Letters for Fertilizing Futures
A collective mourning and speculative writing practice inspired by the concept of fertilizing mourning by artist Eliana Otta. Through letter writing, ritual, and offering, participants reflect on extractive loss while imagining what forms of life, relation, and possibility might grow from collective grief. The activity re-stories mourning as closure, by engaging with it as a regenerative practice that allows participants to remain with loss while nurturing otherwise futures grounded in care, relationality, and responsibility to the Territory.
Tools
This is the continuation of the activity Paper Mourning.
Extractivism seeks to confine us within an emotional void (Mortimer-Sandilands, 2010) — one that renders environmental loss incommensurable and inexpressible due to relational displacement. Within La Escuela de las Chullachaquis, mourning became part of re-storying as a way of collectively engaging with extractive violence, ecological loss, and uncertain futures. The activity asks participants to reflect on what might still grow from loss, memory, and collective grieving.
The practice is inspired by artist Eliana Otta and her concept of fertilizing mourning, which draws from the Amazonian ancestral practice of Yana Allpa (Black Earth). In this process, organic matter, ashes, pottery, and remains become fertile soil that nourishes future life. Mourning, then, is understood not as closure or forgetting, but as a collective and regenerative practice through which endings continue feeding new forms of existence.
Letters for Fertilizing Otherwise Futures invites participants to imagine a time beyond the present and beyond their human form. Based on their case studies from the Paper Mourning activity, participants write letters reflecting on what they hope their remains might fertilize after death: what forms of care, resistance, relation, or life they wish to nourish within Territories impacted by extractivism.
Anna Tsing (2015) reminds us that “if we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope.” This is why mourning, as a refusal of extractive temporalities, becomes a way of staying with the Territory, remaining accountable to loss, and imagining otherwise futures rooted in regeneration, memory, and relational continuity.