I leave the city into a world of pine and silken water, transporting me back to the Weichselian glaciation that formed these landscapes ten thousand years ago. Ice advanced southward from Scandinavia, past the Baltic, reaching the edge of the North German Plain before retreating again. An ebb and flow of ice that created this landscape. Hard and cold that left dripping wet marshes. I walk along the Landwehr Canal after days of snow. Compacted and compressed into itself, the pathway of white-grey ice melts into a dirty slush and then disappears into a puddle. On a good day (or night), this is how I feel in the arms of others.

Other lakes are legacies of clay and sand pits, gravel quarries and lignite mines—testaments to the industrial era that changed the landscape in more recent times. Berlin’s formerly inaccessible, mist-covered marshes were drained with the help of Dutch engineers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, relegating the marshlands to the surrounding countryside. I think about the potential these wet, marshy territories hold and what of their intangible properties remain in Berlin’s canals, rivers and tributaries. I walk home with friends one evening and they point out the dim lighting of a bar: an atmosphere we’ve become familiar with in Winter. I wonder what this shadowy, soft light fosters? The playfulness it allows – a potential in murkiness? Ample resources and no-one watching. Nutrient dense, messy, not pretty but sexy.

Into the Swamp is a curatorial program by @ventana_project curated by @aquilesjarrin and @irving_ramo

Documentation by @marteconesa