NEW THEATRE INSTITUTE OF LATVIA

contemporary performing arts in Latvia and abroad

Artist Rosa Omarsdottir’s reflection on the residency carried out in collaboration with artist Linda Boļšakova within the framework of the European Union programme Creative Europe project The Big Green at Ķemeri National Park. Translated by Ieva Lešinska.

Looking for the Bog

Every city, if you look closely, harbors a bog. Even here in Reykjavík, where concrete promises solidity, the ground remembers otherwise. The streets are grey, hard, fractured here and there. In one small crack a weed has taken hold, prying open the surface. Moss pushes between the pavement tiles, slow, like tectonic forces nudging concrete plates apart.

I’m reminded of the bogland.

The bog is a sort of half-world, a refusal of borders. It is mushy and soft. Neither water nor land, neither dead nor alive. The bog resists clarity. It asks us to sink, to release the fantasy of firm ground.

Geology tells me that bogs are accumulations of sphagnum moss, waterlogged expanses where oxygen thins and decomposition slows to a crawl. But language tells me something else: bog, from Old Norse bogi, meaning “bend”. A bog is a bending of matter, of time.

The lichens and the moss in the bog work slowly, they hold. They hold water and memories. They create a system of survival through attachment. Lichens are not one but many: a fungus, an alga, cyanobacteria, all in symbiosis. Lichens can challenge how we valorize independence, these world’s oldest survivors live in constant cohabitation. As the biologist Scott Gilbert reminds us, we are all lichens[1]. Perhaps we are all bogs as well.

A bog is an upside-down world. An eerie world. Haunted. Filled with bog bodies. Human cadavers preserved in the peat bog. Pulled from the peat after centuries, they look uncannily alive: eyelashes still clinging to their lids, stubble rising from cheeks, braids intact. The bog has entered their insides, like flesh turned to coat, hollowed and preserved. They seem to whisper that life dwells not in hardness but in the porosity of flesh.

In ordinary soil, it is the skeleton that lasts: the bone, the tooth, the hard kernel of life. But in bogs the rule is reversed: the bones dissolve and the skin and hair remain. To step into a bog is to step into inversion, into a place that undoes what we think should endure.
The Latvian bogs intrigue me. Endless flatlands of quaker moss stretching toward the horizon, the ground muffles footsteps, sodden with silence. These bogs have swallowed entire histories: weapons, ornaments, bodies. They are both burial and archive. Unlike stone monuments, which rise upward and proclaim their permanence, the bog whispers preservation. What the bog keeps is not history’s triumphs but its fragilities: a braid, a fold of skin, a forgotten offering. The bog remembers what the earth would normally forget.

But I live in Reykjavík. My city has paved over its wetlands, redirected its waters, trained its land to behave. Predictability and solidity are the currency of contemporary life; permeability is avoided. Where, then, is the bog here?

Maybe in the neighborhoods built on old wetlands, where the ground quietly sinks a few millimeters each year, reminding us that asphalt is only a thin skin stretched over water.

Perhaps in the smell of sulfur rising from the earth, reminding us that stability was always a surface story.

The bog haunts Reykjavík in these gentle but persistent ways. The city rests on a landscape that refuses domestication: volcanic, porous, forever shifting. Like the bog, it insists on other timelines, other forms of endurance.

And then, where is the bog in my own body?

I imagine my skin as moss, my tissues as peat, my organs as waterlogged ground. My bones, I imagine dissolving one day in some slow chemistry of time. What will remain? The softness, the outlines. The bog body is a paradox: intact, yet emptied. Preserved, yet transformed. Its strength lies not in resisting rotting but in letting decay take another form. The bog does not halt death, it alters its tempo. It asks us to reconsider what it means to endure.

I think of hydrofeminism – Astrida Neimanis’s reminder that we are bodies of water, our flesh and blood circulating in the same planetary cycles as oceans, rains, and tears. Water makes relation unavoidable: it dissolves, it flows through us, tying us to strangers, to ancestors, to every living and non-living being[2]. I wonder what it means to think with this element, to imagine the self as something fluid, connective, uncontainable.

Hydrofeminism dissolves borders through flow; but the bog adds another lesson: what endures is not only circulation, but also saturation, and stillness. Where, as Virginia Woolf put it: “I am rooted, but I flow”[3].

If hydrofeminism teaches me that my body is water, endlessly flowing, then bog-feminism reminds me that my body can also be a marsh, saturated, layered with what came before. The bog does not wash things away, it holds them, quietly. What if endurance looked more like this?

What would it mean for a city to live by bog-feminism? Reykjavík would have to stop pretending that its ground is firm. It would have to admit that beneath the asphalt, the land is restless – sinking, swelling, leaking, never fully domesticated. Streets would no longer be seen as permanent arteries but as temporary veneers stretched across wet histories. The city would learn to breathe with its metaphorical bogs, to allow dampness to rise, to accept subsidence as part of its rhythm rather than a flaw to be corrected.

Bog-feminism in a city might mean that permeability becomes a civic value: walls that invite moss, pavements that welcome cracks, neighborhoods that grow more porous instead of more rigid. It would not be about conquering land but negotiating with it, entering into symbiosis with seepage. It might invite us to think of a city not as a monument to permanence but as a living archive of reversals, where softness survives and hardness decays.

And what of the landscape? A bog-feminist view might refuse the myth of stone as eternal. It would remind us that moss, lichens, and wet softness are the true custodians of time, outlasting concrete, steel, and glass. In such a landscape, value would not be measured by height or solidity, but by the quiet tenacity of organisms that spread without spectacle.

And for me? Perhaps bog-feminism asks me to honor my own porosity, to admit that I, too, am stitched together by seepage and softness. That I am less fortress than wetland, more membrane than wall. My flesh, layers of peat, storing sediments of experience.

What if survival is not about standing firm at all? But rather about absorbing, holding and letting things soak through? To live bog-like might be to let time decelerate inside me, to allow griefs and joys to accumulate in layers rather than rush to resolution.

Memory, too, might need rethinking. We are taught to raise pillars against the erosion of time. But bog-feminism whispers otherwise: memory need not be carved in stone to endure. It can lie low, layered into the earth, kept alive by dampness, dark, quiet. Maybe to live like a bog is to accept that yielding is its own kind of strength, that transformation is the truest form of survival.

Bog-feminism suggests that a body is never entirely its own. Like the bog, it is always already filled with others: bacteria, fungi, histories, loves, losses. To acknowledge this is not defeat but participation – a hollow that is never empty, a softness that refuses to vanish.

Bog-feminism speaks not as doctrine, but as wondering.

It is not a pillar, but a porosity.

It is not certainty, but the slow saturation of living with others.

We are not fortresses, but wetlands.
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[1] Gilbert, S. F. “Holobiont by Birth: Multilineage Individuals as the Unit of Evolution.” Biological Theory, 14(3), 151–164, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-019-00322-1
[2] Neimanis, A. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
[3] Woolf, V. The Waves. 1931. (Oxford University Press edition, 2006).

The work was created with the support of the EU program Creative Europe as part of the project The Big Green, with financial support from the Society Integration Foundation from the Latvian state budget allocated by the Ministry of Culture and co-financing from the Ministry of Culture of Latvia. The work is being carried out in cooperation with the Pierīga Regional Administration of the Nature Conservation Agency. The New Theatre Institute of Latvia is responsible for the content of the performance.

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