Swampy Rituals

How can we change the process of artmaking? How can we diversify perspectives? How can we centre nature in our practises? Avantgardeners Collective wants to create a toolkit for artists and institutions that will help them to face these issues in contemporary performance art. 
  
They are seeking inspiration from one of nature’s complex and delicately balanced ecosystems: the swamp. Swamps refuse national borders, the rigid maps of city planners, even the ‘simple’ distinction of water and land. “Swamp-thinking” can free us from the preconceptions embedded in human society, instead encouraging us to think outside of our pre-existing categories and open us up to the complicated, the confusing, the contradictory.  
 
The collective wants to revel in the entanglements of nature that refuse binary categorisation, and learn about collaboration and plurality from these messy, muddy aspects of the organic. Using this research, they will devise a series of practical rituals that artists can incorporate into their own creative process.

People involved

Claudia Graham, Johann Otten, Livia Rita
Avantgardeners Collective, performing artists, creatives, producers, curators, Nesslau (with roots across Europe)

Image: ©Avantgardeners Collective