SWAMPING (2024 – 2025) explores how changing ecologies manifest themselves in artistic practice, particularly at the interface between water and land, between physical and mental ideological landscapes. SWAMPING serves as a projection surface to pose various socially and ecologically inspired artistic questions. In addition to a selection of new and existing works by established and emerging international visual artists, Kunstverein Arnsberg and curator Pauline Doutreluingne invites young artists from various disciplines as well as ecologists and activists over a period of two years (2024-2025) to jointly create an artistic sensibility and imagination for an ecological past, present and future: a collective performance, four solo exhibitions, and a transdisciplinary symposium.

I: Prelude to SWAMPING : River Biographies, 2024

Lundahl & Seitl  

Exhibition duration: June 9 → 30, 2024

Exhibition venues: Lichthaus Arnsberg

Opening: June 9, 2024, with collective Performance

Located between the sky and the underground, water is always in a moving relationship with stone. This also applies to the renaturalized Ruhr, which should not be entered at present due to landscape protection. We learn about the way of the walking river. Pourous limestone leading the water underground to reappear elsewhere. Pebbles that travel with the water and rebuild the landscape. The farmers hand that redirects the flow away from farmland, the industrialist hand taming rivers into straight channels and the hand of the city that, a hundred years later, lets it run wild again. For a month in June this year, there will be an opportunity to gather in the courtyard of Wedinghausen Monastery to engage in a process of re-naturalizing the body.

River Biographies is an odyssey into the geology of the body as well as of the land, emphasizing that which is not human but of which you are a part. Taking the form of an hour-long session where an audience of 20 people explore embodiments of natural elements of stone and water to form a river collectively, the artwork exists somewhere between performance and a space for healing and repair.

Like the life of a river is a measure of the health of a local ecosystem, River Biographies are living artworks where the shifting collective ability of the group passes through the artworks score. Each half of the group embodies the qualities of water and stone, respectively, to physically explore their relationship; the way in which stone affects the flow of the water and how water forms the topography of rock and stone, directing the water’s flow, and how both affect each other’s temporalities. As an ongoing project, River Biographies is an international co-production and collaboration between institutions located on rivers and waterways, including the Southbank Center (Thames), Chronus Art Center (Huangpu River), Liljevalchs Konsthall (Stockholm River) and Istanbul Modern (Bosphorus).

Just as the global water cycles connect the world‘s rivers, the artwork is created anew for each new body of water in collaboration with local people (here with the project‘s exploration and adaptation to the Ruhr), but carries within it the memories and knowledge of the previous locations, which are preserved in the choreography of the artwork. 

Although it is a live artwork, it will also be shown as an ongoing sound installation with participatory performances every Sunday at 3pm.

Lundahl & Seitl live and work in Stockholm. Their immersive projects reinterpret the medium of the exhibition as interpersonal processes about choreography, matter and time. They have been presented around the world, notably at the Royal Academy of Art (UK), Gropius Bau (DE) and Accelerator Stockholm (SW), Chronus Art Centre (CN), the 8th Momentum Biennale for Nordic Contemporary Art (NO), Centre Pompidou Metz (FR), the 3rd Kochi Muziris Biennale (IN) and with the commissioned work „Echoes of Alternative Histories“ at Staatstheater Kassel during Documenta Fifteen.

II. Vital Vapors, 2025

Adriano Amaral

Exhibition duration: April 13 → June 8, 2025

Exhibition venues: Kunstverein Arnsberg and Lichthaus Arnsberg

Opening Speeches: Dr. Barbara Rüschoff Parzinger, Kirsten Minkel (Kulturbüro Arnsberg) and Pauline Doutreluingne

The solo exhibition VITALS VAPORS by the Brazilian artist Adriano Amaral opens as part of the annual programme SWAMPING at Kunstverein Arnsberg. Curated by Pauline Doutreluingne, the programme explores how changing ecologies manifest themselves in contemporary artistic practice, particularly at the interface between water and land, between physical and spiritual ideological landscapes. The exhibition opens up an understanding of humans as part of a complex ecosystem whose definition is rapidly changing in the face of climate change

