Exact start time TBC. Participants will have to pay for their own travel. Bring your own lunch. Closer to the day, if there are people interested in travelling together, we are happy to arrange a group ticket to save on train costs. 
This field-based workshop invites participants to reimagine the Netherlands as swamp rather than "reclaimed land." Through a visit to an experimental Food Swamp in The Hague, we examine the violence of drainage: displacement of marsh communities, peatland destruction, and ongoing subsidence. We explore how colonial and capitalist logics transformed wetlands into "productive" territory, making the Netherlands a global agricultural leader. After walking through the swamp, participants engage in a fermentation activity that reflects on cooking as a cross-species collaboration and explores more-than-human agency, slow processes and western ideas of purity and hygiene. The session considers decolonial food systems suited to amphibious living—water plants, marsh crops, aquaculture—and how more-than-human cohabitation might reshape urban ecologies.
Anna Kooi is an Amsterdam-based rural sociologist, food artist and chef. Her work interconnects food theory with food practices by integrating gastronomy with academia and the arts, focusing on the manifestation and potential transformation of intersectional identities through food. As an ethnographer, Anna studies the potential of artistic practices to incubate food networks that can strengthen rather than undermine socio-environmental justice. She investigates the choreography of future foodscapes as a doctoral researcher at the Rurban Futures Collective at the University of Twente.

Readings:

• Kelley, Lindsay. "Digesting Wetlands: Cooking and Eating Across Species." In Leonardo Electronic Almanac 22, no. 1, edited by Lanfranco Aceti, Paul Thomas, and Edward Colless. Cambridge, MA: LEA / MIT Press, 2017.
• Proulx, Annie. "Discursive Thoughts on Wetlands" (Chapter 1) in Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis, 2022.