(Un)Box the Soap Podcast

In our second episode of (Un)box the Soap Podcast, we continue our journey through the swamps and examine how this porous ecosystem manifests in culture.  Whether it's through watching the film La Ciénaga, listening to swamp-pop, walking through the streets of London, or examining the history of the Great Dismal Swamp Maroons, we explore the swamp’s potentiality of creating new meanings, seeing ordinary things anew, and reclaiming one’s independence. Why do we associate swamps with something negative and why is it Shrek that helps us free ourselves from these presuppositions?  Join us in our boggy ruminations and let’s submerge in the swampy realms! Works we referenced and cited in this episode: Avidad, Andrea. “Deadly Barks: Acousmaticity and Post-Animality in Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga.” Film-Philosophy, vol. 24, no. 2, June 2020, pp. 222–40, https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2020.0140. Bernard, Shane. “State of the Genre: Swamp Pop Music in the 21st Century.” Bayou Teche Dispatches, 2022, http://bayoutechedispatches.blogspot.com/2022/05/state-of-genre-swamp-pop-in-21st-century.html. Błoto. “Błoto - Szlam (Official Video).” YouTube, uploaded by Astigmatic Records, 26 Feb. 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1LFxsaq_0g.  Giblett, Rod. “Introduction: Looking Back, Looking Forward.” Cities and Wetlands. The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 3–14.  Giblett, Rod. “London: The “Nether World” of “the City of Dreadful Night.” Cities and Wetlands. The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 69–91 Greene, Liz. “Swamped in Sound: The Sound Image in Lucrecia Martel’s La Cienaga/the  Swamp.” Printed Project – Physical Stuff Made Strange, no. 15, 2012, pp. 52–60. Martell, Lucrecia, director. La Ciénaga. Lider Films, 2001. Long, Jake. “Ideological Rubble.” City Swamp, New Soil, 2024. Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/track/5W1NctXJprxy4oc99q0AEI?si=cc81d1ea5ac24a34.  “Refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp.” YouTube, uploaded by Southern Gothic The Podcast, 19 Mar. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBs8ITobjW4. Stewart, Katy. “Establishing the Female Gaze: Narrative Subversion in Lucrecia Martel’s ‘La Niña Santa’ (2004) and ‘La Ciénaga’ (2001).” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, vol. 21, no. 3, Sept. 2015, pp. 205–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2015.1179850. Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues. University Press of Mississippi, 1996. “Twisting at the Fais Do-Do: Swamp Pop in South Louisiana.” Folklife in Louisiana, https://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/creole_art_swamp_pop.html. “USA: The Great Dismal Swamp - BBC Travel Show.” YouTube, uploaded by BBC Travel Show, 1 Feb. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_zaVMNsD7c.  Youssef, Sharif. “The Great Dismal Swamp.” 99% Invisible, 15 May 2017, 99percentinvisible.org/episode/great-dismal-swamp/. 

Hello and welcome to the first episode of the (Un)Box the Soap Podcast! Anticipating the release of the fifth edition of our journal, we would like to invite you to the realm of swamps. How does the swamp speak? What can we hear when we tune in to its sounds? What are the things we can learn about and from the swamp, and how can it inform ourselves, as well as the world we inhabit? Can our engagement with the often-neglected wetlands provide an alternative to the city spatio-temporalities and offer an antidote to our own sense of feeling ‘swamped’? These and many more questions we explore in an interview with Dominika and Iulia, who are the founders of the fieldfictions collective. Accompanied by their soundpiece project “ecotonal tones; eventually everything is swamp”, we hope to take you on the journey through the zones of transition: the world-making processes of forested wetlands.