‘The Solastalgic Archive’ and ‘Passing By Autumn & Winter’ at UNH Museum of Art

The Solastalgic Archive

September 15 – December 3, 2022

SOLASTALGIA: THE PREMONITION OF TRANSITION, A SENSE OF LOSS FROM AN ANTICIPATED FUTURE.

IT IS THE FEELING OF HOMESICKNESS BEFORE LEAVING HOME.

Conceived by artist Nina Elder during a residency at the University of New Mexico, the Solastalgic Archive holds materials that contextualize and give breadth to the experience of living and making in this time of accelerated change. The traveling archive encapsulates ephemera of memory, creation, forgetting, destruction, preciousness and transience from diverse founding artists and collaborators. It is an evolving, changing, temporal entity that will continue to grow as it is enriched by additions connected to each host venue. Contributors are asked to consider what they do that connects them to time.

Can we read time, smell it, taste it, touch it? Do we reinvent it, ask it questions, and look for answers?

Passing By Autumn and Winter

The exhibition invites you to use all your senses to imagine and anticipate arriving in winter. Think of the smell of fallen leaves and damp earth as you leave autumn and approach the snow-covered landscape. As climate change reshapes the contours of autumn and winter, pushing their boundaries farther north, winter for many will soon be unreachable, only to exist in art and the stories we keep.

The geographer Tim Cresswell has written that our social constructions—our lives, our experiences, our memories—only exist because of place. If place is the experiential bedrock of our existence, who are we when a place changes before our eyes? Who do we become when a place becomes something else?

What will we do when winter no longer lives in our body’s memory? When winter is warmer, wetter, browner—who are we?