Amphibian Pedagogy Meets the Wet Ontologies of the Swamp
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
Monday, April 21
Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas: artists, educators, and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice, will give a lecture at Global Arts and Cultures at RISD on Monday, April 21, 2025.
Throughout history, architecture has been realized by draining swamps and wetlands—dividing land into liquid and solid, carving territories for agriculture and settlement, and displacing indigenous life. These are technologies of architecture, and of colonization. As Andrew Pickering suggests, “to notice the swamp below our feet is to switch to a non-dualist ontology”—a way of being better suited to the complexities of the Anthropocene.
Design—and art—must therefore embrace the swamp: its hybridity, queerness, complexity, and paradox, as a method for decolonizing and de-schooling practice. This presentation introduces Amphibian Pedagogy as an artistic methodology that cannibalizes architecture to generate hybrid forms and speculative infrastructures. With a focus on The Swamp School—a self-organized, evolving pedagogical platform—the lecture explores how design and art might adapt to conditions of complexity, queerness, and uncertainty, and help us “land on Earth” anew.
