Nevela
In this artistic research Danny Neyman will look at existing mourning rituals and practices, writing and performance, dealing with the loss of entire species. He will research into some specific species that have gone extinct in recent times and imagine and articulate new forms of mourning, acknowledging and processing loss.
‘Nevel’ in Hebrew means ‘harp’. ‘Nevela’ in Hebrew means ‘carcass’. It can also be used as a curse word meaning something like ‘son of a bitch’ or ‘asshole’.
Like many people, Neyman has been obsessively reading about our ecological emergency: global warming, ocean acidification, mass extinction... He has been wondering how we deal psychologically, privately and as a society, with the knowledge of the extinction of a species, and with the understanding that it is our most mundane actions (starting a car, buying toys, eating candy) that are responsible for this collapse. Though clearly our best energies should be invested in figuring out how to reverse these trends of destruction, Neyman thinks it is also worth questioning and re-imagining how we might mourn what has already been lost.
The very idea that extinction could be possible is something relatively new, until the 19th century it would have been blasphemy to claim God might allow any part of His creation to vanish for all eternity. And it seems like up to today it is hard to come by rituals or shared experiences with which we express the horror/grief of extinction, in which we mourn lost species. We give dinosaur toys to babies, making extinction cute.
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