Swamp Song
briesetal: “berlin’s everglades”
Swamp Song a research-creation project drawing from participatory action research and sensory ethnographic approaches, to explore embodied learning and community-building through storytelling, ritual, and accessible art initiatives. The project originates in the context of Berlin, where the swamp bubbles up from social, ecological and mythological narratives in the city’s history, and continues to seep into present-day sociopolitical complexities. A deeper dive into the swamp reveals its historic and symbolic associations with marginalised bodies and beings — feminised, racialised, queer, mad, filthy, feral — an othered landscape offering refuge to persecuted and fugitive classes and vulnerable species. Swamp Song uses a mythopoetics of the swamp to activate a radical queer imaginary, where monstrous beings and feral natures are held in tender reverence.
gathered by the grotto, in the palace garden
In mid-2024, Swamp Song was invited as a feature project at the Palace Residency in Gorzanów, Poland. Embracing the opportunity to explore collaborative potentials and site-specific development, the project was facilitated as an open process to empower individual and collective research. The conceptual and methodological framing encouraged experimentation and exchange, with a focus on supporting diverse inputs and fluid development towards an unknown end beyond the process itself. Through meetings, rituals, methodological exploration, and creative play, Swamp Song was brought to life by a wildly talented group of multidisciplinary collaborators, emerging as an immersive performance during the final showcase weekend.
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