Earth Temple: A Sanctuary for Ecological Grief & Love
Earth Temple: A Sanctuary for Ecological Grief & Love was an immersive installation, a non-denominational house for ecological emotion & spirituality for the Jersey City community. Understanding that today’s layered environmental crises evoke a complexity of emotion in many of us—including fear, anger, grief, powerlessness—Earth Temple offered a place for these emotions to exist, to be approached with respect & care, & to become channels towards deeper accountability & connection to our environment & one another.
Open to the public for one month, Earth Temple imagined a world where shared spaces for emotional & spiritual connection to our environment are a plentiful urban resource. The space was open regularly for visiting hours, and activated with programming throughout the month.
The project lives in honor of the indigenous people & cultures of Turtle Island, in love for the people, creatures, & places who have been harmed by this era of colonialism, exploitation, & pollution, & in response to the cultural paradigm of separating “human” & “nature” characteristic to the Western worldview. Earth Temple was supported by the Jersey City Arts & Culture Trust Fund.
Location SMUSH Gallery
Year 2023
Partners SMUSH Gallery, Connor Sale
Photography Mengwen Cao & Amghy Chacon
Media Reel
Press Jersey City Times, Jersey Journal
Nocturnal Medicine offered Ecological Tuning Sessions at Earth Temple’s opening & closing events, featuring an original score and guided meditation for ecological intimacy, grief, and love.
“It’s suffused with grief about what we, the most arrogant of primates, are doing to our planet, but it isn’t inhospitable. Instead, the black-draped chamber comes off as a cross between a subterranean medieval shrine, a seaside fortune-telling parlor, and an opium den. The prayers are earnest, the prognostications are bad, and the altered states of consciousness are as real as you’ll let them be.”
—Tris McCall, Jersey City Times
Amongst the community programs that took place within Earth Temple was Golden Light Poetry’s Open Mic Night, centering stories of Mother Earth.
“Superficially, the five stations — each one a tiny altar — are quite beautiful, but the more you look at them, the more unnerving they become. As your eyes adjust, you may notice that the sacred stone in the northwestern corner of the installation is actually a hunk of Styrofoam. The shining pool that imparts a ghostly glow to the chamber is stuffed to overflow with a substance that resembles shattered glass.”
—Tris McCall, Jersey City Times
Members of the radical performance community, The Stop Shopping Choir performed songs of Earth and shared their longstanding practice of activism, spirituality, and music.
"I left feeling more open and receptive than I have felt in decades."
- L. Colon, visitor
