Elizabeth A. Hodson and Emily Joy have been collaborating together since 2018. Emily is a socially engaged artist making sculpture, installation and performative work. She is currently exploring Swiss glacial melt around the Morteratsch Glacier, and the associated ecological and social impact it holds. Her practice centres around empathy and how storytelling can inform our current environmental narratives. As an anthropologist, Elizabeth is interested in how artists respond to the Anthropocene and the tales that artists share and reimagine to explore our current epoch.
The Ghost of Stollenwurm is an edited transcription from a conversation they recently shared, in which they talked about some of the creatures that populate the Alpine regions of Europe, and in particular the Stollenwurm, alongside thoughts on empathy, feminism and environmental and bodily loss. Local stories and myths tell us that the Stollenwurm is a high-Alpine giant cat-headed lizard now widely thought to be extinct. It was said to drink milk directly from the udders of cows grazing the Alpine pastures.
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1995), London: Vintage, Random House.
Jonanna Wolfarth, Milk: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding (2023),London: Orion Publishing Co.
Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Reading Landscape 