Elegy to the Frogs

Elegy to the Frogs is a multimedia installation that engages with the violent reconfiguration of anuran amphibian bodies,*coerced into transformation by endocrine-disrupting pollutants like Atrazine and glyphosate (Roundup)—agricultural chemicals still widespread across Europe. This ecological corruption opens a broader inquiry into swamp pedagogies—ways of thinking, learning, and becoming with wetlands, bogs, and other liminal ecosystems—spaces persistently drained and erased under the extractive imperatives of capitalist growth and development. Various vessels, shaped like queered anuran vocal sacs, invoke the echoes of voices lost to high concentration of agro-pharmaceuticals in their environments. Each vessel enters into a symbiotic relationship with a bryophyte (moss), foraged from the places I call home, carrying with it the hope that these plants might unlock their latent phytoremediation capacity (the ability of plants to remove or neutralize pollutants from the environment). Here, bryophytes and Anura conspire, entangling us in imagining futures where more-than-human ecologies accumulate and absorb the toxic pollutants of our swamps, conjuring the return of frogs, singing once more. A choir emerges from the installation. Queer voices assemble, offering their crepuscular tunes as a call of solidarity with the disappearing amphibians, beseeching empathy from all the silenced bodies of the West. Speculating about a future of nights—mute, silent, rid of frog choirs—queering voices cast a spell, calling on the resilience and survival strategies of the wetlands: indeterminacy, mutation, hybridisation, symbiosis, and sympoiesis. With our bodies remade by the posions of our time. Lend your queer kin your ears. *Frogs are amphibians of the order Anura (without a tail).