Milulu
Turakella Editha Gyindo
2:31 min, 2025
Peatland: Lake Nyasa Wetlands, Tanzania
The centre of this work is the wetland ecosystem surrounding Lake Nyasa in southern Tanzania. Within this ecology, a particular being emerges: Milulu (Eleocharis acutangula), a plant that grows densely across the shallow edges of the lake and its peat-forming wetlands. To the people of Kidingili, where my roots are from, milulu is a material and an archive. When I visited these wetlands, they were held in a quiet and expansive stillness. Peatlands like these are formed over thousands of years through the slow accumulation of partially decomposed plant material. Globally peatlands store over 30% of the world’s soil carbon, making them one of the most significant ecological systems in regulating climate.
But to understand this place only through carbon would be to flatten it. I think of milulu as a wetland being. This wetland connects ecological processes to social practices, material culture to ancestral memory. Milulu carries a dual life. It moves from lake to hand to mat to home. Traditionally, it is woven into mikeka (mats) and baskets. These mikeka are used in prayer, in ceremonies, in everyday acts of sitting and gathering. Today, milulu weaving continues as an important source of livelihood, especially for women in communities surrounding Lake Nyasa. In this way, the plant is part of a living economy. It is seen in knowledge passed through generations, through hands, through repetition. These practices exist within what could be understood as a form of paludiculture, although such terminology rarely captures the depth of local knowledge systems that have long practiced this balance.
Milulu was produced in the frame of the Sensing Peat series Swamp Cosmologies.
Research, Concept, Text, Images, Sound, Video: Turakella Editha Gyindo
Song and story: Mligo
Local conversation partners: Aurelia Mligo, Se’ Gadau, Mama Eniadi, Mama Bariki, Se’ Kyando,Sofia Kyando, Yohana Gyindo, Oygen Gyindo
Curation and transdisciplinary research coordination, editor of Swamp Cosmologies: Suza Husse
Creative and technical support online publication: Kim Bode
The Deaf Peatland
Marina Naprushkina
Research material, film excerpt: Melioration With Emotions and Without Emotions, Belvideocenter, 1990;
11:43 min, 2026
Peatlands in Polesia, Belarus
What narratives of resistance, survival, and healing are inscribed in the landscape of the swamp in Belarus? And how are these fragile ecosystems still exposed to forms of ecocidal politics today? What forms of resistance exist, and who are their actors?
The Deaf Peatland connects peatland landscapes around Worpswede in North German landscape and Belarus, a country that contains some of the largest peatland areas in Europe. However, more than half of these areas: around 1.5 million hectares, have been drained as part of large-scale, imperially driven projects. My research for this work moves between archival materials and contemporary reports on the reactivation of Soviet drainage systems under projects of the Lukashenko era, as well as historical narratives in literature and film, where the swamp and its landscape became a key marker of regional and cultural identity.
For the Sensing Peat Video Channel, I contribute an excerpt from the film Melioration With Emotions and Without Emotions (1990). The film was produced on behalf of the Soviet Ministry of Water Management and Land Reclamation of the Belarusian SSR, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is a compelling document of a transitional moment: on the one hand, it already allows for critical voices, more critical than would be possible in today’s Belarusian context. On the other hand, it still reproduces the status quo of industrial domination over nature in the name of efficiency and progress. This perspective is further reinforced by a male-dominated expert discourse and voices. Nevertheless, the film also marks a historical turning point. In the 1990s, new initiatives and forms of activism emerged, like Ekodom, one of the largest grassroots ecological initiatives, founded and led by the feminist Irina Sukhy.
Archival footage / online source: Melioration With Emotions and Without Emotions, Belvideocenter, 1990. Институт Мелиорации (Belarus): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QS7GYkRP9A
The Deaf Peatland was developed during the research residency Songs of Serpents – Ecopoetic Zones (2025) of Junge Akademie, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and continues to be in progress.
Undrainment
Philipp Modersohn
15:09 min, 2024
Peatlands: Ķemeri Purvs, Latvia; Sedas Purvs, Latvia; Nambigirwa Wetland, Uganda; Anklamer Stadtbruch, Breitenfeldermoor, Tollensetal, Quelkorner Moor, Spandauer Teufelsbruch, Germany; Aukštumalos Durpynai, Lithuania
Undrainment interweaves the consequences of draining peatlands with the individualisation of people within capitalist modernity. Two historical developments in particular, identified during research for the film, led to the notion of a “drainage of the world,” resulting from the demarcation and division of interconnected entanglements: land is regarded as the first good to be transformed into capital during the Enclosure Movement in England from the 15th century onwards. Many other goods—from labour and machinery to knowledge and genes—followed. Later, even Sigmund Freud employed the metaphor of draining, describing the aim of psychoanalysis as the strengthening of the ego and the appropriation of the subconscious: “Where id was, there ego shall be. … It is a work of civilisation, like the draining of the Zuider Zee.”
