WETBEINGS Contributors
Artists, Scientists, People
Andreas Haberl grew up near the Murnauer Moos in Bavaria, one of the most beautiful peatlands in southwest Germany, where he developed a deep, intuitive connection to the unique wetland landscape and its wildlife from an early age. This personal bond later evolved into a scientific pursuit when he studied landscape ecology and nature conservation at Greifswald University, with a focus on the paleoecology of peatlands. For the past 20 years, Andreas has been working with various institutions within the Greifswald Mire Center, contributing his expertise to numerous national and international projects related to peatland paleoecology, nature conservation, and paludiculture.
Aurelija Maknytė (b. 1969) is an interdisciplinary artist who uses various found archival materials and natural objects, giving them new forms or contexts. She has been focusing on the relationship between nature and culture, and is interested in the transformation of landscape in art, wild and cultivated environments. www.maknyte.com / https://maknyte.com/castor-fiber-krastovaizdzio-partizanas/
Aio Frei is a non-binary sound artist, relational listener, sonic community organizer, collaborator, sonic researcher and graphic designer based in Zürich. They co-founded the experimental record- and artbook store OOR Records, and co-curated OOR Saloon, a production context for queer-feminist listening practices.
Since many years they are deeply interested in questions concerning «ethics of listening» – in socio-political, environmental, non-extractivist, mindful, embodied and queer practices of listening within its situated contexts, emancipatory possibilities within the sonic realm, forms of non-verbal communication/improvisation and relational composition. Aio's transdisciplinary practice interweaves sonic organizing, electroacoustic and attentive communal forms of composition, listening-workshops and graphic design/printed matter. They organize experimental and discursive audio formats and collaborate on listening performances and collective listening settings. www.aiofrei.net / www.oor-rec.ch
Dr. Dr. Kallia Kefala holds dual doctorates in psychical research and paranatural environmental studies. Her work focuses on liminal spatial configurations and the entrancement triggered by spectral ecologies. She examines how supernatural presences interact with attention, behavior, and belief across unstable landscapes.
Jeanna Kolesova is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher working across moving images, performance, installation, and text. Their practice investigates the violent manipulation of history, information, and narratives, focusing on how imperial technologies have shaped—and continue to shape—bodies, landscapes, and collective memory. Grounded in personal experience and critical research, their work bridges the intimate and the political, searching for alternative futures through the lens of trauma and resistance. https://jeannakolesova.com/info/
Jūratė Sendžikaitė took her first steps onto real mire ground as a city kid, only a few years after completing her PhD studies in Natural Sciences. It was in Aukštumala in 2005. Since then, the peatlands have been an enduring part of her life. With a background in Geography and Biology, defending PhD, over 20 years of research at the Institute of Botany, as well as 17 years of experience in non-governmental nature protection organizations, she has gained expertise in ecological restoration, protection and conservation of biodiversity and public education. She is the scientific editor of the Lithuanian edition (2016) of C.A. Weber’s foundational monograph on the Aukštumala raised bog (Weber, 1902).
Kim Bode (they / them) is a research associate at the Bureau of Transitioning Landscapes, which studies terrains not only as geographies but as metabolizing archives. Their work merges hydroacoustic sensing, landscape anthropology, and speculative ecology—tracing residual signals and disturbances across wetland systems and submerged zones. https://bureau-of-transitioning-landscapes.net/
Laima Mačėnienė is a local farmer and a descendant of the old residents of Vabalai, a village on the edge of the Aukštumala raised bog. She feels privileged to live in the most beautiful place in the world, cherished by her family for generations. Since childhood, she has nurtured the spoken dialect of the old Vabalai village and is not only the heart and soul of this community but also serves as the chairwoman of the Kintai Evangelical Lutheran community.
RE-PEAT - Bobbi (she/they) is a young peatland, climate, and social justice advocate living in the Netherlands and part of RE-PEAT. With RE-PEAT, she works on pushing for deep shifts in public perceptions of peatlands using tools of public education, community building and campaigning. Currently, her focus is with the Peatland Justice project, which investigates injustices at play in the trade of peat in Europe and envisions a just transition in this system, particularly in the Dutch context.
RE-PEAT - Lara-Lane (she/her) is a writer, researcher and cultural worker. Since childhood, she has found the more-than-human world around her to be her most generous support. Sensitive to the injustices and violence around, she turned toward political engagement beginning with climate and social justice activism in 2018. Since then, her path has been leading back to her ancestral landscapes: peatlands.
Suza Husse is a researcher, writer and curator with an interest in collaborative and performative practices that bridge knowledges from different social, ecological and historical environments. Suza coordinates the arts and peatland ecology platform Sensing Peat at the Michael Succow Foundation, facilitating transdisciplinary arts and community based approaches towards alive and emancipatory swamp, bog, wetland and peatland cultures. Sensing Peat is rooted in the Venice Agreement, a bottom-up network of peatland custodians dedicated to protecting and restoring peatlands globally through local initiatives and decolonial tools. Suza is a member of the transnational Organising Committee of The Venice Agreement, where scientists, community organisers, Indigenous and environmental advocacy representatives, artists and researchers from three continents organise transdisciplinary peatland protection together.
