Hanna Tuulikki

Hanna Tuulikki’s short film Seals’kin is a sonic and choreographic meditation on loss, longing, transformation and kinship, shot on location in coastal Aberdeenshire in Scotland.

Tuulikki explores with her body what it might mean to become-with-seal, drawing on myths of human-seal hybridity and folkloric music musical practices to offer alternative forms of mourning through sensuous identification with more-than-human kin.

In Scottish folklore, mythical seal people known as selkies are said to shed their sealskins and step from water as humans, until mysteriously disappearing back to sea. The sealskin is essential to the act of transformation.

Perhaps these selkie stories of loss and longing helped to alleviate the feelings of sorrow brought on by a sudden death in the community, or from relatives lost at sea. 

Musical practices of singing to or with seals may have maintained a felt connection with the dead through the fostering of kinship with seals and selkies, thought by some to be the souls of the departed. 

But as folkloric coping mechanisms for grief, how might these stories and songs help us to come to terms with the collective and personal tragedies of the present pandemic? How might they help us to navigate the sorrow of ecological or climate grief?