Ecologies of Togetherness

During her year-long residency, Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka will be working with the architecture of the museum building. The line drawn by the artist symbolically cuts across the entire building, beginning at Lipowa Street, then passing through the patio and the Alfa Gallery, to end in the spaces on the side of Ślusarska Street.

This is the first site-specific project of its kind, based on an artistic residency and a collaboration extending over three seasons. The key here is the process itself: developing creative practice in dialogue with the environment, time and evolving working conditions.

The installation Nest will be the first edition of the residency, in which the museum building is treated as a host organism – an existing architecture that can be overwritten, renegotiated, and supplemented with additional semantic layers. Krakowiak proposes a radical shift in emphasis: from architecture conceived of as static stage design for human life to architecture as active, sensitive participation in interspecies, social and material relations.

What has served her as the inspiration are the nests of African weaver birds that construct complex, multi-tonne, hanging structures – that are the result of the collective labour of generations. Krakowiak is fascinated by how precise thermoregulatory and social systems emerge in extreme climates. The bird colony acts as a living archive, growing iteratively, module by module, absorbing errors and material shifts as new structural elements.

Through an analysis of these avian strategies the artist crystallises her approach, defining architecture not as a noun – a ‘building’ – but as a verb: a continuous process of weaving, repairing and adapting. Faced with the exhausted modernist narratives of control and individual authorship, this model emerges as a system capable of self-regulation. Krakowiak has transposed this logic to the domain of art, which – just like the birds’ nests – is a multigenerational record of gestures. The spatial form becomes direct proof of ecologies of togetherness, where the shelter’s shape is determined not by a designer’s vision, but by the dynamics of relationships.

Abstract theory gains physical weight through a radical grounding in local specificity. In March, in the first stage of the project, viewers will enter MOCAK’s ‘pergola’ space – until now abandoned and empty – above which the Nest will be built. It will be an experience of immersion in a structure that is both alien and familiar: woven from industrial waste, yet imitating the forms of nature.

The project enters a dialogue with the identity of Zabłocie, a district historically defined by cable factories and the electrotechnical industry. Krakowiak utilises ‘clean waste’: kilometres of fluorescent lines, wires, casings, and technical cords – post-production rejects stripped of their original function. Through her artistic gesture, the industrial matter has been recycled and transformed.

The Nest ‘feeds’ on the activity of its environment, thickening and changing with the seasons. The installation will be accompanied by performances devised by the artist.

Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka, PhD, post-doctoral (b. 1980) – graduated in 2006 from the Sculpture Transplantation Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, which was later transformed into the Spatial Activities Studio. Between 2004 and 2007, she co-ran the Sculpture Transplantation Studio as an assistant to Prof. Mirosław Bałka. She received her PhD from the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2013, and her post-doctoral degree in 2019 from the Faculty of Sculpture and Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. Krakowiak-Bałka works internationally, carrying out projects in prestigious art institutions around the world. She is a recognised artist who has received many awards, including from St. John’s College, Oxford University, the Minister of Science and Higher Education, the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, the City of Gdańsk in the field of culture Splendor Gedanensis, and the Trust for Mutual Education foundation. She was also the winner of a special award for her solo exhibition at the International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (2012), as one of the few Polish artists to gain the distinction at this cyclical event. Teaching is important to her. In 2011–2019, she lectured at the Urban Interiors Studio of the Faculty of Interior Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. From 2019, she ran the Sound Action Space Studio at the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In the academic year 2022/2023, she launched the Interdepartmental Action Studio at the same faculty, run jointly with Prof. Mirosław Bałka. Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka works at the intersection of architecture and sound, making groundbreaking reversals and translations. In her art she combines acoustic research on matter with an interest in the emotional, social and cultural dimensions of the functioning of sound, including the spoken word.