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Our future is peat was a creative-engagement workshop developed in collaboration with RE-PEAT and Historic Environment Scotland. The workshop was hosted as part of the IUCN UK Peatland Programme’s Peatlands, People and Nature conference in Aviemore, Scotland. Peatland-themed questions posed by primary school children from Wood Farm Primary School in Oxford informed the nature of the workshop. Participants were invited to explore Insh Marshes through three different creative exercises: Deep listening to the sounds of the peatland and performing as human hydrophones, mark mapping and exploring the textures of the marshes through responsive drawing, and embodying the many layers of the peat through freeze-frame postures. These exercises acted as an invitation for participants to lose their human vocabulary, move out of their heads and more into their bodies, and listen more closely to the peatland. The workshop concluded with the responding of the letters to the primary school children.
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The following prompt was used to introduce the concept of the workshop:
-- We develop our values through our lives starting in childhood. Hearing questions from school children helps us think about where and how our own values and valuing of peatland developed.
-- Questions are moments of relation to the peatland; reflecting what is important to an individual or a group at a particular time, context or life stage. To put it another way: the types of questions we ask of peatland ecosystems comes directly from what we value.
-- This workshop will take participants through three angles (history/ deep sensing/ childhood) in order to sketch a map of the diverse values associated with Insh Marshes through the questions it provokes.
-- People at different points in the long life of a bog will have related differently to this ecosystem, in part due to differences in how they value the peatland, resulting in them asking different questions of it. Here at Ruthven Barracks, with Historic Environment Scotland, we will use the historic site along with peatland folklore to think back through time and consider how peoples’ bog questions might have changed over the long life of the Insh Marshes.
-- Questions are moments of relation. Before we ask, we must first listen in one way or another. We will continue our questioning-map-making at the Insh Marshes, investigating what different sorts of questions arise in us when we listen deeply to the bog. We will use three exercises to encourage us to lose our human vocabulary, move out of our heads and more into our bodies, and listen more closely to the bog.
-- We will finish by responding to questions collected from primary school kids. Provoking us to reflect on how our bog questions change at different stages of our lives.