Cicha kompozycja świata. O miejscach błotnych, bagnach, mokradłach i torfowiskach jako refugiach antropocenu
The World’s Silent Composition: On Marshes, Swamps, Wetlands and Peatlands as Refugia of the Anthropocene

Summary/Abstract: The article investigates the notion of refugium as both shelter and enclave, situating it in relation to wetlands (swamps, marshes, and peat bogs) and their significance in the literature and cultural imagination of Central and Eastern Europe. The author’s point of departure is however the idea of silence, music, and listening, understood as intimately entangled with the cultural practices of refuge making. The analysis foregrounds the auditory conditions of this process, drawing attention to the complexities of the human relation to the environmental soundscape in the Anthropocene, as well as to the challenges of cultivating arts of attentiveness within environments saturated by technology and digital simulacra.The second part of the article focuses on the cultural perception of wetlands in the European thinking, tracing their ambivalent position: on the one hand, as sanctuaries of unspoiled nature, spaces of intimate encounter with elemental forces and sites of retreat; on the other hand, as zones of exile – dangerous, impure, and accursed – which are resistant to modernization. Within this discussion, a new narrative is introduced, emerging in connection with the so-called wetland turn in the environmental humanities. The narrative exposes the Enlightenment drive toward drainage and reclamation as an attempt to conquer wetland environments and to colonize their inhabitants. The final section returns to the nexus of refugium, silence, and music, approached through an analysis of the sonic representation of wetlands in contemporary Polish nature writing. Here, the notion of a sonic refuge of the Anthropocene is explored in relation to ideas of multispecies assemblages, heterogeneous temporalities, and polyphonic modes of listening, as articulated in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s conceptual framework.

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