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Swamp Cosmologies #3: Medio Mundo y Dagao Mangroves

Current Project

Swamp Cosmologies

Collaborator/s:

Medio Mundo y Daguao contains the second largest mangrove forest of all the islands of Puerto Rico. This, along with the terrestrial, coastal, transitional, estuarine and aquatic ecosystems found in the area, provides habitat for a total of 26 rare, endemic, vulnerable and endangered species. Among the documented species are the West Indian manatee, the mariquita, the Puerto Rican boa and several species of sea turtles that depend on these ecosystems. Medio Mundo y Daguao Natural Protected Area is managed by Para La Naturaleza.


The Bog School is a series of Peatland Art & Science Gatherings to connect and collect local peatland knowledge towards the composition of a Bog Opera to be realised at The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in 2027. The Bog School is an eco fiction, a space of learning that does not follow a pre-established notion of pedagogy, and a path to storying diverse peatland knowledge and information.

Peatland Bog School / Escuela Turbia at Para La Naturaleza Location: Cabezas de San Juan, Borikén (Puerto Rico)

From mangroves to microbes, from sargassum to spores, Bog School / Escuela Turbia asks: What murkiness lives in you? What is muddy in you? What in you resists clarity?

In this third offering of Swamp Cosmologies, the swamp doesn’t speak in clean lines or final answers—it murmurs in turbid layers, murk, mucus, and music.

Held from May 20–22, 2025, in the ecotonal embrace of the Cabezas de San Juan Nature Reserve, this first session of the Bog School gathered artists, scientists, and peatland guardians for three days of storytelling, listening, field study, and laughter—lots and lots of laughter. Where bioluminescent dinoflagellates were spoken of but not see and mangrove roots knit air and water together, we practiced what it means to ablandar: to soften. To unlearn certainty. To meet each other, and the land, in the in-between.

Before it was protected, this site was nearly erased by a tourist-residential project. Its survival is a story of local refusal, ancestral memory, and the quiet persistence of swamp logic. Now, it holds space for an eco-fictional school with no fixed syllabus—just sediment, song, sargassum, and the slow, stubborn life of peat.

Bog School is sticky, submerged, and unruly. A long-term proto-pedagogical experiment—a compost pile of art, science, and speculative ritual, fermenting toward a Turbid Opera to be shared at MASS MoCA in 2027. But its method is murky. It doesn’t teach; it decomposes. It doesn’t deliver knowledge; it stews it. Like the mangrove, it is a site of pre-forming and post-human dreaming. Its lessons are not extractable. No learning outcomes. No metrics. Just small pulses, fragments, intuitions. Clumps of insight clinging to your ankles as you wade back into the world.


This first gathering activated The Venice Agreement—a living commitment to the care and rights of peatlands, originally signed in 2022 in Venice and renewed in 2024 in Torres Vedras, Portugal. It is not a policy—but a poetics. Not top-down governance—but bottom-up entanglement. A call to move with the swamp, not over it. People At its nucleus were Camila Marambio, Antonia Peón-Vega, and Rosario Ureta, who held space for collective sensing, dreaming, and decomposition. Alongside them, a translocal swarm of unknowing teachers—providing guidance in the slow unlearning, deep sensing, movement of collective care.

Together, we didn’t compose answers—we composed tonalities. We spoke of the necessity of creating an ecotone to the Turbid Opera. A gathering where thought softened through drawing, hearts softened through darkness, and language softened in the thick humidity of swamp air. We sat in the eco-tone—between roots reaching for water and roots reaching for air—and asked: 

How do we story with what resists clarity?

A constellation of offerings—drawings, reflections, fragments, and swampy residue—emerges from this gathering as a porous response. An act of awe. A whisper of gratitude. A murmur from the mud.


Medio Mundo y Daguao


Ablandar

Generosidad para el visitante de la muestra.


El ecotono como un lugar de transición entre un estado y otro. 


El cuerpo blando del mangle está disponible para lidiar con las necesidades del mangle a su lado. Juntos se amoldan en esta trama que parece un desorden orgánico, pero es el orden del manglar que se refleja como una foto, pero lleva en esas costuras el paso del tiempo. 


Raíces aéreas que buscan el agua en uno de los extremos.

Raíces acuáticas que buscan el aire en el otro extremo.


¿Qué es lo que ocurre ente-medio? Qué es eso que llamamos eco-tono?


Ablandar resuena como una palabra que acompaña ese encuentro entre dos situaciones polares. Sirve para suavizar los bordes y transformar las diferencias en similitudes. 

Cuando una cosa para a ser otra entre medio está el paso del tiempo, las transiciones son espacios de transformación que requieren generosidad para darle espacio a lo que requiera transmutarse.


¿Cómo se ablanda a un visitante al entrar a una sala?

¿Cómo se ablanda la densidad de un espacio oscuro?


La luz pareciera ser un elemento que podría ser fundamental en la transformación del cuerpo sensible del visitante. No solo se ablanda la mirada, pero se ablanda la conciencia y también se ablanda el corazón. 


¿Cómo ablandar el pensamiento?


Ablandar el pensamiento a través del dibujo y ablandar el corazón a través de la luz. 


Considerar el tiempo es fundamental en esta traducción de los tiempos de acomode del manglar para traerlos a la experiencia de la sala. Los tiempos que en la vida del mangle toman muchos años, en la sala deben ser ajustados a un ciclo relacionado con la visita. Ese ciclo debe permitir ablandar de forma amorosa. 


Deberá haber un ciclo de la sala ecotono y un ciclo mayor (compuesto por varios ciclos menores) que será el ciclo de los tres actos musicales. 


eco  tono  eco  tono  tono  tono  tono  eco  tono  onot  oce  tono tono  tono  eco  oce  eco  oce  onot  tono  onot  eco  oce  eco  oce tono tono tono tono tono ttonno tttoooooonnnooo ttono tono tono onot onottttt onot ttono eco tono eco 


Y las palabras y las conciencias se invierten y se transforman al encontrarse en este nuevo espacio, que es el manglar en la sala, traído para ablandar los tonos del cuerpo, los tonos de la mente, los tonos del corazón.


El corazón de la turbera aún nos acompaña.



Cooperation Partners:

Venice Agreement
Greifswald Moor Centrum
Succow Stiftung
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