Peatlands are ancestors, are memory, are futures. WETBEINGS gathers “old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth” (R. W. Kimmerer) in the biodiverse organism and troubled ecosystem of the Aukštumala peatland. The transdisciplinary program roots itself in this 9000 years old living archive in the delta of the Nemunas river at the Baltic coast and one of the largest peat extraction sites in the Baltics. From, with and for this WETBEING the project gathers approaches and examples of living in and with peatlands which are based on mutuality and sustainable survival of humans and peatlands. 

«Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to the land. We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers. All stories are connected, new ones woven from the threads of the old.» (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, 2013)

The Aukštumala Arts, Science & Story Field Symposium engages with Aukštumala as a living peatland archive, focusing on embodied experiences, environmental and social complexities, and the diverse histories of human and non-human relationships with peatlands. From 31 May to World Peatlands Day on 2nd of June 2025, the field symposium takes place in different sites of Aukštumala: the raised bog of the protected area, a small birch forest and ancestral site in the midst of extraction fields of current peat mining, a dreamed museum in the ruin of a peatland farm house, part of a village now overgrown by forest that was established as part of Prussian mire colonies, and a guest house at the banks of the Aukštumala river. Each site accommodates different stories to be told and imagined based in the histories, current lives and futures of the Aukštumala Raised Bog. 

WETBEINGS invites peatland beings, storytellers, scientists, artists, researchers and neighbors to listen deeply to the voices of water, moss, and memory. Over three days, participants engage in workshops, excursions, talks, performances, and ceremonies exploring the bog’s deep time and ecological memory, practices of environmental and cultural restoration, and the wet ecosystem’s social significance. Old and new stories emerge from dialogues between trans-local peatland knowledge, between human and non-human wetbeings, connecting artistic, scientific, and eco-political perspectives. WETBEINGS addresses Aukštumala as history and future-being, inviting a shedding of human-centered knowledges towards pooling wetland matter and meaning. In the layers of peat sediments—ancestral, sensuous archives of time and transformation—survival reveals itself as reciprocity woven through species, stories, and the multidimensional work of restoration as healing of the relationship between wet/land and people.

One of the main artistic formats of the project is the WETSOUNDS Bog Radio which collects sounds, stories and imaginaries around Aukštumala and connected peatlands through documentary formats, sound art, music and storytelling.

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Sedimentary Murmurations – A sonic offering by Aio Frei

In interrelation with local rocky formations and earthly companions, Aio will develop a soft sonic lithology of geo-rumbles, brittle stony timbres, minor rock falls, slow granular erosions and swampy oscillations. Sedimentary Murmurations - A Sonic Offering attunes listeners to the realities and dissonances of the small birch forests and the vast extraction fields of peat mining around it. Carefully considered microphony will be employed to attentively amplify the compositions of the lands intimate co-inhabitation, allowing the subtle murmurations, sedimentary memories and present aliveness amidst and beyond loss and destruction to resonate with and through us in space/time. 
Remains of tools found from a settlement in the Middle Mesolithic period will return with us to the birch forest, witnesses formed in stone who carry the energies, memories and soundings of those who once inhabited the land long before. The sonority of their return, and that which continues in its resilience of vivacity, evokes and honors ancestral presences.

Spirit Companion: Fomitopsis betulina
Clinging like a quiet sentinel to the birch’s pale bark, Fomitopsis betulina lives where decay meets renewal — a decomposer and a healer. In the quiet geometry of its pores, we find a code of resilience, written in spore and cellulose. Used for centuries to dress wounds, soothe the gut, and ward off infection, the birch polypore carries manyfold stories of healing. 

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See full program here