On the second of September, we held the kick-off meeting for our climate justice exquisite corpse project that emerged from the FEELers 2025 summer camp. In this project, we explore the link between climate justice and community building using the Exquisite Corpse method and the following questions:
- How is FEELers connected to climate justice?
- How can meeting/ gathering/ thinking through these questions of collective care/ learning and dreaming with others inform and enact our conceptions of climate justice?
- What can we glean from and expand from our personal pod learnings to share with the wider group with regards to our personal approach to climate justice?
The Exquisite Corpse method is an asynchronous collaborative art process inspired by surrealist techniques developed in Paris in the 1920s. The version we are using is based on a game developed by Roz Ray in 2010 (described in detail here). It works like this: Based on a common ‘seed’ or inspirational prompt, all participants create an artwork in response to it using whatever medium seems appropriate (writing, painting, photography, sculpture, baking, needlepoint, film, music, dance, or literally anything else). After a set period of time, the pieces are exchanged between participants and everyone creates another piece inspired by whatever project they received and the process repeats…
For our kick-off meeting we gathered a group of campers from FEELers as well as some people who had wanted to join the summer camp, but couldn’t make it in the end, to co-create the seed. Our seed is a facilitated conversation about climate justice. We took turns answering the following questions based on which question resonated with us the most:
- What colour does climate justice have for you?
- How does it smell?
- How far away is it?
- Where do the words climate justice resonate in your body?
- What have you always wondered about climate justice?
- What should everybody know about climate justice?
After everyone had taken a turn, we ended with a freeflow conversation about what emerged from our answers, sharing wonderings, experiences and knowledge with each other.
Now, we all have time until the beginning of November to create our first artwork. Depending on the format and distance, we will share our pieces either by email or snail-mail (also inspired by our general embrace of FEELed Lab snail-mail, hehe).
I am very curious to see what will emerge over the winter and what types of connections will be unfurling. This project is really exciting to me, because I have worked with this method for a while, but always in different ways.
I have used it as a pre-conference networking and connection opportunity and low-stim activity space during the International Conference for Young Marine Researchers, which was much more focused on the emotional benefits of crafting and connecting in a creative way. With the Cobra Collective, we conducted a research project that explored relationship building and embracing different ways of knowing between ocean artists and scientists using the Exquisite Corpse method. This focused mostly on the process of relationship building and less on the content of the artworks itself.
In this FEELers Exquisite Corpse edition, however, the art itself will be the main focus – what will emerge?
The FEELed lab 