In his artistic work, Adriano Amaral explores materiality, time and space, creating complex, immersive and transformative landscapes that can be experienced through the senses. This transformation is not only physical but also symbolic, questioning the permanence of meaning in content and form. His practice is based on an intuitive and pluralistic approach. Numerous dichotomies – natural/artificial, abstract/figurative, material/immaterial, ecology/technology – play a role, but the interesting aspect is that new hybrid forms and content constantly emerge and enable new perspectives in the juxtaposition. His installations stimulate our thinking and drive us into the liminal zone between the strangely absurd and the known and familiar. They are like talismans from the future that evoke a new iconography. His oeuvre is more than mere representation; it invites us to enter into a deep, psychic and physical experience, awakening sensations and states of mind linked to our captivation with the chimerical.

The floor of the Kunstverein in Arnsberg has been transformed. It is now covered with black-grey lava sand, the windows have been covered with antifreeze agent and the view to the outside is obscured. Natural light flows into the space, but not excessively. The four basic elements of fire, water, earth and air come up against silicone, acrylic and prosthetic rubber. Industrial and everyday objects are combined, natural and synthetic elements merge and the resulting hybrid sculptures and paintings populate the space. For instance, the Prosthetic Painting Series (2023) hangs on the wall, resembling sci-fi swamp landscapes from another world or the future. Several (kinetic) sculptures hang and stand in the room, bringing together unexpected and elegant assemblages of acrylic pipe, silicone, pigment, shells, wire, ants, LCD screens, twigs and electronic components. In the middle of the room, three monitors hang from the ceiling in a triangle, showing the atmospheric film Mar de Fé from 2020. The film is set on a rugged coastline at night. The camera glides over foaming waves, chases through dark bushes and along shiny, resinous tree trunks. The exhibition is like a porous experience, in which the viewer is left to decide how to take it in.

The installation Mar de Fé (2020) can be seen in the Lichthaus Arnsberg, not far from the Kunstverein. It consists of an octagonal aluminium tank, steam, water, various seeds, silicone, peat and aluminium casts of fish. The base consists of modular solar panels. Over time, the influence of sunlight has created subtle purple and green patches on the dark surface. This artificial landscape conveys a sense of time and transformative energy through technological devices that accompany us in our daily lives. Amaral allows organic and industrial things to interact with each other on this platform. The compressed peat soil dries and shrinks slowly, while mould forms on the surface, absorbing the mist from the humidifiers. The octagon has been a recurring architectural and ornamental motif in many cultures since ancient times. Its symbolism is related to the integration of the material and spiritual worlds through the harmony between the square, which symbolises the earth, and the circle, which represents the sky, the divine dimension. A sculpture hanging above the octagonal basin was made from casted aluminium fish fossils and recalls the book One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez- in which a man began to cast and melt fish in a cyclical quest from matter to form and back to matter again. The exhibition VITALS VAPORS questions the extent to which it is possible for us today to step out of rigid thought patterns and try to understand the environment that surrounds us in its transformation.

Adriano Amaral lives in Brazil. He obtained an MFA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London, before taking up a residency at De Ateliers, Amsterdam, in 2016. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (NL), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (NL), Rodeo Gallery, London (UK), GRIMM Gallery, New York (US) and Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld (DE), among others, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions such as Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (2024), Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (2024) and Mudam, Luxembourg, LU (2020)

III.  Liquid Mantras, 2025

Patricia Domínguez

Exhibition duration: June 27 → August 24, 2025

Exhibition venues: Kunstverein Arnsberg

Kunstverein Arnsberg presents the third exhibition as part of the SWAMPING programme. In her solo exhibition Liquid Mantras, Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez focuses on the access to water in the age of privatised natural resources. She directs it towards forms of weeping and healing with regard to rituals, spirituality and resilience in an increasingly digital present. Domínguez describes her work as a ritualised practice in which digital and real elements merge. As she materialises the digital and mixes it with real elements and memories, she highlights mutual influences on a planetary togetherness. Her artistic work can be understood as a late capitalist hacking – like a stomach digesting current systems and rearranging them in a futuristic sci-fi aesthetic or better spi-fi (spiritual fiction).

