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. Ornithologist Vytautas EIGIRDAS with Wetbeing companion Tikutis - Wood sandpiper gives insight into the songs of bird and amphibian life in Aukštumala. Poet Yasmeen Al-Qaisi leads us to finding and voicing our inner WETBEING in any preferred tongue or vocalisation from quacks and squeaks, spoken, whistled and murmurations. Based on these listenings, the aim is to sensorially connect our imagination with the bogs but also with our stomach while observing together what it does to our voices. 

In preparation for the workshop, Yasmeen met Vytautas and shortly participated in his daily routine of monitoring birds. They have discussed the challenges of the area, but also the intimate stories that come out of this monitoring. They planned to respond to the immediate moment of the day, weather, and knowledge and mood of the participants to the workshop. And so it was. Due to pretty intense winds, in the middle of the bog, facing the extraction site on one arm, and the bog on the other, Vytautas could not necessarily show to the workshop participants so many birds, yet that served understanding the landscape through his words. He told us: there might not be many, but they are very specific to this environment. 

The workshop audio backdrop, in the freezing wind, was the amplification to one of the small lakes, with a hydrophone, that gave the whole participatory approach a new dimension: that of transcending landscape through having our sensorial fields, melting into each other. 

After a session of discussing how and where and which form we are finding each other in the landscape, we split into two groups and created two performative moments, multilingual, unexpectedly connecting us with the landscape and each other. The variety of types of belonging in the landscape, as bog people, but also as community organizers, some other tour guides, ecologists, activists, teachers, artists and poets, made the flux of the knowledge transfer come out completely unexpected, spontaneous, empathetic even a little moralistic at times, very important for learning to not exclude ourselves from the extractivists scenarios, and yet to participate in mimesis if not anyhow else, with humor, poiesis and guts to communicate the landscape for those who are not in it.