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The political divide of this moment is not, as many still argue, between those who accept and those who reject the overwhelming evidence of climate science. It is about those who stand to gain - both in this moment and in the future as traditionally conceived - from fundamental system preservation or other modes of right wing climate realism, and those whose current exhaustion is part of the fuel for that system as much as any petrochemical or industrial agricultural process.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary, The Exhausted of the Earth

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The state of the world and human well-being are interconnected: The exhaustion of ecosystems and that of humans are mutually dependent.

Die Erschöpften [The Exhausted] combines the voices of the Breitenfelder mire in Lower Saxony, Germany, and the Nambigirwa wetlands in Uganda with visual narratives from their depths and wetnesses. The exhausted protagonists talk about how they formed across different geological eras, about the growth of their peat bodies through the layering of decomposed plant material, their ecosystemhood, and about the destruction of this life-giving activity through drainage, peat extraction and industrial agriculture. Speaking in a vocabulary of capitalist realities and from a place of fluid vitality as much as from exhaustion, the peatlands voice their rebellion. For the involved peatlands and mires, including people, water and plant beings, exhaustion is experienced as depletion of reserves and bodily power.

Peatlands, like people, are bodies of water. Camera and text carry tales of wet beings. With (the return of) water, peatlands become alive, remember, begin to speak. Wet, they ensure the survival of worlds.

Text: Suza Husse und Philipp Modersohn