Society for the Study of the Eco-Weird 2025 Symposium – The Eco-Weird 2025 Symposium
Link to conference programme: https://sites.psu.edu/ecoweird/society-for-the-study-of-the-eco-weird/
Welcome to the Swamp: Biodiversity as a Creative Utopian Somatic Practice
Dr Heather McKnight, Magnetic Ideals Collective, heather@magneticideals.org
“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
“50% of DNA in your body is not human DNA – a community of creatures must coexist for us to exist – cooperating forces that allow human life to go. See yourself as a ‘swamp amongst swamps’ the earth is your extended body.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, Ecology and Utopia Lecture
Welcome to the Swamp is a creative project that explores understanding ourselves as biodiverse beings in transition through artistic practices. It engages with an eco-weird angle of seeing ourselves as “swamps amongst swamps” rather than distinct beings, inspired by the above statement at an Ecology and Utopia lecture. Through doing so, it hopes to counter apathy and feelings of disempowerment, inspire climate activism, and generate an understanding of the importance of biodiversity.
The Swamp Utopia
Firstly, I want to introduce the concept of critical utopian theory, which is based on the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. Blochian utopian theory sees utopia as a process and not a place, it is based on material changes to be made in the real world. This swamp utopia of this project is not a place, nor a no-place; it is a process that is living, breathing, material, and embodied. It is worth noting that here we use the term swamp as it is the most playful of the names for a variety of wetlands that include marshes, swamps, bogs, and fens, coastal wetlands like salt marshes and mangroves, and flowing water systems like rivers and floodplains. These spaces are always in process, in motion, neither ground nor water, an unclosed system of infinite potential, of change, action and hope…
In this theoretical utopian framework utopian process is one that tries to make things better as part of a collective approach. It is not interested in maintaining status quo, stagnation and abstraction, it recognises the inevitability of change moving towards an ever changing horizon of hopefulness. A theory that suggests utopian acts can arise in ways that are unplanned and unexpected, as well as structured and planned, engaging with Bloch’s idea of the pre-conscious and Prigogine and Stengers’ idea that entropy is not irreversible, but there is structure for a new order that emerges, particularly in historical times where things are in a far-from-equilibrium state. More specifically, working towards a model that is non-totalising, resisting traditional colonial narratives by addressing microutopias, network and chaos theory and emergence, from the growth of a new sphagnum moss to international treaties on wetland protection.
Bloch’s utopian theory begins from the ‘darkness of the lived moment’ which assumes that we exist in our own blind spot, that we can not know the moment we are currently in until it has passed, that we are alienated from ourselves and each other. For a process to be utopian, action must be based on the historical moment, meaning that we must know it, and the darkness of relevance here is both temporal and ethical darkness in relation to the swamp utopia. Despite their reputation as murky wastelands, wetlands are a valuable part of our Earth’s ecosystem. The swamp is a transitional space with slow-moving saturated soils. Swamps are sources of fresh water and oxygen, and breeding grounds for biodiversity. They help protect from flooding, absorb excess water, protect fragile coastlines, filter waste and purify water. Sadly, almost half of the U.S. swamps were destroyed before environmental protections came into place in the 1970s. In the UK, we have altered many so they are barely recognisable.
Swamps are transitional spaces with slow-moving saturated soils, breeding grounds for biodiversity, they protect from flooding, absorb excess water, protect coastlines, filter waste and purify water. However, internationally, peatlands have been drained for building, livestock farming, and agriculture. Peatlands alone constitute 3% of the world’s land surface, storing 30% of its carbon capture. Around 500,000 hectares of peatlands are being destroyed annually, contributing to 4% of annual human-induced emissions. They have, in a way, been situated in our blind spot because we did not recognise their worth. People are only now uncovering the histories of those who lived on many of these lands and reconnecting with the history and mythologies of these spaces.
It is not only rising water tables that will be reclaiming these transitional spaces due to melting glaciers, but new approaches to rewilding and rewetting. The Global Peatlands Assessment by the UN Environment Programme estimated that restoring peatlands could contribute 10% of emission reductions by nature-based solutions across all ecosystems 2030. Paludiculture, a process of rewetting, can be seen as a process of repair and care, engaging differently with agriculture. Around 86% of paludiculture initiatives take place on land drained before the initiative was implemented.
The destruction of swamplands and biodiverse spaces more generally are part of the geological epoch where human activities have impacted the environment sufficiently to constitute a distinct geological change. We would argue that the choice of terminology, the Anthropocene, fails to recognise our biodiverse nature where at least 50% of our bodies are actually human and we live in such a space of co-dependence with our microbiome. From another perspective, less than a third of our cells are human, 70-90% bacterial and fungal. There are various measures that show we are not one but many, and that we are not heavily boundaried but our skin, nose, lungs are permeable liminal spaces, ever letting the world in and out of us.