As an artist and activist, she seeks to rethink our planetary relationships and propose ways of being together and coexisting. Water, or more precisely the loss of water, is a central theme in Liquid Mantras. The exhibition begins with a direct insight into Domínguez‘s worldview, which emphasises community and collaboration. It features works on paper by her and her immediate female artistic-activist community under the title ‘Aguas etéricas’ [Ethereal Waters]. In 2020, Domínguez began the research project GaiaGuardianxs, which combines text, installation and video and looks at the impact of biopower on contemporary eco-social conflicts in Latin America. The exhibition will include a digital publication that summarises three years of research and sheds light on the conflict over access to water in the province of Petorca in Chile.

The work La balada de las sirenas secas [The ballad of the dry mermaids] was also created in collaboration. Developed with the women‘s collective Mujeres del agua, which is associated with the environmental protection organisation MODATIMA (Movement for Access to Water, Land and Environmental Protection), it draws attention to the scarcity of water due to increasing water privatisation. The installation is reminiscent of a shrine, for which organic elements have been combined with technological objects and low-fi components. In the centre of the installation there is a screen mounted vertically on an altar made of dry earth. A dark, mermaid-like figure covered in LED lights kneels in front of it in a votive gesture, a moment of mourning or prayer. The grim faces of thirsty and contemptuous avocado-shaped heads complete the scene.

The Hanging Testicles and the She-Spirit of Water continues Domínguez‘s call against the privatisation of water in Chile, first introduced in 1984 under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Under current legislation and in violation of human rights, fresh water is diverted to irrigate large-scale avocado farms in the province of Petorca, in collusion with politicians and to the disadvantage of the local, often indigenous, population. The title of the work (a subtle criticism of patriarchy) also refers to the Aztec origin of the word “avocado” -āhuacatl, meaning “testicle”.

The last room of the exhibition is dedicated to a facsimile of the Troano Codex, one of the four surviving pre-Columbian Maya books. This codex, written in hieroglyphics on bark paper, dates back to the period between 900 and 1521 and contains almanacs that served as manuals for prophecies and prognostication. The records of astrological systems and ideas provide insights into the rituals and calendar systems of the Maya. The artefact is positioned on a mirror shelf so that it resonates in the room to the sounds of two spiritual meditations on water worlds created for Gaiaguardianxs by her mentor Nicole Postel. Visitors are invited to turn inwards, enter a meditative state of consciousness and connect with the spirit of water.

The exhibition Liquid Mantras can be understood as an analysis of the role of water as a fighting and sometimes deadly force. The various works can be interpreted as ritualised acts of empowerment. They not only thematise vulnerabilities, but also open up paths for the articulation of new collective voices.

Patricia Domínguez (born 1984, Santiago, Chile, lives and works in Puchuncaví, Chile) draws upon myths, symbols, rituals and healing practices, combining artistic imagination with experimental research on ethnobotany. Domínguez works with watercolours, ceramics, sculptural assemblages and video installations to create shrine-like imagery derived from a visual vocabulary that spans from plant life, mass market goods, corporate wellness schemes and the digital world. Patricia Domínguez has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum (New York), WAMx (Finland), CentroCentro (Madrid), Gasworks (London), TBA21 Collection at C3A (Córdoba), Sala CCU (Santiago), Galería Patricia Ready (Santiago), and ARCO Madrid. She has been chosen as artist in residence at ALMA (Chile) + CERN (Switzerland), Gasworks (London), Meet Factory (Prague), AIM Bronx Museum (NY), R.A.T. (Mexico), FLORA ars + natura (Bogota), The Institute of Critical Zoologists (Singapore), Sandarbh Residency (Partapur, India), and American Museum of Natural History (New York). She has recently received the Botín Foundation Visual Arts Grant (2022), the CERN+ Symmetry Grant and the AMA-Gasworks Grant, among others. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College, New York. She has a BA in Art from PUC, Chile, and studied Botanical and Natural Science Illustration at the New York Botanical Garden. She runs the experimental ethnobotanical platform Studio Vegetalista.

