ABSTRACT
The swamp chapter looks to significant artistic practices that think with the swamp as a zone of rich collaboration. Throughout the chapter, the hydro-artistic methods (archiving, incubating and cleaning) are strategies for relating with ‘response-ability’ to swamps, wetlands and liminal waterlogged zones. The chapter presents vital and unique artists and curators who co-create with swamps with a special focus on Signe Johannessen whose embodied relationship with her local swamp is a site for intimate ritual, sacrifice and collaboration. The chapter then looks to curatorial wetlands and swamp pedagogy in the Swamp Pavilion and the Swamp Biennale, as well as the work of artists Madeleine Andersson and Yasmin Smith, who have both developed care-based relations with swampy bodies of water. Similarly, the chapter looks to the work of artist duo Gideonsson/Londré who see the peat bogs of northern Sweden as a zone for durational interspecies performance, based on crossing the swamp as an act of time-based material entanglement. In this chapter, artists develop unique response-able relations with swampy bodies of water, working towards embodied human–swamp relations.
