Art & Science projects being developed by Joanna Hoffmann with the ASN Team in the frame of the SPIN-FERT/ Horizon Europe (Misson Soil) program
RhiZone: [Bog-Land] is an immersive XR artwork by Joanna Hoffmann inspired by rhizosphere’s networks and the transformative processes of peat formation. It highlights the interconnectedness of life, bridging nature and culture while advocating for the protection of wetlands and sustainable horticultural practices. The project belongs to the RhiZones series and supports the communication of SPIN-FERT research on healthy soil and peat-free substrates.
RhiZones
VR, 360 stereoscopic narratives, / music: Andre Bartetzki
RhiZone: [Bog-Land] is a transdisciplinary art project that seeks to reawaken our collective sensitivity to the vanishing worlds of wetlands and peatlands—crucial, fragile ecosystems that have sustained both biodiversity and human imagination for millennia. The project emerges from a personal and research-oriented journey through the landscape of my origins: Great Poland province—once a vast marshland, now one of the most water-deficient regions in the country.
The project fuses artistic expression with scientific insight to position wetlands as vital environmental systems and living cultural archives—repositories of ecological memory entangled with the stories of human settlement, agriculture, and changing belief systems.
The core of RhiZone: [Bog-Land] is a multimedia journey, including virtual reality, that guides viewers through the deep ecological time of a peat bog—beginning in prehistoric times, passing through medieval deforestation and industrial exploitation, and arriving at the present moment of crisis and awakening. The artistic experience presents the bog as both a living system and a mnemonic space, unfolding a timeline where natural rhythms and human activities have long been interwoven.
Alongside the VR piece, a sonic composition transforms scientific data—specifically, the environmental and archaeological records derived from pollen, spores, and charcoal particles in peat cores—into an evolving soundscape. This sound world captures ecological shifts over centuries, creating a profoundly affective link between data and emotion, science and story.
A series of Augmented Reality (AR) applications and artefacts—including actual peat cores—expand the experience into physical space, allowing audiences to engage directly with peatland ecology’s scientific and symbolic dimensions. The artefacts, both natural and man-made, act as thresholds between past and present, knowledge and intuition.
As an artist, I envision myself as a part of an immense network of connections and interdependencies. In this meta-rhizosphere, life, in its many forms, is a continuously evolving, self-organizing system. This imagined network bridges the deep past, present, and speculative future(s), where organic and inorganic structures merge into one intelligent system. It is a dynamic network of data processing, scaling, and adapting where embodied memory becomes central to understanding life and its evolution.
RhiZone: [Bog-Land] aims not to reconstruct the past but to reimagine our future relationship with wetlands. It asks: What kind of cultural narratives do we need to make the science of wetlands resonate with society? How can we restore wetlands not only ecologically but emotionally and spiritually?
In this project, a wetland is a vital resource, a partner, a memory, and a sacred presence. Through the synthesis of immersive media, scientific knowledge, and poetic storytelling, RhiZone: [Bog-Land] becomes a space of reflection, reconnection, and hope.
Aesthetic and Symbolic Dimensions
The title RhiZone refers to the rhizosphere—the symbiotic underground network linking roots, fungi, and microorganisms. It echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept of the rhizome as a non-hierarchical, interconnected structure. The subtitle Bog-Land plays on the English word “bog” and the Slavic word “Bóg,” meaning “God,” invoking wetlands as sacred spaces—forgotten sanctuaries that once lay at the heart of spiritual and ecological life.
This work calls to reconsider not only the material value of water and peatlands but also their symbolic and cultural resonance. It invites the public to perceive wetlands as co-authors of our history, not passive backdrops to human activity. In destroying peatlands, we risk erasing not just carbon sinks but deep archives of human (and non-human) memory.
Ecological and Cultural Significance
The project draws direct inspiration from my collaboration with Prof. Lamentowicz and his team of paleoecologists, whose research reveals in minute detail how environmental changes are tightly coupled with political and cultural histories. The rise of settlements, wars, and even shifting ideologies leave traces in the land—encapsulated in the peat’s layers like pages in a living book.
Peatlands are valuable ecosystems that affect the climate and are dependent on it. Although they occupy only 3% of the Earth’s land surface, they contain about 25% of the world’s carbon resources in the soil. Their ability to actively accumulate carbon makes them natural sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As a result of drainage works, most of Europe’s peatlands have been drained, and peat decomposition has begun to outweigh its accumulation. This way, peatlands have started releasing more significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The Paris Agreement assumes the rewetting of 500,000 km2 of transformed peatlands worldwide by 2050-2070. /M.lamentowicz/
During the summer of 2024 (19 August), we went with Prof. Mariusz Lamentowicz to the research base of the ReVersal project in the nature reserve “Bagno Kusowo” – a peat bog reserve established in 2005.
It is probably the best preserved large dome-shaped peat bog of the Baltic type in Poland. Overgrown with peat mosses and bog forest, the peat layer reaches 12 meters thick. learn more
Collaborations and Networks
The project is rooted in ongoing collaborations within scientific and artistic frameworks. It intersects with the EU Horizon Europe research initiative SPIN-FERT (“Innovative practices, tools and products to boost soil fertility and peat substitution in horticultural crops”) and the Rhizosphere: The Big Network of Small World platform, which combines art, science, and education.
Additionally, it resonates with the local context: In 2025, the city of Poznań was granted the Wetland City Accreditation by the RAMSAR Convention, marking a moment of recognition but also a reminder of the urgency of cultural engagement and long-term action.