IV: THE STARLIGHT DIMS
ITS BLISSFUL GAZE,
THE SPRINGS ARE STEAMING—
WE DESCEND IN HAZE, 2025

Elise Eeraerts & Roberto Aparacio Ronda

Exhibition duration: September 12 → November 16, 2025

Exhibition venues: Kunstverein Arnsberg

Elise Eeraerts & Roberto Aparicio Ronda are an interdisciplinary artist duo with a background in art and architecture. In their work, they explore the many factors that influence landscapes and ecosystems and determine how ecological transformations and social infrastructures leave their traces. Their exhibition at Kunstverein Arnsberg is the final part of the year-long exhibition and event programme SWAMPING, following three successive exhibitions, performances and a symposium. They will be transforming the rooms of the Kunstverein into a literal swamp. Film, architecture, light and plants merge into a spatial installation.

This is not the first time that Eeraerts and Ronda have explored the swamp as a motif and breeding ground for their work. In 2021, they addressed energy and carbon cycles in particular in a site- specific installation titled C (Bargerveen). The ‘Bargerveen swamp’ is a large marshland area near Zwartemeer, not far from the German-Dutch border. The installation elements were exhibited directly in the Bourtanger Moor-Bargerveen International Nature Park.

For their current exhibition at the Kunstverein Arnsberg, they are now focusing on Kirkpatrick Marsh in Maryland, USA. Following their stay there, they are presenting a spatial and visual translation of their research. In this moorland landscape, they met scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Centre (SERC), who are investigating how plant and animal species react to fluctuations in CO2, temperature, nitrogen, methane and sea level rise.

Here, global climate change is manipulated in specific architectural and computer-controlled infrastructures to simulate conditions in the next century. Impressive aerial shots combined with close-ups of the multi-diverse flora and fauna form the visual basis of the film ‘Moors and Mires/ Kirkpatrick Marsh’. In interview excerpts, the scientists working at Kirkpatrick Marsh talk about their work and their findings.

The documentary character of their film increasingly becomes a dark, computer-generated narrative. The spatial elements of the exhibition are visual echoes of the swamp scenery, transforming the scientific narratives and their aesthetics into a poetic vision of the future with the sensation of one being in the landscape. Phragmites australis, an ‘invasive’ grass species, is one of the main characters in the artistic- ecological narrative. The plants have existed for several hundred years, but it is only in the last thirty to fifty years that they have become a problem in the Kirkpatrick Marsh in Maryland. As an invasive species, they spread and dominate the landscape.

In their video work, they immerse themselves in the magical-realistic dimension invoked by the swamp and its appearance, using the same coloured growing light as the lamps that enable the young Phragmites australis to grow in the dark. We also recognise the architectural interventions used in the Kirkpatrick Marsh in the form of octagonal structures and cube-shaped elements to ensure accurate measurements. In the exhibition‘s reconstructed rectangular structures, Eeraerts and Aparicio Ronda use SERC devices to measure the CO2 concentration and temperature of the earth around the plants positioned in the room. They also serve as the structure for the audio installation and provide the soundscape for the space.

In their exhibition, the gloomy scientific predictions fit seamlessly into an atmosphere that blends legends, myths and stories into an overall installation designed to get under the viewer‘s skin. The symbiosis between the technical and scientific equipment and the aura of the vast marshland is alarming. How can we learn from the swamp about future strategies for survival in times of climate change? One scientist‘s conclusion is as disillusioning as it is reassuring: ‘It may not necessarily be good for humans, but the Earth itself will continue to exist.’ 

