Back to the Marshes: Myth, Method, Matter

Back to the Marshes: Myth, Method, Matter is the final volume in Barbara Baert’s tripartite study on the cultural impact of weather and environment, on the artistic symptoms of fertility and anxiety, and on the study of matter and medium. The series includes About Sieves and Sieving (2019) and Looking into the Rain (2022). In this essay Baert explores the cosmological imagination, prehistoric graphemes, and the sensory experiences of marshes and wetlands, including their artistic significance for raw and biological materials such as clay, mud and fungi. Back to the Marshes develops into a fluid voyage of discovery that charts the role of material topologies and their artistic properties in human hands, and reflects on the obstacles accompanying the writing process and the epistemological crises it precipitated during the author’s residency at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg. It leads Baert to reconsider the contemporary challenges of Bildwissenschaft in the Geological Turn. A multidisciplinary and cross-sectional analysis of the swamp Interdisciplinary approaches from art, culture and the history of ideas