Every year, hundreds of whales and other marine mammals strand on terrestrial shores. These ocean-dwelling animals are mostly hidden from humans during their lifetimes, but in a stranding death, they reveal themselves to us, and call on us to care. What might this care look like? What can these deaths teach us about the lives of these animals, and about the entangled futures of humans and oceans?
Learning Endings is a multi-part interdisciplinary research project that has surfaced amidst the overlapping contexts of climate crisis, threatened ocean ecosystems, and challenges to scientific expertise. It examines the work of scientists who perform necropsies of dead marine mammals as unacknowledged forms of attention and care, and explores how various kinds of art practice can support this care work. Including laboratory observation, expert interviews, walking art, filmmaking, community engagement, poetics, public outreach, and the sweaty work of interpersonal and interdisciplinary exchange, Learning Endings seeks different kinds of conversation about science, oceans, and human responsibility. As we try to figure out how to respond to so many untimely endings, how might we reconfigure the role of both science and art as part of the complicated ecologies of mutual care in and for the oceans, and for the beings that call it home?