Insights from Art and Transdisciplinary Research: What Moore Tells Us About Planetary Existence

What would it mean to perceive the world through swamps and bogs, marshes and wetlands? What does the wet (and to-be-rewet) web—which spans the planet and holds within it pasts and futures—whisper in terms of knowledge and prophecies for our time? A time in which social and ecological movements are gaining strength, ^advocatingfor planetary “resistir y^{re-xistir”¹}, for “rExistenzen”—for survival on and with the Earth that draws its strength from the connection between the living and the resistant. A time marked by the acceleration of climate catastrophes, authoritarianism and militarization, ecocide and genocide. Drawing on artistic works and transdisciplinary research within the context of the art and research platform Sensing Peat at the Michael Succow Foundation, Suza Husse reflects on approaches from and involving peatlands in the Baltic region, northern Germany, East Africa, Eastern Europe, and southern South America. These community-based and transcultural methods link the ecological and social restoration of wounded yet wondrous peatland worlds with the revitalization of wetland cultures and wetland knowledge.

Suza Husse is a researcher, poet, swimmer, and cultural worker. They work collaboratively and without disciplinary boundaries at the intersections of queer ecology and anti-colonial cultures. Since 2024, they have curated the art and research platform Sensing Peat at the Michael Succow Foundation / Greifswald Mire Centre and have been organizing with the Venice Agreement for Peatlands (VA). VA is a global community network for peatland conservation from the grassroots up through local initiatives and decolonial approaches. Through the nomadic art space district*schule ohne zentrum and the collective The Many Headed Hydra, Suza, together with many others, initiates performative, rooted, and speculative practices that connect different worlds and forms of knowledge. Since 2016, they have been co-curating the nomadic platform and online archive for post-socialist feminist video art, D’EST. From 2017 to 2018, they served as a visiting professor for interdisciplinary artistic research at the Berlin University of the Arts. They publish on contemporary art and culture in relation to ecology, coloniality, queer feminism, post-socialism, and extractionist cultures, including in Archive Books, Diaphanes, February Journal, D’EST, and ECCLECTIC.

1Lina María Hurtado Gómez, a geographer and scholar of Latin American and Amazonian territorialities, conflicts, and social movements, explains that the concept of “Re-Existence” emerged amid social struggles in the Latin American context. Gómez argues that “re-existence” and “resistance” are overlapping processes that mutually involve and renew one another, thereby imbuing existence and the environment with new meanings within shifting strategies of territorialization—meanings rooted in the past/tradition, on present-day struggles and conflicts, and on visions of the future, dreams, and imaginations.” Lina María Hurtado Gómez, *Resistir y Re-existir*, 2022.

Moderator: Professor Dr. Gerald Jurasinski