Artistic Initiatives
Creative processes are central to how the Venice Agreement takes shape. They allow us to engage peatlands not only as ecosystems to be studied or protected, but as living relations that can be sensed, interpreted, and responded to through multiple forms of practice.
Across different territories, artists, researchers, and communities are developing ways of working that move between science, art, and embodied knowledge – attuning to peatlands through sound, image, movement, storytelling, and experiment.
Our foundational project was the Chilean Pavillion Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol dedicated to an interdisciplinary peatland vision at the 59th Venice Biennale.
Some of the past and ongoing initiatives include
Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol
The Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol Pavilion was a collective project led by curator Camila Marambio that proposed an experimental approach to the conservation and promotion of peatlands.
Presented by the Chilean Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, this project was a collaborative effort between art, science, and traditional knowledge, promoting research and ecological transition through the environmental humanities. To this end, a diverse multidisciplinary team was assembled: sound artist Ariel Bustamante, art historian Carla Macchiavello, filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor, and architect Alfredo Thiermann. For a full list of collaborators visit the Turba Tol website.
Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol
Sensing Peat
Sensing Peat is an arts and research platform at the Michael Succow Foundation / Greifswald Mire Center. Inspired by the VA and in reciprocal nourishment with the network, Sensing Peat co-initiates localised arts, community and research formats in and with different peatlands. Bogs, mires, swamps, with their slow time and buried memory, become sites for listening, learning, and imagining otherwise. A crucial link between science, art and nature conservation, the programme creates opportunities to encounter peatlands as spaces of deep cultural, ecological, and ethical resonance and feel into their complex entanglements with major climate and social justice issues of our time.
Sensing Peat
Swamp Cosmologies
Swamp Cosmologies/Bog Bridges is a series of community based and transdisciplinary peatland projects and processes which takes place across different bogs, swamps, and diversely named peatlands connected by rich wet realities. Co-organised by local community organisations with Indigenous authorities and practitioners, artists, scientists, researchers and peatland inhabitants of various backgrounds with the transdisciplinary arts and research platform Sensing Peat at Michael Succow Foundation / Greifswald Mire Center and the Venice Agreement for Peatlands community, Swamp Cosmologies gathers diverse philosophies and lived approaches to surviving in and with peatlands based on mutuality between non-human and human beings.
Swamp Cosmologies
An Open Invitation
We know that many other creative processes are unfolding – sometimes quietly, sometimes outside institutional visibility.
If you are working on projects related to peatlands, ecological care, or more-than-human relations, we would be glad to hear from you.
This space is intended to grow.
If you would like to share a project, please get in touch so we can include it as part of this evolving network.