Rehearsing Murky Bogland Futures
Linda Boļšakova (Latvia), Rósa Ómarsdóttir (Iceland)This participatory audio play invites into a future of deeper entanglements with a living, more-than-human world. It explores the future movements and mythologies of bogland through a performance that unfolds within the individual bodies of each participant. Our present-day approaches and ways of perceiving our place within natural processes are haunted by speculative futures. In this piece you’ll tune into the vibrant frequencies of the world to come, where the bog has come into the city.
“Not like a catastrophe
not like a flood
more like waking up
more like remembering.
Slow, insistent and without doubt.”
Moving beyond extractivist logic and into murky entanglement, the bog is encountered as an agential being. The sonic landscape conjures a speculative ecology in which bogland is no longer a distant wetland but a sentient force seeping into the city, into bodies, into time itself.
This is the second work of the trilogy series by Linda Boļšakova, developing as part of the EU Creative Europe project The Big Green residency at Ķemeri National Park.
About artist
Linda Boļšakova works with various media, focusing mainly on performance and installation, through which she explores the relationship between humans and the environment, especially the plant kingdom. She has collaborated with scientists from the National Botanical Garden and the Institute for Environmental Solutions in Latvia, as well as the Antalya Orchid and Biodiversity Conservation Association. In the project series Semina futuri: vietturis nākotnes līdzāspastāvēšanai (Seeds of the Future: A Framework for Coexistence in the Future), Boļšakova collaborated with composers, scientists, web developers, and 3D artists. She recently collected stories from gardeners at the Sporta pils dārzi (Gardens of Sporta Pils), which address the semantics and correlations between humans and plants. Her solo works include Svešinieku tuvība (The Closeness of Strangers) at the ISSP gallery and Off spring at the ALMA gallery, and she has participated in the performance festivals Starptelpa and No New Idols. She has taken part in several group exhibitions in Scotland, Latvia, Greece, Slovakia and Turkey, and has participated in residencies at Nida Art Colony, Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Hybrida AiR, VV Foundation and Zen Temple in Sweden. Linda Boļšakova has completed a course in art and philosophy with first-class honors in Scotland (2016), having previously graduated from a photography course at Edinburgh College. In 2018, she completed a course on performance art in Riga.
Credits
Created by: Linda Boļšakova & Rósa Ómarsdóttir
Soundscape by: Ernst Lima
Supported by: The work was created with the support of the EU program Creative Europe as part of the project The Big Green, with financial support from the Society Integration Foundation from the Latvian state budget allocated by the Ministry of Culture and co-financing from the Ministry of Culture. The New Theatre Institute of Latvia is responsible for the content of the performance.