“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
“Hollow space with sparks, this will probably remain our condition for a long time, but a hollow space which allows us to walk undisguised, and with sparks which increasingly model a figure of direction. The paths in the midst of collapse are layable, right through the middle” – Ernst Bloch, The Heritage of Our Time
“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
Swamps 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 U.S. swamps were destroyed before environmental protections came into place in the 1970s. In the UK we altered many so they are barely recognisable.
Welcome to the Swamp, a project that explores understanding ourselves as biodiverse beings in transition through artistic practices. Through doing so it hopes to counter apathy and feelings of disempowerment, inspire climate activism, and generate understanding of the importance of biodiversity. This swamp utopia of this project is not a place, nor a no-place, it is a process living, breathing, material and embodied.[i] The swamp is always in process, in motion neither ground nor water, an unclosed system of infinite potential, of change, action and hope…
Initiated by expressive artist Kirsty Lumm and utopian theorist Heather McKnight, the project 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. Drawing on theories of utopia, as a process and not a place, and practices of somaesthetics[ii] they are developing an evolving series of workshops to be delivered at conferences, activist spaces, festivals and in the community. These workshops combine acts such as foraging, the use of natural paints and dyes in expressive artwork, soundscapes and audiovisual experiences into accessible immersive group interactions.
This video shows the Swamp Meditation we designed for the project – best listened to with headphones!
Our failure to appreciate and value caught up with the homogenising of the human form, rather than knowing ourselves as beings in transition or valuing difference on a multi-spectral level is destroying our species-being.[iii] 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 steps from darkness into new forms of self-knowing that serve to motivate action in our current crisis.
Somaesthetics here serves to activate the living, sentient, body as the indispensable medium for all perception.[iv] The project workshops engage with ideas of repetition and interruption from studied from traditional ritual practices. These rituals interrupt our false separation from each other, our false separation from nature. They offer somatic practices that help realise the interconnectedness that our bodies have with our environment, 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.
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.[v] 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.”[vi]
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”.[vii] 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.
Our theme of utopian biodiversity both links with the idea of the Anthropocene, but also critiques it. Through the destruction of swamplands, and biodiverse spaces more generally, we accept the concept of a proposed geological epoch where human activities have impacted the environment enough to constitute distinct geological change. However, we also question the choice of terminology as it fails to recognise our biodiverse nature where only 50% of our own bodies are actually human DNA and we live in such a space of co-dependence with the living environment. This project engages more closely with the Anthropocene imagined as what Donna Haraway would call the Chthulucene. This means one in which “the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices” [viii] and the swamp embodies the possibilities through realising and staying with our troubled kinship with our co-existence in nature.
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.
Seeing the beauty of nature is the starting point for resistance. Once we see ourselves as beings in constant transition, as made up not of only the human but as inter-dependant biodiverse entities we can begin to see 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.
We will update this page with further project information and workshop dates shortly. Please get in touch if you are interested in knowing more! swamp@magneticideals.org
The video below is from the workshop we ran at the Un/Building the Future Conference, 2023, at Warwick University.
The video below shows scenes from our workshop as part of the Creative Climate Cafe programme funded by the Rampion Windfarm Community Fund.
References
[i] Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia (Anthony A Nassar tr, Stanford University Press 2000); Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol One (Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight eds, The MIT Press 1995).
[ii] Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge University Press 2012).
[iii] Bobbi Woodhill and Curtis Samuels, ‘Shades of Pink and Blue: Unidimensional Spectra of Identity within a Multidimensional Model of Diversity.’ <https://www.cambridge.org/engage/coe/article-details/60890ce7b299f8e1bc98d84e> accessed 23 October 2021.
[iv] Shusterman (n 2).
[v] Fushun Wang and others, ‘Editorial: Neurotransmitters and Emotions’ (2020) 11 Frontiers in Psychology 21.
[vi] Robert Chapman, ‘Neurodiversity and the Social Ecology of Mental Functions’ [2021] Perspectives on Psychological Science 1745691620959833.
[vii] Tom Moylan, Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation (Bloomsbury Academic 2020).
[viii] Haraway DJ, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press Books 2016)