by Glacier Report (AWOL)
Mourning names a methodology for engaging with the ever-changing states of time, landscape, and collective memory. Rather than signalling a fixed moment of loss, it marks a continuous practice of interpreting, and inhabiting transformation. This becomes a way to learn, for example from glaciers: a melting body whose shifting borders, sediments, and temporalities reflect layered forms of disappearance.
To mourn is neither to withdraw nor to idealise what is gone, but to acknowledge absence as an overwhelming presence, a force capable of reshaping the terrain and the political imagination. Through mourning, fiction becomes a tool for envisioning alternative realities and new forms of agency: it allows the disappearing body of the glacier to articulate itself beyond scientific measurement, beyond nationally established borders, and beyond extractive narratives of progress.
Practicing mourning means working against the paralysis often produced by scientific data and, instead, approaching climate transformation as a site of multispecies intimacy and shared vulnerability. It invites unlearning the idea of the glacier as static, remote, or solely geological, and understanding it instead as a dynamic agent of cultural, ecological, and political change. In this way, mourning opens space for imagining post-glacial futures collectively: futures that emerge not from denial or nostalgia, but from attentive coexistence with processes of loss that are already shaping our immediate world.