Migrant Mermaid: Embodied re-membering’s interwoven timespaces

This performance-paper grows out of the poem ‘Migrant mermaid’, written in February 2021, which is in turn inspired by my dance practice and more-than-human ethnography by Utterslev marsh, a nature-culture area in Copenhagen.
When the COVID19 lockdown begun in Denmark in March 2020, I developed the habit of frequent visits to Utterslev mose, a series of bogs close to where I live in Copenhagen. I took up dancing on a wooden platform, almost every morning. I saw the light grow stronger, the seasons and the vegetation change. I made friends with ducks who sometimes remained sitting on the platform; I observed grebes build a nest.
Apart from these specific interspecies relationships, dance also increasingly attuned me to the bog as a polluted, fragile infrastructure out of balance, embedded in ongoing violent histories. Dancing, I reached out to rusty bikes stuck in the poisonous sludge at the bottom of the bog. I observed the many people, circulating around the bog on paths laid out by unemployed people in welfare state construction projects in the 1930ies. I read about thousands of fish dying by asphyxiation in the 1980ies.
Through attuning me to interspecies entanglements and the ecosystem of the marsh, dance continues to enable me to weave sticky threads across space- time. Dancing with and by the marsh, I re-turn to my childhood summers spent by the Rīga gulf in Latvia. For instance, the green algae in Utterslev march make me re-call the growth of algae each summer on Garciems beach.
Through using the poem, movement and sound recordings, the performance enacts non-linear time. These sensory and affective means enable us to connect to the uneven flows of re-membering, inhabiting ruptures and thickening of our multi-layered present(s).