Since 2012, Elise Eeraerts and Roberto Aparicio Ronda have been developing a multidisciplinary practice that focuses primarily on the relationship between art and architecture. Their projects find expression in natural environments or public spaces in cities, where site specificity, history and material transformations are the subject of their research. As the most primitive material, earth plays a central role in their practice: from soil research and excavations to the appropriation of different types of soil and their further pro- cessing into objects and spatial installations. In their most recent works, Eeraerts and Aparicio Ronda examine the role of soil and landscape from a climate science perspective. In a stimulating, often physical and sensual way, they confront the current conventions of the Anthropocene with ideas and traditions in which humans have appropriated nature and continue to do so. Elise Eeraerts studied fine arts at the LUCA School of Arts (Brussels), at the Institute for Spatial Experiments, Olafur Eliasson‘s class, UdK (Ber- lin) and completed an internship at Studio Carsten Nicolai. Her artistic work has been awarded several scholarships and prizes and has been exhibited internationally. Roberto Aparicio Ronda studied architecture at E.T.S. Arquitectura (Valladolid) and fine arts at the Universidad del País Vasco/ Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (Bilbao). He worked as an architect for various international companies, including OMA – Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam (NL) and Kengo Kengo Kuma and Associates, Tokyo (JP).

They recently participated in the IJsselbiënnale (NL) and exhibited their work at the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp (BE), STUK, Leuven (BE), La Casa Encendida, Madrid (ES), Le MAT centre d‘art contemporain du Pays d‘Ancenis (FR), ENE, Quebec, Canada, Cityleaks Festival (DE), Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (DE) and Lunds Konst- hall, Lund, Sweden.

PANEL / SYMPOSIUM: Wetlands for Future, SWAMPING 2025

Date: June 28, 2025

Venue: Lichthaus Arnsberg (Kloster Wedinghausen), Klosterstraße, Arnsberg

The panel WETLANDS FOR FUTURE brings together ecologists, students, artists and curators who deal with the future and the past of wetlands. The starting point is the question of how artists explore the swamp as a poetic, social and ecological potential and as a hybrid space. For centuries, the concept of the swamp was demonised as a way of dealing with the uncanny, the unknown, the uncertain and the unstable. These prejudices are to be recontextualised based on the current knowledge about the wetlands in light of the effects of climate change. The local iniative SPONGE FOREST, for example, which explores swamps as a spatial and ecological strategy for biodiversity and the regeneration of forest ecosystems, will be presented by local experts.

The mission of the annual programme SWAMPING (2024-2025) is to raise public awareness of the principle of wetlands and swamping as an ecological strategy. This is not only about the actual landscape in its physical presence, but also about the landscape as a mental imagery or model. SWAMPING is to be understood as an active concept. Its inherent fluidity brings together new and old indigenous ways of thinking and calls for a paradigm shift. Finally, we discuss what it means to make exhibitions and artistic works in ‘wet’ spaces (on, in and under water). New paradigms in exhibition practices, such as the transition from “dry” to “wet” exhibition spaces, as well as the development towards future orientated virtual and augmented spaces will be tested and discussed.

Program: 

11:00 – 11:30 Introduction Pauline Doutreluingne (BE) – SWAMPING as a spatial strategy

11:30 – 12:00 Patricia Dominguez (Chile) – presentation of her artistic practice (EN)

12h – 12:30h Elise Eeraerts (BE) & Roberto Aparicio Ronda (ES) – presentation of their artistic practice (EN)

12.45h – 13:30h Dipl. Geograf Ulrich Cordes: lecture on wetlands (DE); Volker Karthaus (Wasserverband Obere Lippe): lecture on the initiative SPONGE FOREST in the Arnsberg Forest (DE)

13:30h – 14:15h Manon Awst (UK): Stuck in the mud, a performance lecture

14:30h – 15:30h MA Spatial Strategies of Kunsthochschule Weissensee Berlin – Performances, virtual and augmented-reality-works

16h – 17h Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas (LT) – online lecture: Amphibian Pedagogy Meets the Wet Ontologies of the Swamp (EN)

17h – 18:30h Roundtable discussion with all participants: on expanded exhibition practices in wet and immersive spaces

Moderation: Pauline Doutreluingne

What does swamping taste like? The transdisciplinary symposium will be accompanied by the culinary food performance Schwammbrote by Katrin Schwermer-Funke, where the principle of reactivation through the absorption of fluids is reflected in traditional dishes.