Here, this project engages more closely with Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, in which “the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices”, and the swamp embodies the possibilities through realising and staying with our troubled kinship with our co-existence in nature. Thinking of swamps and their unknowable potential, as well as their ongoing destruction, takes us to the edge of the space of “horror, wonder, and uncertainty” thematically resonant with this conference.
Welcome to the Swamp!
Our project “Welcome to the Swamp” aims to bridge the gap between thought and activism, challenging the paralysing impact of eco-anxiety and apathy through an embodied understanding using immersive creative practice. It is a project jointly run by expressive artist Kirsty Lumm and utopian theorist Heather McKnight. Drawing on theories of utopia, as a process rather than a place, and practices of somaesthetics, we are developing and delivering an evolving series of workshops at academic conferences, activist spaces, festivals, and in the community. These creative workshops combine acts foraging, the use of natural paints and dyes in expressive artwork, soundscapes and mindful audiovisual experiences, creating immersive group interactions.
We have run these sessions in reimaged creative climate cafes spaces, which are intentionally intergenerational, where activists, scientists and families can come together to discuss the climate crisis, and are in dialog with festivals to run longer sessions that bring the importance of the swamp into dialog with spaces of play and relaxation. Intentionally building on the concept of death cafes, Climate Cafes, as defined by the Climate Psychology Alliance, are open, inclusive spaces for people to talk and act on climate change. Recognising the prevalence of grief in the climate crisis experience, these are thinking and feeling spaces where people share experiences and frustrations around the climate crisis. Our aim is to address the paralysing impact of eco-anxiety. We want to view it not just as an atomised problem for an individual’s health and well-being, but as part of a profoundly political and universal predicament that is slowing our response to the climate crisis. In particular, it is having a profound impact on young people, gaining prevalence and documentation in the rich Western countries as creators of the climate crisis and the slow violence and death in the global south.
All is not yet lost, and there are paths to be found in the midst of collapse. Anxiety holds within it transformative potential. We argue that the arts can and are being used to create spaces that educate as they heal. We present case studies, examples of material action and change. This deliberate work creates collective daydreams which transform eco-anxiety into eco-activism, prefiguring a world in which we may survive the destruction. Crucially, these spaces hold a chance to change our imagined future. In anticipating failure together, these workshops voice our collective daydream as we try to intervene in an imagined future, as social beings, workers, friends, activists, as a connected species being, within humanity and beyond it. We aim to move people from anxiety into action by allowing them to feel connected with nature, and by peaking their interest in the preservation of swamps and other wetlands, and holding a space for comfort for burnt out activists.
It is worth noting that we are not the only project operating in these spaces. Re-Peat is a youth-led project that also views wetlands, specifically peatlands, as important liminal spaces where people can reconnect with nature. Re-Peat see themselves as a “collective changing hearts and minds for and through peatlands” and their Netherlands based project have been going since 2020. Their upcoming project exhibition “Limbo” Notes:
“Peatlands are often overlooked or dismissed as wastelands but in reality are landscapes of cultural memory, ecological significance, and ongoing negotiation between histories, identities, and futures. Limbo invites you to step into these shifting landscapes and to hear stories of those connected to them.”
We want to take people with us into this space of limbo. Within our workshops, we engage with somaesthetics (the understanding of how the human body is used and experienced within artistic practice) to activate the living, sentient body as an indispensable medium for all perception. The project workshops also engage with ideas of repetition and interruption and meditation from the study of traditional ritual practices. These rituals interrupt our false separation from each other and from nature. They offer somatic practices that help realise the interconnectedness of our bodies with our environment, viewing them as part of nature rather than separate from it. The somaesthetic practices in the workshops work to dissolve our perceived boundaries between self and the natural world. To connect and understand ourselves as “swamps amongst swamps” we must understand the fundamental spaces of difference and diversity in humanity.
As we develop this project, we are interested in spheres of ecospirituality, rooting our practice of understanding this through repetition, movement, through expression, connecting it with the very fibres of our being. Through creating a generative ritual practice that is developed and emergent, rather than prescriptive and fixed, we find ourselves and each other in our differences. This resonates with druidic rituals. These rituals interrupt our false separation from each other, our false separation from nature. What might be seen as a further bioecospirituality that realised the interconnectedness that our bodies have with our environment, as part of nature rather than separate from it. In a way it is nothing new but a utopia temporality where the past, present and future collapse into one.
