Kolesova’s most recent essay On Created Worlds and Plotted Routes (2024) examines the environmental and social transformations driven by peat extraction during the Soviet industrialization, weaving archival research, oral histories, and personal reflections. To read the full essay click here.

During the Sensing Peat Research Residency, Jeanna Kolesova is working on their current project, In Zombie Fires, which examines the shared yet distinct histories of peat extraction across Europe—tracing its impact from Russia and Latvia to Finland and Germany. Through documentary and speculative narration, the film will trace how a single resource has shaped landscapes, identities, and collective memory, while also questioning its role in environmental futures.

For In Zombie Fires Jeanna weaves together archival footage, interviews with industry workers and scientists, and speculative 3D animation to critically examine the nostalgic narratives of industrial pasts. Told through the lens of a wetland spirit, the film moves across time, revealing how peatlands have been sites of both extraction and preservation, memory, and transformation.

As research resident with Sensing Peat at Succow Stiftung and Greifswald Moor Centrum, Kolesova is supported to conduct in-depth research on wetland conservation in Germany—investigating how mires store ecological and cultural histories, the species that inhabit these landscapes, and the possible futures of these ecosystems under different environmental scenarios. Their fieldwork includes filming conservation processes and interviewing scientists, further expanding the film’s engagement with the fragile yet resilient worlds of peatlands.