The Netherlands is a palimpsest of peatland, shaped through drainage, water management and development. This workshop takes us into the Vondelpark and to look at the city through a different lens. To unearth the erased landscape and envision the reemergence of the swamp.
The workshop starts with a walk through the Vondelpark while listening to sound-pieces made with field recordings from wetlands. During the walk, stories of peatland are shared, ranging from the history of Dutch land management, to mythology and carbon sequestration. Provoked by the question “How can you see the erased swamp re-emerging? Where does it appear, and what does it reveal?” participants will observe the waterways and swampy grounds in the park with a magnifying lens, zooming into the wetland as it bubbles up through the cracks of hyper-manicured urban nature.
The workshop concludes with a creative exercise performed in pairs, that transforms these observations into written or visual expressions that illuminate the traces of wetlands still present in the Vondelpark.
RE-PEAT is a youth-led collective of environmentalists engaged in creative advocacy work for peatlands. With backgrounds spanning across activism, arts, and science, they are united by love for peatlands, commitments to protect them, our motivations to shift the ways that these ecosystems are culturally understood.
Luca Smorenburg (NL) is a curious thinker and maker, who always likes to have their feet in the soil. With an interdisciplinary background ranging from biology and anthropology to visual arts, they are trying to carve out spaces for embodied, experiential knowledge moving towards a more cognizant and responsible world. Wetlands’ binary-defying qualities are one means by which they try to open alternative ways of looking at our surroundings, thereby opening the possibility for things to be otherwise.
Moss Berke (US/IT) is a writer, researcher, and multidisciplinary artist whose work brings together eco-poetics, land art, natural sciences, environmental humanities and queer theory. Informed by her experience as a queer and disabled artist-thinker, Moss’ practice blends art, activism and theory in an effort to explore more-than-human relations. She often works in collaboration with wetlands, in order to explore the generative and disruptive potentiality of ecological grief in times of environmental crises.