Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka: 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 (b. 1980) – the artist creates sculptures, performances, objects, compositions and sound installations that explore the languages used to describe architecture. She obtained her doctorate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and a post-doctoral qualification at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. Her goal is to generate acoustic environments that allow viewers-cum-listeners to become part of the artwork and encounter architecture on the level of sound. Exploring the boundaries of architecture, Krakowiak builds large-scale installations based on architectural structures. Currently, her focus is formulating the concept of architecture in linguistic terms – as an imperfect verb and a space of becoming, which appears in different ways depending on its function, as well as on the sound manifestations of human and non-human relations. Krakowiak has received numerous awards, including from St John’s College, Oxford University, the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education, the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage, and the American Trust for Mutual Education. In 2012, she received a special award for her solo exhibition Making the Walls Quake as if They Were Dilating with the Secret Knowledge of Great Powers (curator: Michał Libera) at the Polish Pavilion at the 13^th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. In 2020, she created the work It Begins with One Word: Choose Your Own at the Barcelona Pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe. Her latest work, currently on display at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, is the installation Where Does Any Miracle Start, inspired by the sounds of insects often inaudible to human ears, as well as their strange presence and perseverance. From 2019 to 2022, she ran the Sound Space Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and since 2022, together with Prof. Mirosław Bałka, she has been running the Interdepartmental Action Studio. She lives and works in Otwock and Oliva (Spain). She also identifies herself as a gardener, on a daily basis tuning in to, and learning from, the soil and plants.

Curator: Mirosława Bałazy