Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my experience as part of the “Learning Endings” project led by Patty Chang, Astrida Neimanis and Aleksija Neimanis, this poem is a record, a reflection, a tribute to the scientists I spoke to, the animals who died away from their home, and the more-than-human care explored by the project.

Paper long abstract:

In the age of plastic, pollutions, and disconnection, ocean space becomes increasingly lethal to their own inhabitants. Marine creatures are getting lost, suffering from hunger, and separated from their families due to a multitude of anthropogenic causes. Some came close to the shore, became stranded and eventually died. In these cases, humans may be called to help, and to care for the stranded marine animals in different ways. Among these encounters, necropsy is a unique practice that is conducted by scientists.

In early 2021, international artist Patty Chang, cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis and wildlife pathologist Aleksija Neimanis gathered their forces and started the interdisciplinary project “Learning Endings”, seeking to explore ‘what cetacean strandings and deaths teach humans about our relationship to oceans and their ecologies’. Drawing on my experience working as part of the project as a research associate, and some preliminary findings, this poem reading (estimated around 5 minutes) is a record, a reflection and a tribute to the scientists and conservationists I spoke to, the animals who died away from their home, and the kind of more-than-human care envisioned by “Learning Endings”. In particular, this poem imagines necropsy as a mode of labouring, mourning and worlding. How might the fragmentation of a dead body as part of a necropsy offer a conduit to confront fraught contemporary ecological relations and to become whole? Amidst the sixth mass extinction, how might scientists’ attending to individual dead animals resist the abstraction of death?