Program
Step into the soft terrain of Sensing Peat — where art and research seep through the mire, and stories surface in slow, silty rhythms.
Sensing Peat unfolds as a trans-disciplinary journey into the watery, wounded, and wondrous worlds of peatlands. Bringing together artists, scientists, writers, and local communities, the program explores the mire as both a physical terrain and a space of deep cultural, ecological, and affective resonance.
Through fieldwork, workshops, collective research, and experimental practices, Sensing Peat cultivates a multi-sensory engagement with these often-overlooked landscapes. Peatlands, with their slow time and buried memory, become sites for listening, learning, and imagining otherwise — beyond extractivist logics and human exceptionalism.
The program creates opportunities for shared inquiry: into the stories held in wet soils, the shifting forms of mire-dwelling species, and the complex entanglements between climate, colonial histories, and land use. It embraces the bog not as a backdrop, but as a collaborator — an archive, a teacher, and a being with agency.
As the climate crisis accelerates and restoration efforts gain urgency, Sensing Peat offers a space for intimate, critical, and creative encounters with peatlands. It invites participants to sink into slowness, attend to subtle transformations, and sense the peat anew.
Current
WETBEINGS
Aukštumala – Peatland Organisms, Stories 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. From, with and for this WETBEING the project gathers approaches and examples of living in and with peatlands which are based on mutuality and sustainable survival of humans and peatlands.
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.
Swamp Cosmologies: #1 Pakeliah Hol Hol
Pakeliah is a peatland located in Tierra del Fuego, Chile, in the Karukinka park. The name was given by our community in a joint effort with the park rangers. Pakeliah Hol Hol means “Healing Peatland” (turbera que sana). As Selk’nam community we feel a special ancestral bond with this particular peatland.
Swamp Cosmologies: #2 Papyrus Peatlands of Lake Victoria
Lake Victoria Papyrus Peatlands stretch along the lake’s edge, deeply interwoven with the lives, traditions, and memories of riparian communities. In places like Yala Swamp, the papyrus grows dense and rooted, holding stories of craft, subsistence, and seasonal rhythms.
Archived
Ingrid Bjørnaali, Fabian Lanzmaier & Maria Simmons, Ensayos, Geir Tore Holm, Søssa Jørgensen, Concordia Klar, Enn Kärmas & Villu Järmut, Kristina Norman, Randi Nygård, Laura Põld, among others.
Down in the Bog: Hibernation
The exhibition Down in the Bog: Hibernation takes us on a deep dive into the curious ecosystem of peatlands. It is an exhibition and a place for learning and sharing from peatlands around the world, arguing for the need for increased attention and care, located at Tromsø Kunstforening from March 22 to May 5, 2024, curated by Karolin Tampere.
Lene Schwarz, Anett Simon, Juliane Tübke & Alison Darby, Siljarosa Schletterer
PEAToresk Workshop Series
The four artistic workshops from the series PEAToresk: Artistic Perspectives on the Drained Peatland Meadows near Greifswald are related to peatlands and landscapes. The en plein air workshops will take place in the Polder Steinbeckervorstadt from May 25 to September 8, 2024.
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