Next Club Meetings:

April 6 noon EST
Exquisite Corpse and Curating Nature with Amanda Besl.

May 4 noon EST
Mourning Ash with Mary Abma

In 2017, artist Mary Abma brought her local community together to ritually mourn the loss of her region’s ash trees, which had all died from the invasive Emerald Ash Borer. Join Mary as she talks about her ash tree project and opens our eyes to ways that we can adopt mourning rituals that can help us to process and put into perspective the species losses that we are witnessing all around us.

September 2 6pm EST
  Awakening with Ashley Czajkowski

Ritual photographer and professor of Death and Photography
Ashley Czajkowski, will be leading a participatory performance
called Awakening.Ghost Plants & Plant Ghosts

Past Meetings

March 2
Plant Ghosts

Plant performance artist and pet memorialist Alyssa Ellis will talk about her plant legacy service and inventing new mourning practices.

February 2
Death & Love

Poet and curator Miriam Segan will read to us from her book Love and Death.

January 5
The 4 Elephants

Biophilium director Alexis Williams led a meditiation
on radical mortality acceptance.

Death Club at the Biophilium

Casual conversations about death.

The Biophilium hosts a free monthly Death Cafe for Artists the first Thursday of every month in 2023.

Everyone is invited, you don't need a previous affiliation with the Biophilium, a personal invitation or experience with death. No need to apply or prepare, just turn up.

Artists, musicians, dancers, poets and crossdisiplinary mortals will be leading the gathering but you don't have to fit into any specific definition of an artist to participate.

The gathering was initiated by the 2022 Mortem cohort. Each club meeting gives participants a chance to introduce themselves and their practice, features a short artist talk, reading or ritual performance by a Biophilium alumnus followed by an informal, unstructured, death positive conversation where everyone in the small group is invited to contribute as much as they want.

At Death Club you don’t have to talk about death, but it’s a place where the taboo of talking about death is lifted. Usually when we do this we find that everyone has a lot to say. It’s perfect for artists who make art about death. It’s perfect for mortals considering the logistics and meaning of their own lives and deaths and the lives and deaths of their companions. No grief councilor will be present, but it will likely be therapeutic. It’s a good place to consider creative mourning rituals and to connect with other death curious and death literate artist. It's a great place to practice talking about death, so you can be more comfortable doing it with your family. It's a good place to practice identifying as a creative person who makes art about death.

The monthly meetings will each be lead by a different Biophilium artist.

Join the club to receive a monthly invitation and a link to the meeting.