The Institute for Multi-Species-Singing is a temporary moisty singing multi body creating singable patterns out of what we already know and what we can learn from sounds and stories of wetlands.
The Many Headed Hydra (TMHH) is dedicated to queer ecologies, myth making and situated practices that emerge from bodies of water. TMHH collaborates with inhabitants of different lands and seas to cross-connect queer*feminist and decolonial research, art making, and publishing. TMHH uses ritual and fiction, shape-shifting collectivities and storytelling to set resistant knowledges into motion. TMHH’s magazines are a performative device – they circulate as rumors, gatherings, printed matter, performances, exhibitions, radio broadcasts, evocations...
Vytautas Eigirdas is an ecologist, ornithologist and bird ringing specialist. He works at the Vente Cape Ornithological Station (Nemunas delta) as Senior Ornithologist and participate in various conservation projects, mainly related to bird conservation.
Yasmeen Al-Qaisi is a poet who writes for voice and paper, articulates and performs language with sound, food or care practices towards uncontainable forms of literature. When writing with sound, Jasmina shape-shifts in inexistant institutional forms, invents jobs, engages in human and more than human relations and broadcasts temporarily or mobile on free and public radios. https://jasminescu.com
Current
WETBEINGS
Peatland Organisms, Tales and Troubles
Peatlands are ancestors, are memory, are futures. WETBEINGS gathers “old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth” (R. W. Kimmerer) from the biodiverse organism and troubled ecosystem of the Aukštumala peatland. The transdisciplinary program roots itself in this 9000 years old living archive in the delta of the Nemunas river at the Baltic coast and one of the largest peat extraction sites in the Baltics.
WETBEINGS: Trans-Local Wet Cultures and Bog Knowledges
~ Spring Online Meetings
One of the earliest modern scientific studies on a peatland, Carl Albert Weber’s study of the Aukštumala peatland in Lithuania, published in 1902, is a starting point to critically interrogate the relationships of science and the utilisation, productivization, destruction and protection of peatlands across times and ideologies, and to activate diverse and wet perspectives on peatland ecologies, knowledges, cultures and economies.
WETBEINGS: Aukštumala
~ Arts, Science & Story Field Symposium
WETBEINGS invites peatland beings, storytellers, scientists, artists, researchers and neighbors to listen deeply to the voices of water, moss, and memory. Over three days, participants engage in workshops, excursions, talks, performances, and ceremonies exploring the bog’s deep time and ecological memory, practices of environmental and cultural restoration, and the wet ecosystem’s social significance.
Wetbeings in Aukštumala - Multi-Species-Singing
The Institute for Multi-Species-Singing is a temporary, moist gathering where participants create singable patterns from the sounds and stories of wetlands, guided by ornithologist Vytautas Eigirdas and poet Yasmeen Al-Qaisi, who invite deep listening, vocal experimentation, and sensorial connection with the bog and its beings.
Deep Histories and Wet Wonders of Aukštumala: What plants, waters and peat tell us about the present and the past - peatlands have layers in space and time.
At the Aukštumala workshop, participants explored 9,000 years of peatland history—tracing its transformation from post-glacial wetland to raised bog, uncovering ecological layers and human impact through peat stratigraphy, vegetation, and archaeology.
Learning from Beavers - Partisans of Landscaping in the Labyrinths of Land Reclamation
Aurelija Maknytė is an interdisciplinary artist whose long-term research explores the entangled relationship between humans and beavers, using found archives, natural objects, and beaver-made artifacts to reflect on landscape, reclamation, and the shifting boundaries between nature and culture.
Sedimentary Murmurations - A Sonic Offering
Sedimentary Murmurations – A Sonic Offering explores the sounds and materials of an Aukštumala birch forest and the peat extraction fields, using sensitive recording methods to reveal the subtle movements, textures, and histories of the land and its inhabitants.
Looking, Otherwise: A workshop in perception and landscape
A peatland is not just a landscape but a layered space—scarred by industry, softened by moss, and rich with stories waiting to be seen. Through slow observation and sensory attention, we begin to notice what is often overlooked, revealing new ways of relating to place.
Mapping Multi-Species Peatland Perspectives - Challenging Human-Centered Ways of Knowing with Artistic, Experimental and Scientific Tools
The workshop Mapping Multi-Species Peatland Perspectives invited participants to explore a drained wetland through the senses and perspectives of non-human beings, creating ephemeral, living maps that challenged human-centered ways of seeing and knowing the landscape.
Peatland Memory and Transformation in the Post-Soviet Sphere – Intersections of Artistic Research, Environmental History and Speculative Storytelling.
Jeanna Kolesova shares an excerpt from their work-in-progress In Zombie Fires, a film that weaves documentary and speculative narration to trace the entangled histories and environmental legacies of peat extraction across Europe.
