We are the ecological grief initiative

Foreshadowing is the transnational initiative dedicated to grieving ecological loss. We build and activate multi-platforms and resources for interrogating neo-colonial structures around the climate crisis and developing the agency and intelligence for collective witnessing and transformative healing. It aims to be a socio-cultural infrastructure for activists, artists, researchers, and organisers from the frontline communities affected by damaged ecosystems and to process grief through community-led interspecies epistemology. Foreshadowing focuses on several key areas. 

Organising witnessing communities

First and foremost, organising witnessing communities in the areas where the devastating impacts of ecological damage are prolific and urgent. Each witnessing process intersects ecological trauma with social ones and devises grief rituals based on community traditions and lived experiences.

Reparative Care Structure

The processing of intersectional trauma considers the reparative climate-aware care structure that overcomes conventional therapy narratives and seeks the collective ways of holding the emotional struggles of ecological loss and broken communities. 

Creative Conviction of Political Spirituality

Leveraging spirituality as an engine for bringing people together, this process explores and honours the indigenous relationships to nature and their healing practices, which conspire with the contemporary practice of community-led ritual makings and meaningful offerings.

Exploring the idea of a ‘Living Memorial’

Foreshadowing attempts to decolonise the practice of commemoration through exploring the idea of a ‘Living Memorial’. This experimental commemoration process imagines and involves interspecies collaboration, focusing on time-based community-oriented care rather than the materialistic production of human-centred value-imposing forms. 

Alternative pedagogy and transnational advocacy network 

Foreshadowing aims to build and share community-centred knowledge on ecological grief as a planetary pedagogy and expand the advocacy network of the grief council as a movement. For this journey, we welcome long-term partnerships and practice-based research commissions from institutions with interests in community-oriented, nature-based, transformative healing

Current Web of Council

Youngsook Choi is the founder and co-steward of Foreshadowing. Youngsook instigates grief as the process of climate interrogation that scrutinises structural conditions intersecting human tragedy and environmental loss. In Every Bite of the Emperor (since 2021), her ongoing body of works on colonial exploitation engaging North England post-mining towns, Malaysian rainforest and Vietnamese hydrosphere is in tandem with this inquiry. 

Chiara Famengo is the co-steward of Foreshadowing, and curates online seasonal programmes. Chiara works at the intersection of art and ecology, often beyond traditional exhibition formats. Chiara’s curatorial endeavour and research take place across Three Rivers in London, NICHE and Ocean Space in Venice. Seaweed has been her grief-kin in witnessing rapidly changing Venetian Lagoon’s ecosystems and resultant impact on fishing communities.    

Hannah Davey is exploring re-enchantment methodologies to support herself and other artists to nourish activist practices. She is part of Liberate Tate; a guest lecturer on The Dutch Art Institute’s roaming MA; and the in-house art-activism specialist at Greenpeace UK, working on climate justice. Her projects challenge public, corporate and political spaces – usually without permission. 

Emily Gee is interested in how we live otherwise; in the cracks and gaps where we can find each other, in the processes of sharing the worlds we live through, and the ones we might move towards. As a senior producer at Heart of Glass, an agency for collaborative, community and social arts practice based in Merseyside, UK, she looks after the organisation’s commissions and residencies, including long-term projects In Every Bite of the Emperor led by artist Youngsook Choi and The Suicide Chronicles led by artist Mark Storor. 

Linh Lê is an independent curator and researcher from Saigon, Vietnam. Her work investigates the changing landscapes and ecologies of Saigon and other parts of Vietnam under the pressure of modernisation and urbanisation. Since July 2024, she has been working on Đo Đạc, a site-responsive curatorial project that attempts to survey the impact of forced resettlement in Thủ Thiêm peninsula, Sài Gòn. She is currently a Curatorial Board member of Á Space (Hà Nội). 

Khanyisile Mbongwa is a Cape Town-based independent curator whose practice emerges as Curing & Care, using the creative to instigate spaces for emancipatory practices, joy and play. Khanyisile was the chief curator of Stellenbosch Triennale 2020 and the curator of Liverpool Biennial 2023 ‘uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things’, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, focusing on spatiality, radical black self-love and imagination, and black futurity. 

Wen Di Sia is the co-founder, writer, and researcher of Gerimis Art, a collaborative artistic and archiving collective that co-produces cultural content with indigenous Malaysian (Orang Asli–OA) communities. She explores how enclosures disrupt the deep connections between OA and their customary territories, threatening the survival of intergenerational Indigenous knowledge and governance systems.