Solastalgic Archive

The Solastalgic Archive
September 15 - December 3, 2022

 

  • Abbey Hepner, Snow Globe for Extractive Industry, 2019, Photograph

Solastalgia: the premonition of transition, a sense of loss from an anticipated future.

It is the feeling of homesickness before leaving home.

 

Conceived by artist Nina Elder during a residency at the University of New Mexico, the Solastalgic Archive holds materials that contextualize and give breadth to the experience of living and making in this time of accelerated change. The traveling archive encapsulates ephemera of memory, creation, forgetting, destruction, preciousness and transience from diverse founding artists and collaborators. It is an evolving, changing, temporal entity that will continue to grow as it is enriched by additions connected to each host venue. Contributors are asked to consider what they do that connects them to time. 

Can we read time, smell it, taste it, touch it? Do we reinvent it, ask it questions, and look for answers?

Deep Time Lab

A participatory learning experiment in how we situate ourselves within time. The Lab merges the forms of exhibition, pedagogy, and archive. 

Deep Time as Lab

The Lab orients participants and visitors to consider Earth’s new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene. Defined by human impact, urgency, and unprecedented change, the Anthropocene reveals that there is not a single, predictable future. 

Deep Time as Experiment

History is a story that can be retold and revised. What will be is being scripted right now. Deep Time Lab seeks new connections between past, present, and potential futures, by exploring time as a language, a measure, an art medium, a social context, a scientific principle, a spiritual space, and a cultural expression.

Collaborate

Over the course of the semester, the Museum invites students, faculty, and community members, to participate in experiential learning situated in the Lab. 

Collaboration Possibilities

Utilize the Solastalgic Archive and themes of the Deep Time Lab as a pedagogical tool, attend a Deep Time Lab program, or engage with resources in the Reading Room. Come, think, and consider your relationship to Deep Time in the era accelerated change. Contribute a piece to the Solastalgic Archive that will become a permanent object in exhibition collection. 

Deep Time Lab Resources

Learn more about a Deep Time Lab collaboration for your students here.

Connect with Molly Bolick at Molly.Bolick@unh.edu for participation and engagement with the Archive and Deep Time Lab. 

Looking for inspiration for your Deep Time Lab collaboration? The Reading Room has a library comprised of authors from diverse fields. Find a path for your exploration. Drop-in anytime during Museum open hours.

Find the readings and inspirations list here

Solastalgic Archive is a curatorial project of artist Nina Elder, and is organized by Dr. Natalie R. Marsh of artepodia.

This exhibition is supported by the S. Melvin and Mary Jo Rines Art Exhibition Fund.