Den Gröna Teorin

Arise Amazons 2.0 – The Green Theory

An embodied, collective ritual of grief

The pandemic had brought the cultural sector to a standstill, leaving artists and audiences with grief, frustration, financial insecurity and a profound sense of injustice. Performances were cancelled, livelihoods disrupted, and artistic encounters replaced by isolation. A collective trauma lived in our bodies, yet there were few spaces in which it could be acknowledged, shared and processed together.

Out of this experience emerged the need to grieve — not as a private act, but as a collective one. The cancelled work Arise Amazons 2.0 – The Green Theory was transformed into a collective post-traumatic artwork, placing grief and loss at its centre. Rather than rushing towards recovery or immediately producing something new, we created a space in which what had been lost could be mourned and laid to rest.

The work took the form of an open-air grief ceremony in the forest, inviting participants to gather, feel, mourn and rest together. Grief was not something to be fixed or overcome, but a necessary passage. For something new to emerge, something old first had to be allowed to die. Tears became rain: not a sign of weakness, but a life-giving force capable of nourishing the earth and the bodies that carry us.

The performance unfolded as a walk through the forest, where opera echoed between the trees, poetry whispered of loss and longing, circus artists performed high in the treetops, and dance emerged from the moss beneath our feet. A transhuman drag SPA opened a playful space for transformation, where identities and forms could dissolve and be reimagined. Mythical figures, unicorns and the songs of wild women carried messages beyond rational language, building towards a collective ceremonial crescendo.

The forest was not a backdrop but a dramaturg and co-creator. Human bodies were situated within a wider ecological community, among other living beings. Moving between vulnerability and ecstasy, stillness and movement, intimacy and spectacle, the work embraced magic as something emerging through the encounter between bodies, place and shared intention.

Slow, analogue and rooted in its specific location, the ceremony offered a deliberate counterpoint to digital exhaustion and isolation. It became a temporary community in which care, presence and slowness took precedence over productivity. By giving grief a collective and embodied form, the work created space for people to recognise that they were not alone in their pain.

In retrospect, Arise Amazons 2.0 – The Green Theory became an act of relational restoration — not a return to what had been, but an attempt to listen to what needed to change. Through ritual, performance and collective participation, art became both a space for mourning and a preparation for an unknown future.