We operate on the principle that such biodiversity exists within own lifecycles (our chemical make-up changes) as we move through phases of hormonal changes such as puberty or menopause, as we pass stages of the menstrual cycle. In the diversity of our mental states, the differential association between neurotransmitters and basic emotions that form our moods. We are at a time when theorising around neurodiversity (including autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyspraxia, and bipolar disorder) is looking at “ecological functional models that take relational contributions to collectives, and group functioning, into account alongside individual functionality.”
It is the very nature of meeting our own embodied genetic existence, our experience and understanding of our own mortality, and the diverse contrasts between different physical and cognitive experiences of the lived world that we can construct new potential futures as a biodiverse species-being, that step from darkness into new forms of self-knowing. That we might currently view as “unwell” or “other” as part of achieving the utopian break, and in the individual and communal processes of eco-anxiety, we may refer to as the complexity of “becoming utopian”. It is not by trying to escape these times of psychological or physical “unwellness” or trying to cure or merely accommodating otherness, but by going into and through them and undergoing a process of integration, acceptance, and learning. We are engaging with a utopian approach to biodiversity that is temporal as well as spatial.
We aim to address plant-human relations through creative workshops as a critical utopian intervention that is bringing humans back to the swamp. It is an immersive project, and you can experience part of the project by using headphones and watching this immersive meditation video on YouTube – we have used versions of this in our workshops:
Case Study: Un/building Futures Conference – Into the Swamp and Into Uncertainty
A lived example of our workshop in academia can be seen at the Un/Building Futures Conference in Warwick. Instances of conceptual and physical displacement were at the core of the conference, held at the University of Warwick in June 2023. The theme of the event was closely aligned with science-fictional ideas concerning spatiality. On one hand, the conference aimed to trouble and reform the dichotomy between urbanity and rurality, particularly within the present context of accelerating ecological decay and on the other, it troubled the distinctions across academic fields, by favouring interdisciplinary cross-pollination, or a ‘commoning’ of knowledge, across a wide variety of sectors, including architecture, literature, law, agriculture, and fiction.
The immersive swamp workshop took participants on a journey into a beautiful space on the campus nature reserve at Tocil Woods, an on-campus swamp. This was to be a transitional utopian space, we invited participants became the swamp through ritualistic movement and expressive painting, exploring their own bodily biodiversity as ‘swamps amongst swamp’ through an initial meditation.
This workshop aimed to materialise utopia as process, through somaesthetics and embodied ritual practice, breaking the veil between the earthly and human experience, Berries, spices and mud made the paints and dyes, and sticks, feathers and grasses were used for mark-making. Participants were guided to forage for natural materials responsibly. This foraging walk was a pilgrimage to connect us to the natural surroundings. This workshop was a full sensory experience, with the smells of nature drifting through the woods and a soundtrack of ritual drumming. The swamp ritual involved weaving around the clearing, moving to a sheet of paper, using gestures, movement, splatting mud, dripping paint, and scraping across the paper. This was not a solitary practice; people moved from paper to paper, abandoning their original creations to contribute to the work of others, as we created collaborative artworks.
There were A3 pieces of paper placed in intervals across the forest floor. Participants of the workshop were encouraged to reimagine the purpose of the natural objects we found around us by allowing time to forage for pine cones, leaves and branches to be reimagined as appliances to transform the blank sheets of paper into representations of the swamp. Natural paints and dyes were provided for this purpose: egg yolk, beetroots, blackberries and blueberries to name a few. This was not a solitary practice; people moved from paper to paper, abandoning their original creations to add to the work of others as we created collaborative artworks. No one art work belonged to one person, there was initial resistance to this but then there was flow.
For many, it awakened the inner child who used to play in the mud and paint with their fingers, an unbuilding of the constructed and separated self. This dynamic exploration of bodily biodiversity and relationality provided a means for participants to contest and subvert the paralysing impact of eco-anxiety. Here, people were walking out of the university, stepping into a new domain in ways which facilitated new interactions and ‘coming together’. It also levelled the playing field for conversations between different levels of academics, as those giving keynotes crawled around the swamp with undergraduate attendees. People reported feelings of hope, an interest in the potential of swamps and wetland spaces, and a feeling of connection and release.
Liminal thoughts from the edges of the swamp…
Rooting our practice of understanding this through repetition, movement, through expression, connects it with the very fibres of our being. Through creating a generative ritual practice that is developed and emergent, rather than prescriptive and fixed, we find ourselves and each other in our differences. Realising the weirdness of nature and our connected relationship with it is the starting point for resistance. Once we see ourselves as beings in constant transition, composed not only of humans but also as inter-dependent biodiverse entities, we can begin to understand our place, relationship, and potential in the world as it is, and the world to come. While things may seem desperate in these times of crisis, the paths in the midst of collapse are indeed layable, gently through the swamp…