CORSIO

CORSIO proposes ways of sinking deep into the materiality of landscape. Welsh artist Manon Awst has maintained a long-standing investigation into bogs and peatlands through layered installations of moving-image, sonic, sculptural, and textual interventions. The verb corsio is formed from the Welsh word for bog; cors—meaning to sink and stick in the bog—can be applied to boggy landscapes beyond Wales, especially in Ireland where peat has played a strong role in shaping cultural identity and the environment. CORSIO is also associated with ‘becoming looser,’ and offers a mode of embracing precarity and uncertainty through textures of land and language that may seem far away, buried, or distant to us. 

How land and languages are sculpted over time became a starting point for Awst’s investigations and engagement in Northwest Ireland. Awst embraces peat as a deep, situated ground with the potential to deconstruct boundaries between what is solid/fluid, wet/dry, dead/alive, stable/precarious, human/more-than-human. Awst’s time in Leitrim, through a residency at Drumnadubber Arts, informed performative investigations and material compositing in Irish bogs and peatlands. Through research and community engagement, this new iteration of CORSIO comparatively explores studies on landscape and materiality through shared stickiness and slowness to sink deep into a new and familiar landscape.