SURVIVE TO HOW

In Marie Darrieussecq’s play The Sea Museum, a human family cohabits with a sea creature named Bella. The play is set in a moment beyond Ragnarok, in a rural location where rations are scarce. Likewise, Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s Hér relates the often harrowing relations between a girl and a soldier who takes up residence with her after slaughtering everyone nearby. Both Hér and The Sea Museum explore the rough terrain of survival in apocalyptic circumstances.

These ecofictions become less a dystopian future and more realism as polycrises mount.

The six sessions of SURVIVAL FOR POETS are meant as enlivening encounters with the ecosystems on which we interdepend. Here, we see the creative practices applied to attunements with ourselves, other humans, and our ecosystems. These are practices of relationship. What is most important in The Sea Museum and Hér are how the relationships are navigated. The same is true when crises multiply. How to activate, animate. How to affect. How to gentle loving kindness and care. How to rage with exactitude. How to move. How to love. We survive in how we survive together. We survive to how.

~

SURVIVAL FOR POETS acknowledges that each person who goes outside, who writes, and who rites will have a variety of possible or preferred ways of attuning to any outsides and cultivating many creative practices. 

SURVIVAL FOR POETS promotes the understanding that all action is political and the personal is political and each body has their own sensate way of navigating a world. 

SURVIVAL FOR POETS is an outcome of the research conducted for Fókus: Centering Families in Iceland’s Just Transition, analysing the past eighty years of Icelandic film and literature for family attitudes towards their environments.