doulas to ecologists and activists. Through conversations and shared ritual, we seek to learn new ways of being present, weaving interconnections between individual grief and collective ecological urgencies.
This second workshop of the series is hosted together with the artist Sarah Doerfel, whose work deals with the borders between death and life, and between human and non-human identity.
We invite participants to attend with their departed in mind, as well as those unborn and those in the future who may never be; human and more-than-human. Holding our dead and our fragilities with us in the present, With Ends in Mind, reimagines futures, nurtures agencies and seeks new ways of being.
Undead Matter is a cross-disciplinary collaborative practice, exploring entangled lives of organic and non-organic matter, weaving together the intimacies of being-with-dying, from palliative care to geological ancestry, deep time and planetary futures. Bringing together voices from art, ecology, activism, sciences, indigenous communities and other fields through commissions, performance, writing, podcasts, publishing, events and gatherings, Undead Matter has worked with cultural institutions (Tate, BBC radio, TBA21, documenta, MACBA, Nieuwe Instituut, inIva, and many others), universities, scientific research institutions, and community-based organizations.
Sophie J Williamson is a curator and writer based in London and Margate. She is the initiator and convenor of Undead Matter, a commissioning, broadcasting, publishing, and research programme focused on the intimacy of dying and its dialogue with the geological. She is Associate Curator (Art&Ecology) at the Natural History Museum, London (2024–) and Artist-in-Residence at ArtAngel (2024-25). From 2013-2021, she was Exhibitions Curator at Camden Art Centre, and was previously part of the inaugural team at Raven Row (2009–13). Her writing appears in ArtMonthly, frieze, Elephant, October, and numerous exhibition publications and journals. She is currently undertaking her PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London, titled Being-with-Dying: Living with Agency Through the Sixth Mass Extinction.
Sarah Doerfel’s works deal with temporal and physical transition zones. The negation of a boundary with our environment is central to her dynamic-relational understanding of identity. As permanent trans-beings, the seeming separation between death and life, past, future and present, dissolves for us at a closer look. With the base principle of evolution as a permanent condition of change, wide doors open into narrative speculation. Intermediate states of symbiosis and parasitism, mineral and organic being, human and more-than-human, pain and healing are at the centre of her sculptures, video works and paintings.
Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin, the Macro Museo, Rome, and the Kunstverein Munich. She has received grants from the Stiftung Kunstfonds, the Cultural Department of the City of Munich and the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and Art, among others. Doerfel studied Fine Art and Photography & Video Art in London and Munich.
