Solastalgia: UWM Art Discussion Hosted by Nina Elder

The Age of Solastalgia: Artist Nina Elder Discusses Anxiety of Environmental Change at UWM 

Undergraduates, professors and community members gathered in UWM’s Curtin Hall for a casual conversation about art, museum archives and environmentalism, a discussion based on a fairly new word to the English language: solastalgia.

Artist, researcher and environmentalist Nina Elder hosted the brown bag discussion presented by the Center for 21st Century Studies on Tuesday, Feb. 18 on the UW-Milwaukee campus.

The word solastalgia didn’t appear until Australian environmental philosopher Glen Albrecht coined the term in 2005. Solastalgia is the emotional sensation of environmental change, or in Albrecht’s words from his book Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, “homesickness you have when you are still at home.”

“As land changes we start to have an anxiety that is in this present moment,” said Elder. “It’s imagining the change that we are going to experience in the near or distant future, a triangulation between time and place and emotion.”

Elder discussed some of her major art and archival projects that blend solastalgia with changing cultures and societies.

Her major concept, The Solastalgic Archive, required help from communities and individuals. For the multisensory museum display, Elder asked for permanent item donations that reflect a scientific or spiritual sense of solastalgia for the contributor. Donations included anything from rock collections to flat-screen TVs to photographs. Elder requested written commentary of the contributor’s emotional connection to each object, sometimes receiving several pages of anecdotes.

“Each object had a whole spectrum of responses to it,” said Elder. “In some ways, it is random, but the fact that there were emotional relationships and a lot of spiritual relationships, I don’t often run into that in a museum.”

Incorporating archive donations wasn’t always simple. Elder has received many items like houseplant clippings that can’t stay in a museum, or recipes best represented when actually prepared as meals.

Milwaukee resident Alexandra Lakind attended the discussion. A longtime fan of Elder’s work, she also pursues studies regarding the environment and art.

“Moving forward in the future is going to be complex and take a lot of thought and care,” said Lakind.

Another effort of The Solastalgia Archive stemmed from Elder’s archival work at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center at Alaska’s Anchorage Museum. There she tackled the problem of overtaxonification of objects when removed from a community and introduced to a museum.

“It stops being the vibrant and alive thing that it is meant to be in the world,” said Elder.

For example, Elder explained how a salmon skin scraping knife used for generations loses its dynamic character when archivists clean and shine the knife for display, never to be used on a fish or touched by hands again. The Solastalgia Archive challenged the traditional concept of a museum exhibit, encouraging community interaction with pieces that didn’t undergo heavy taxonification.

The archive resides at the University of New Mexico Art Museum, near Elder’s home in Albuquerque. In Santa Fe, SITE Santa Fe hosted her exhibit “What Endures” last fall, featuring Elder’s own contemporary landscape drawings made from materials like radioactive charcoal, industrial waste, pulverized meteorites or forest fire ash.

The conversation transitioned to Elder’s current work studying California forest management. She explained how a law from over 100 years ago that prohibited the state from letting forest fires burn caused massive overgrowth and a dead mycelium network underground. Fire scientists estimate that 14 out 15 trees need removal for forests to regain optimal health. Essentially, parts of California will lose the clear blue skies that attracted many of its residents, to seasonal smoke, and Elder wants to work with Californians to “create funerals and write obituaries” for the blue sky.

“Using grief and an anonymous public archive can help heal,” said Elder.

The conversation continued well past the scheduled hour, continuing discussion of forest fires. Elder herself said she had transitioned from a radical environmentalist to one who understands the need for certain practices like controlled burning.

“I learned from boots on the ground with people who were doing the work, and the long term benefit was so profound,” said Elder.

UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies had invited Elder to present. The center supports faculty research and collaborates with graduate students in the humanities and social sciences. They typically host four to five major speakers each semester, focusing on interdisciplinary study in areas of digital culture, critical east asia studies and art in higher education.

Founded in 1968, it was a “peak of excellence when UWM was trying to distinguish itself from Madison,” said Deputy Director Maureen Ryan.

Elder received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at The University of New Mexico and a Master of Fine Arts at San Francisco Art Institute. She was the Residency Program Manager at the Santa Fe Art Institute, working on program support for international artists. Although a researcher and artist by title, Elder extends her work into education and activism. She co-founded the women’s networking initiative Wheelhouse Institute in 2016 with scientist Twila Moon. The organization hosts skill-sharing and workshopping events to foster climate leadership among professional women. 

Elder played a video at the discussion that showcased her education efforts specifically with children at a school in New Mexico through SITE Santa Fe. In an art workshop, students made a paper cutout of something related to nature – a bird, a wolf, the word peace. They placed that image on a photograph of a natural landscape, a “void” symbolizing the solastalgic anticipation of that piece of nature disappearing in the future.

“He [a student] just symbolized it with a really simple water drop, and then put it over this image of beautiful clean lake,” said Elder. “It’s kind of like this ghost of clean water.”

In the meantime, Elder will continue her work in California, where she hopes the upcoming public art project can help Californians come to terms with senses of solastalgia for the not so distant changes coming to their forests.