Caroline Vitzthum


Home
About
CV
Email
Instagram
LinkedIn

Back

An Evening in the Peatland Library (2026), programming as part of the MooreMotion student congress, Greifswald, Germany.

As part of MooreMotion 2026, a peatland congress organised by students at the University of Greifswald, I programmed An Evening in the Peatland Library, an evening of film, sound, poetry and conversation held in the Moorbibliothek at the Greifswald Mire Centre. MooreMotion brought together students, researchers, practitioners and others working with peatlands for a programme of talks, excursions, workshops and cultural events, creating a space for exchange across different disciplines and approaches to peatland conservation.

The evening grew from my involvement with RE-PEAT, an international youth-led collective working towards peatland justice through education, advocacy, and community-building. Rather than presenting a single artistic perspective, I wanted the programme to bring together some of the different voices, places and practices that exist across this wider network. Contributions by Yasmeen Al-Qaisi, Bianca Arnold & Moss Berke, Lu Fraser, Timothy Olanda Mboya, Lara Lane Plambeck, pantea, Frankie Turk & Swantje Furtak, and myself moved between film, poetry, sound, and other forms of creative expression.

At the centre of the evening was the premiere of my new short artist-documentary, Voices for Peat. Filmed during a collective RE-PEAT residency in Greifswald in 2025, the film moves between the archive of the Peatland Library and a participatory workshop at the nearby drained peatland landscape of Steinbecker Vorstadt Polder. Through these two settings, it traces a movement from accumulated knowledge towards embodied and collective experience, exploring both the ecological significance of peatlands and the diverse creative practices emerging around their protection and cultural reimagining.

Premiering the film in the Peatland Library itself, where much of it had been filmed the previous year, felt particularly significant. Rather than separating the film from the people and place from which it emerged, the screening returned it to that context and placed it in conversation with new contributions from across the RE-PEAT community.

Professor Hans Joosten opened the evening with an introduction to the Moorbibliothek and its unique collection, before the space shifted into an informal gathering for listening, watching, and conversation. Surrounded by books, archives, and stories accumulated through decades of peatland research and advocacy, the evening offered another way of encountering peatlands: through multiple voices and artistic perspectives, and through the experience of spending time together in a place dedicated to their histories and futures.

With special thanks to Hans & Ine Joosten and the MooreMotion team for supporting this event.



••

Contributions:

WETSOUND by Yasmeen Al-Quaisi, BOG POEMS by Bianca Arnold & Moss Berke, Lu Fraser (wetbog), Subtle Hearts and Peated Beauties by Timothy Olanda Mboya, Peat and Pink Soup by Lara-Lane Plambeck, pantea, In Death is Life by Swantje Furtak & Frankie Turk, and Voices for Peat by Caroline Vitzthum. 

© Caroline Vitzthum, 2026. All rights reserved.

---