Endurance Protocols for Climate Chaos

A woman stands on a seashore at low tide, the water lapping her feet. She remains standing as the tide comes in and the water rises. It rises to her knees, her hips, and, at highest tide, to her neck. She remains standing as the tide ebbs and the water recedes, slowly, down to her chest, her waist, her knees, her ankles, until—about thirteen hours after she began her silent, immersive, vigil—the water is no longer touching her, and the performance is over. There is no dialogue, no movement, no action. Onlookers and friends do whatever they want to: sit and watch, dance, play music, or simply join the artist in the water for short periods of time

This is 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, a decade-long multi-part performance project by Sarah Cameron Sunde. It’s been performed in seas around the world—off the shores of Mexico, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and finally in the artist’s home sea, the Atlantic Ocean, on the shores of New York City.

The image at the center of 36.5—a human being standing in a rising sea–is an apt figure for this moment in the field I want to discuss: broadly, Environmental Humanities, in particular how theatre and performance are engaging with topics like ecological crisis and climate change. It is an apt figure for this moment because of its expansive scale, its ambiguous agency, and its disquieting affect: all these mirror the overwhelming, often paralyzing, experience of climate change.

The field of Environmental Humanities didn’t even exist until recently; today it is surging, proliferating new university programs, journals, conferences, book series, and subfields. The scholarship explosion is matched by snowballing cultural production in every genre and medium, and—finally—in skyrocketing levels of public awareness.

The field is part of the crisis it studies and teaches about, making us emotionally and intellectually overwhelmed.

Change is both the subject and the experience of this discourse, as scientific data piles up and often outstrips the theories and models developed to understand it. In the past three decades, the debates around this topic have gone from asking “Is climate change really happening?” to “Is climate change caused by human actions or is it a natural phenomenon?” to “What should we do about climate change: should our energies be focused on adaptation, mitigation, or prevention?” to where we are now: “Is it too late to do anything meaningful about climate change?”

The last question—also known scientifically as the “we’re so fucked” hypothesis—has opened up a whole new dimension of the topic. Questions about how climate change is making us feel now form the basis of a whole new field—Environmental Psychology, with its own neologism, “solastalgia,” defined as a form of emotional or existential distress caused by “the lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change.”

So the current state of the field is painfully paradoxical: on the one hand, the field is thriving, expanding, getting attention, funding, etc. But on the other hand, the field is part of the crisis it studies and teaches about, making us emotionally and intellectually overwhelmed.

The simple action of 36.5 distills the turbulent emotions surrounding climate change into a single, uncanny image: a solitary human engulfed by a rising sea. It is a striking image, as well as an enigmatic and multivalent one. It can signify courage as much as stubborn denial, resilience as much as madness, hope as much as suicidal despair.

In the case of 36.5, the transformation from idea to activation, proposition to protocol, took the form of a slowly growing international community of collaborators working together and apart.

It can also engender a dialectic between these emotional polarities and become a space for contemplating the capacities and limitations with which we humans will face the rising tide of suffering that lies ahead of us.

Like a tide, the coming suffering is predictable: as the accelerating rate of extreme weather events makes clear, it is surely coming. Yet it is also, like the ocean, utterly unpredictable: we do not know when disaster will strike, nor where, nor in what form: drought, wildfires, floods, heat, hunger, disease. We only know that it will surely strike, and our species and others will suffer on an unprecedented scale. Focusing on this double-edged fact—the inevitability of sudden, unforeseeable breakdowns of vital systems—leads to a different set of questions, tasks, and strategies than those that follow from abstractions like “saving the planet.” Preparing to take care of ourselves and those around us returns us to a human scale, the scale of individual and community action.

Climate art was, in its inception, a consciousness raising project dedicated to building public awareness about the reality of climate change and its causes. It is now an activation project, identifying and putting into practice actual, usable strategies for responding to climate change. This kind of art, as Marek Poliks put it in a recent episode of the Disintegrator podcast, “intervenes in cultural systems at the level of protocol, beyond the level of the concept. It locates change in action and implementation rather than in systemic imaginaries.”

In the case of 36.5, the transformation from idea to activation, proposition to protocol, took the form of a slowly growing international community of collaborators working together and apart. Here is how that happened.

