FSAS Summer Studio 2025: Ultimology Summer School

Fire Station Artists’ Studios (FSAS) is calling artists, curators, writers & thinkers to send their expression of interest for Ultimology Summer School by Wednesday 26 March, 5pm. 

FSAS 2025 Summer Studio: Ultimology Summer School is devised and facilitated by Fiona Hallinan and Kate Strain, and developed in collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim and the Department of Ultimology. It will take place from 28-30 May in FSAS and includes a day trip to Kunstverein Aughrim (more info in itinerary below). 

This Ultimology Summer School invites participants to delve into Ultimology, or the practice of paying attention to endings. Through readings, field trips, hands-on activities, workshops and guest presentations, participants will draw on research into practices proximate to death, to imagine how paying attention to endings might shape or alter our present approaches to artistic knowledge production. 

We are living in a period of environmental crises that has been deemed a “sixth mass extinction” for the extent of biodiversity and species loss wrought by human-led activity. In this context, Ultimology considers ways of paying attention to vulnerability, obsolescence, redundancy and death, asking how might we navigate loss and consider endings at a time when many rituals, species, relationships and ways of being are at risk of extinction? Ultimology considers how we attend to the loss of life, that most significant of endings, to inform our approach to thinking about other endings and the urgencies of the present. 

The three-day programme will be delivered by Fiona Hallinan and Kate Strain of the Department of Ultimology, in collaboration with invited guest contributors: Marie Farrington, Maïa Nunes and Staci Bu Shea. Artist Marie Farrington will lead a hands-on clay workshop during a session of deep introductions. Artist and sound therapist Maïa Nunes will lead a site-specific Voice Bath as part of our field trip to Kunstverein Aughrim. Curator Staci Bu Shea will lead a workshop and share a presentation on their research into the practice of Dying Livingly, drawing on their holistic experience as a death doula to speak to the aesthetic and poetic experience of living life led by death.