Shepherds Between Worlds

• Quick look

  ✹ Project: Co-creative research journey and final performance-art piece around the themes of hospicing systems

  ✦ Methods: Collective imagination, ceremony, facilitation

  ✦ Funder: Collective Imagination Practice Community

  ✦ Collaborators: Andrea Gilly, Esther Grossman and Daniela Pascual (Candama)

  ✦ Year: 2024 - 2025

• About the project

  • What does it mean to compassionately let go of old and failing systems?

  • What are the roles needed in this work of hospicing?

  
  Shepherds Between Worlds is a experimental, collaborative exploration of how we can navigate the difficult but necessary process of saying goodbye to systems that no longer serve us. In movements for social and environmental change, much energy is spent on building the new, but what about the work of releasing the old?

  This project reimagines “hospicing” not just as a metaphor, but as an essential practice in transitions. It asks: How do we help outdated industries, structures, and ways of thinking - from the fossil fuel economy to extractive practices, and colonial legacies - come to a close? What mindsets, actions, and rituals can help us collectively grieve, reflect, and make space for what comes next?
  
  Through deep inquiry and co-creation, Shepherds Between Worlds sought to define what hospicing really looks like and how each of us can take part. The culmination of this journey was a participatory ceremony for letting go, held in March 2025 at Oksasenkatu 11.

• Process

  Collective Imagination Practice Community funding facilitated a trip for the project team to a Finnish mökki (summer cabin) in September of 2024. Inspired and informed by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Hospicing Modernity) and Anna Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World), we spent three days in the forest exploring the topics of hospicing, collective imagination, grief and systems change. Inspired by foraging mushrooms and long discussions, we found many learnings around the roles within systems hospice work, and the underlying challenges facing those of us working in the space.

  We were then lucky enough to be curated by Candama (Daniela Pascual) into A River of Seeds, a collection of ceremonies exploring themes of rebirth, death, beginnings and endings, at Oksasenkatu 11. The ceremony, framed around a mushroom story we wrote on the trip, and our learnings, guided participants through an intimate process of letting go and grieving.

  Blog post coming soon!