The formation and survival of peatlands depend primarily on ground that is saturated with water up to the surface. Only then does peat form, in which generations of grown and stored plants are transformed into matter (and world knowledge). At the beginning of the film, the past states of a peatland are recalled. As a result of the drainage and upheaval of this web of water and plants, a piece separates from the peat body and takes on a figurative form. This isolated piece of peat now moves through stage-like, absurd scenes, while the voice-over suggests human states of exuberance, isolation, and exhaustion. For a moment, the piece of peat merges with the logic of the capitalist-modern self. The images alternate with underwater shots of peatlands from various regions. Ultimately, a will-o’-the-wisp recalls these wet origins, sparking a scene of remembrance of the complexity, uncontrollability, inaccessibility, and magic of the watery.
Undrainment is based on Philip Modersohn’s The Exhausted, produced in the frame of Sensing Peat artistic research commissions in 2024.
Narrator: Kate Strong. Narration: Philipp Modersohn with Ayumi Rahn and Wilma Lukatsch. Peat Core Samples: Dierk Michaelis, Felix Reichelt, Fiedje Moritz from DUENE e.V. (Partner Greifswald Moor Centrum). Sound Design: Slobodan Bajić. Colour Grade: Alec Barth
Digital Animation: Alexander Pannier. Generously funded by the: Andrea von Braun Foundation.
Cuts
Juliane Tübke
2:22 min, 2024
Peatland: Steinbecker Vorstadt Polder, Germany
“The artist Juliane Tübke is interested in human-environment-relationships, specifically from symbiocene perspectives. In her multimedia installation Hilda (2024), she sheds light on the vegetal life of the drained Ryck meadows; the title “Hilda” refers to the earliest documented name of today’s Ryck river. Tübke is particularly interested in the role of plants for peatlands, especially reeds and black alder. She recognises plants as powerful agents that shape ecosystems and co-create habitats.
The video work Cuts is a key work in the exhibition: A drone flight across the present-day Steinbecker Vorstadt Polder. The images show a tracking shot across a snow-covered landscape. First across the Ryck river, which emerges from the mist with a dark glow that is reminiscent of its origins as wet peatland. From the Ryck, the view extends over the dyke, crosses the alder forest and finally shows the cuts in the landscape formed by the construction of drainage ditches. This landscape relief exposes the man-made scars of a damaged ecosystem whose future remains uncertain for various reasons.”
From: Ulrike Gerhardt, Am Ryck – Alison Darby and Juliane Tübke, essay on the exhibition at the Botanical Gardens, Greifswald, published on Sensing Peat, 2024.
The video work Cuts (2024) is part of the multimedia installation Hilda, based on Juliane Tübke’s extensive research into the peatlands of Greifswald.
Collaborators: Earth Observation and Geoinformation Science Lab, Institute for Geography and Geology, University of Greifswald; Sensing Peat – Art & Research Network ~ from the Venice Agreement, Michael Succow Foundation, partner in the Greifswald Mire Centre . Sound by Koenraad Ecker. Funded by University and Hanseatic City of Greifswald; The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media
Under the Peatland
Jeanna Kolesova
21:33 min, 2025
Peatlands: Haukkalampi, Finland; Kaigu, Baloži, and Seda purvs, Latvia; Esterweger Dose and Märchen See, Gemany; Meshchora peatlands, Russia; multiple peatlands in European territory of former Soviet Union.
The film moves through European peatlands as ecological, political, and cultural archives of ongoing transformation. Centred on Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia, it traces how wetlands bearing the imprint of imperial infrastructures and cycles of erasure and survival.
At its core lies a parallel between landscape and body. The scars of exploited peatlands echo in the exhausted, injured bodies of female workers whose labor sustained the industry. Violence against land and violence against workers’ bodies converge, revealing wounds that are both hidden and enduring.
Working in a speculative documentary form, the film layers archival fragments, found footage, and animation. Under the Peatland: Archive invites viewers to perceive wetlands as witnesses, as living entities that remember extraction, embody trauma, and resist through endurance.
Under the Peatland was developed during the Sensing Peat Artistic Research Residency at the Michael Succow Foundation and Greifswald Mire Center.
Collaborators: Baloži Peat Museum Railway, organisers and contributors to WETBEINGS arts, science and storytelling field symposium (Sensing Peat & Foundation for Peatland Conservation and Restoration, Lithuania), peatland ecologists at Michael Succow Stiftung and Greiswald Mire Center, Torfwerk Moorkultur Ramsloh, Snowchange Cooperative. Research supported by Kunstfonds Bonn Scholarship.