Participatory workshop with the lake ecosystem (For Those We Are Within, and Those Within Whom We Are)

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Participatory workshop with the lake ecosystem (For Those We Are Within, and Those Within Whom We Are)
in co-authorship with Anna Potyomkina

2026

Overview: What if the ecosystem of a place is not only the living and non-living entities that inhabit it now, but also everything we remember and forget about it?

Grass carp, roach, pike-perch, nutria, an urban legend about a Jewish cemetery and an undefined site of the Holocaust, sparrows, jays, magpies, someone’s unsuccessful date, an oak tree, Chinese willow, thuja, someone’s place for sex.

All these elements coexist within the same environment: circulating through the water, evaporating in the sun, and returning downward as rain.

The participatory workshop explored the lake as an expanded ecosystem of memory, where personal recollections, historical absences, human and more-than-human presences intertwine. Together with participants, we created a collective object dedicated to the ecosystem of this place — to what has existed and continues to exist within it, and to what it leaves within us.

At the end of the workshop, we traveled by boat to the middle of the lake, where the object was unfolded on the water as a temporary gesture of dedication and remembrance.

Detail Images