Contribution short abstract:

Mourning rituals for (future) environmental loss remains in Western society mainly anthropocentric. Rituals for humans are projected on "dead" landscapes. This paper aims for rituals emerging from daily encounters with the "dying" Hochvogel mountain.

Contribution long abstract:

Within the context of the climate crisis, mourning rituals concerning (future) environmental loss have gained attention in the last couple of years. In 2019, Iceland held the first glacier funeral for the dead glacier Ok. Almost at the same time, people in Switzerland went on a funeral march to the Pizol glacier, wearing black. Since then, glacier funerals have spread globally with the intention of raising awareness for the global climate crisis. Death and commemorative ritual is in this context a powerful manner to do so. But the rituals remain predominantly Westernized ones, usually held for other humans, projected on a landscape. This paper aims to emerge death -, end-of-life care - and commemorative rituals together with the "dying" Hochvogel mountain, based on a four-week autoethnographic field work by artistic researcher s†ëf∆n schäfer, in July 2024, as the first trip of many to follow. Daily visits to the mountain's summit led to first attempts towards rituals emerging from the intimate interaction between schäfer as a human, and the Hochvogel mountain as a more-than human entity, but also between the weather, fauna and flora, equipment are active non-human participants in the proces of ritual making and performing.