'Solastalgia' explores Tallulah's lived experience of ecological grief and solastalgic depression. An installation and performance artwork for an exhibition in 2021 at Sustainable Warehouses called Urban Planning which took place in an artist run building in Marrickville. The space was soon to be demolished to make place for the Wix Park apartment complex.

This work included a stack of 6 mattresses collected from curbsides which were layered and wrapped in different recycled materials. These mattresses represent layers of the earth which have been altered by human activity. These layers represent the beds of earth which define the current geological era - the Anthropocene. The walls of the room were painted in text defining and telling personal stories of solastalgia. The artist lay motionless and teary eyed atop the beds while an audience was invited to move through the space and read the writing on the walls.

Photographs by Bronte Godden

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Solastalgia
From - Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain)
Solastalgia is the “homesickness you have while you are still at home”, termed by Glenn Albrecht.
It describes how our mental health is injured when a once predictable and loved home environment changes.
It is that melancholia experienced when a loved home environment transforms for the worse.
And we are transforming the earth – our home – at a distressing rate through development and climate change
The psychoterratic (psyche – earth) impacts of this instability are painful for those of us who like to settle and feel safe or are unable to put down fresh roots because we are stuck financially or otherwise.
We are now living in the Anthropocene; new man-made geological beds are forming as we sleep our dreams have become filled with eco-anxiety and grief.
Homo sapiens evolved in a period of relative geological stability, our nervous systems adapted to a slow pace of environmental change. Now the rate at which places that were once familiar are becoming unrecognisable - covered in concrete, dust from coal mines or fancy greenwashed apartment buildings makes finding solace so difficult. Especially when we ourselves are so entangled in the processes that alter our sense of place.