The Palace Residency is a co-created artistic residency that hosts 150 participants from around the world for two weeks of cross-disciplinary collaboration and creative development, within the surreal backdrop of a decaying 450 year-old Renaissance palace in Gorzanów, Poland. Swamp Song was dreaming towards collectivity from the beginning, so the invitation to lead it as a feature project at the Palace Residency felt like the perfect opportunity to open it up to wider collaborative input, and offered an incredible location to experiment with site-specific development.

I recognised a chance to not only explore the project’s concepts, but also ways that different modes of collaborative work could be supported through the project design. Inspired by the polyphony and indeterminacy of the swamp, I wanted to create a framing that could encourage diverse articulations, rather than striving towards a predetermined vision. I also knew the residency’s proposal — 2 weeks living and working as a contingent community of artists in a remote location — would likely be challenging, in ways that I could only partially prepare for.

Past experiences working on collaborative projects within short timeframes and variable conditions were valuable lessons in planning for the unexpected, so my project design sought to ameliorate some of the inevitably arising challenges with a fluid and adaptable structure. I facilitated the project as an open process offering a conceptual and methodological framework for individual and collective research, with a focus on experimentation and exchange rather than outcome. Collaborators were invited to embrace a ritual framing (separation, transition, return) as an overarching narrative guide for our shared working process, and as a structure of communal support and meaning-making as we navigated the intensities of the residency period. 

As Swamp Song is predicated on recognising knowledge as embodied and embedded in local contexts, it was also important that the project engaged meaningfully with the sociopolitical and ecological narratives of the site. The 16th-century palace has a rich and complex history that includes a dark era of occupation by Nazi forces and a period of use as a prison labour camp for Jewish women. More about Pałac Gorzanów’s history can be read here.

The project unfolded in the Nymphaeum - a ruined grotto structure in the once-opulent palace garden, steeped in watery symbolism and adorned with flora, fauna, and figures from classical Western mythology. Though rooted in much older animistic beliefs, these appropriated myths reflect objectified and idealised relationships with spirituality, nature, and the body that continue to echo in contemporary ideologies. Taking over this space with deviant intentions and swampy rituals would be a symbolic act of reclamation from hegemonies of sanitisation, purity, and control. Aided by the elements, which had already begun the process of devouring and reclamation, we began to activate a new mythology — something more feral, animalistic and grotesque.