During the first performance, Sunde had something like an epiphany–I call it a “scalar epiphany,” a visceral attunement to the deep connection that’s bestowed upon all humans by the globally circulating ocean. This arose not as an idea but as a physical sensation, caused by her immersion: it was a knowledge jointly produced by her body and the body of water she stood in. This is reflected in the work’s subtitle, which suggests that this is not the solo performance it appears to be but is instead a collaborative performance, created in partnership “with the sea.” Wanting to explore and share this insight, Sunde committed herself to making this an iterative performance, a series of identical actions performed (by herself) in various places around the world, on coastlines and continents connected by the endlessly circulating waters of the world’s single, ubiquitous ocean.

Over time the collaboration between artist and sea drew in a major third collaborator: the community she assembled at each site—including artists, activists, scholars, scientists, and civic leaders—that she relied upon to make each performance.

Standing in the sea for twelve to thirteen hours is a feat of endurance; doing it in places you knew little about and very few people in until a few weeks before is a feat of community-making and requires great trust, imagination, openness, empathy. It entails a protocol of encounters, conversations, discoveries, and alliances that will endure beyond the project. In this case, the protocol enabled a practice of “strategic universalism,” bringing into existence a collaborative community that is both site-specifically rooted and globally connected through its dedication to a future of cooperative planetary thriving.

While the work retained its minimalist form—silence and stillness—all the way to the final performance, the protocols of its making enlarged its resonance through their addition of a host of culture-specific markers, ritual actions, and local civic agendas.

In each iteration of the work, Sunde sought the guidance of local collaborators to become meaningfully aligned with the lived physical and cultural realities of the site, positioning herself in the role of grateful guest and respectful learner. Under no illusion that any deep knowledge can be gained in a short time, and resisting any anthropological fantasies, Sunde’s performance (and the preparation for it) created temporary conditions of possibility for activist connection across cultural difference.

A few examples:

In Aotearoa, the Māori cultural heritage around the body of water she was collaborating with includes long-established and sophisticated methods of seafaring and astronavigation, as well as a mytho-agentic view of the ocean as enspirited energy cared for by the water god Tangaroa. At the same time, the effects of climate change on that low-lying part of the world, including the imminent obliteration of many Pacific islands by rising sea levels, has put Aotearoa-New Zealand at the forefront of climate action; it was, for example, the first country to pass a law forcing all financial firms to report on the effects of their activities on climate change. Sunde’s Māori collaborators activated 36.5 to speak to and amplify their current campaigns for environmental justice and Indigenous sovereignty.

Another example:

The performance of 36.5 in Kenya entailed a number of remarkable community engagements, guided by faculty members and artists from Nairobi who partnered with Sunde. They arranged for her to present the project at a meeting with the town elders of the village where the performance would happen, where her proposal was received with respect and generosity. Framing Sunde’s project within their own cosmology, the community read her as a person who has cultivated a strong relationship with the spirits of the sea, and then expanded the performance with their own modes of celebration and observance. They arrayed Sunde in a ritual head covering and escorted her down to the beach in a big procession that ended with Sunde beating a four-hundred-year-old ceremonial drum. Throughout the twelve hours of performance, large numbers of people remained on shore, often joining Sunde in the water, and enjoying performances by local artists and performance groups. As part of the performance, the community planted seven hundred mangrove seedlings to strengthen the shoreline against rising sea and to commemorate Sunde’s time with them.

The strategic universalism proposed by the collaborative performances of 36.5 is tentative and cautiously hopeful. It offers a space to encounter, however briefly, but without domination or presumption, knowledge systems of the cultures that have been marginalized by modernity. These systems are, often, deeply ecospheric, based on an epistemology of kinship, reciprocity, and respect for the more-than-human world. We in the West are hungry for alternatives to the dominant scientific but alienated systems of ecological thought. At the same time, attempts to engage with those systems are in tension with the politics of decolonization, making us wary of cultural imperialism and appropriation. The performative universalism of 36.5 is a response to this hunger and this tension.

When the pandemic interrupted the planned suite of performances for two years, Sunde focused on establishing a relationship with the site, in New York City, where the final iteration would eventually be performed. Respectful engagement with the local Indigenous community was a key element of the resulting project named Kin to The Cove. This “community-powered” environmental public art project was devoted to “building relationships with the water, imagining a healthier future, and committing to future stewardship of the site.”

Kin to the Cove is at the opposite pole from 36.5’s universalism: the local, site-specific pole. But it stands in powerful relation to eight equally specific sites around the world, whose communities engaged in the protocols for its making. On the day of the final performance in New York, collaborators at the other sites stood in their respective seas for a full tidal cycle. These stands were livestreamed, the streams sometimes superimposed on each other. 36.5 ended, then, with the promise, however fragile or wishful, of a planetary communion, humans and oceans working together, practicing the protocols of endurance.