Alexis Vasilikos

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   The Swamp

   The Swamp (2025) is a photographic series made in the wetlands of Leros Island. The work focuses on the swamp environment as a place of transition, where decay, growth, and erosion happen at the same time. These images document surfaces, biofilms, mineral crusts, root tangles, where organic and inorganic matter blur together.

   The series is influenced by the idea of dark ecology, as described by Timothy Morton, which encourages us to confront the discomfort and complexity of environmental breakdown instead of avoiding it. The swamp, often seen as impure or marginal, is re-framed here as a space of connection and transformation. As Morton writes, “the ecological thought... includes negativity and irony, ugliness and horror.” The swamp is not presented as pure or picturesque. It is shown instead as a space of deep entanglement, where life and death, beauty and breakdown, are inseparable.

   Walking through the swamp became a meditative practice. Each step into the soft, resisting ground was an invitation to slow down and pay attention. Photography, in this context, became a way of listening, of holding stillness in the middle of constant transformation.

   There is something otherworldly in these scenes, not in the sense of escape, but of unfamiliarity. The forms feel alien, ancient, and strangely alive. This strangeness is not decorative; it reminds us that we are never outside of nature, but always within it, surrounded by processes we can barely understand. The project also connects to ideas of the sublime and the abject, especially in how decay challenges traditional ideas of beauty or order. Julia Kristeva writes that the abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order.” These images sit in that space, between form and collapse, between fascination and discomfort.

   The work invites a shift in perception: to find meaning not only in order, but in disintegration; not in separateness, but in contact. In the swamp, the boundaries blur. And from that blur, a different kind of presence emerges, quiet, complex, and deeply alive.