GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Kitman Yeung

proposal:

Toward a “Wetland Aesthetics”

Specimen: sphagnum moss

Or

Location: Puhatu Wetland Complex, da-Viru County, Estonia (Puhatu soostik)

Background info

Northeastern Estonia are home to peatlands, which are carbon sinks shaped over millennia by slow accumulations of plant matter in water-saturated, anaerobic conditions. These landscapes have undergone forceful drainage, to repurpose the wetlands for agricultural or industrial uses. Not only that, decades of industrial pollution of ash, particularly from oil shale combustion has also increased the alkalinity of these bogs, which limits their carbon holding capacity. Contemporary efforts in restoration have reconsidered the biodiversity and carbon retaining abilities of sphagnum moss in bogs. Recent scholarship prompts us to reconsider the ‘unintentional designs at sites of disturbances (Tsing, 2023) and the spontaneous potentials of “wastelands" (The Baltic Atlas, 2016).  How do these peatlands mediate between ongoing industrial violence and future climatic hopes? I aim to unpack how it becomes a carbon bank—a slow body that stabilizes what once moved rapidly and violently through the air. Through this lens, the peatland is not merely a landscape but an entangled infrastructure of storage, filtering, and reconfiguration.

Main Objective / Field Focus

This fieldwork centers on sphagnum moss growing in acidic conditions of northeastern Estonian peatlands. It is a situation of a multispecies and multi-elemental assemblage with the atmosphere, sphagnum moss, oil shale ash, vascular plants and microbial life. I focus on tracing the photosynthesizing process of sphagnum moss in different peatlands samples, and how particularly how atmospheric residues linger in the bodies of plants and soils. The samples will involve environments altered with oil shale ash to see how the increased carbon dioxide, released through oil shale combustion, is being re-sequestered by the carbon sink-wetland substrate. Using the idea of a "wetland aesthetics," I examine the wetland as a site which redefines excess carbon pollution. However, perhaps once this carbon pollution is stored in an inactive state, its toxicity status can be reconsidered. Through this investigation, my artistic intervention builds on the abstraction of how the sense of time, and movement is obscured in the peatlands, where decomposition is slowed due to the acidic of the soil being anoxic (oxygen-deprived) in peatlands, which restricts the activity of many decomposers, which are organisms that break down organic matter.

Technical Description

Possible fieldwork methods include observational journaling, photographic documentation, and elemental mapping (e.g., visualizing zones of higher moss activity or ash residue). I will collect air and soil temperature/humidity data (using a portable CO₂ sensor?) and include sound recordings to document the peatland’s auditory atmosphere (wind, water movement, birdlife). Additional elements could include aesthetic transformation of the land, and speculative visualizations of carbon entrapment over time.

Preliminary References

1. Ots, K., Tullus, T., Sild, M., Tullus, A., Täll, K., & Tullus, H. (2023). Ash treatment promotes the revegetation of abandoned extracted peatlands. Land, 13(10), 1623. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13101623
2. Paal, J., Vellak, K., Liira, J., & Karofeld, E. (2010). Bog Recovery in Northeastern Estonia after the Reduction of Atmospheric Pollutant Input.
3. Tsing, A. (2023). Bestiary of the Anthropocene, Chapter: “Unruly Edges.”
4. The Baltic Atlas (2016). Baltic States Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale.
5. Wojcik, M., & Almeida, A. S. (2024). The role of peatlands in carbon storage and climate change mitigation: A review of ecosystem services, threats, and restoration approaches. Science of The Total Environment, 915, 170501. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.170501