Artistic-Research Residency Programme. First Edition / 2023
The Warsaw Observatory of Culture is launching a long-term research-and-artistic residency programme. The first edition 2023 of the project is entitled Process-ing Change. An Artistic and Research Accompaniment. The programme aims to accompany artists, researchers, and activists working alone or as part of duos or collectives in their experience of and reflection on change. The residency programme supports practices, collaborations, and artistic and research processes, with no requirement for organising an event or creating artwork as a result of the residency.
Residents and their processes
Agnieszka Glińska
Julia Krupa
Magdalena Marcinkowska (Madlen Revlon)
Veronika Ivashkevich
Katie Zazenski
Meeting with the WOK Residents
Meeting with the WOK Residents, photos by Marta Ankiersztejn
Metaphors of residents' processes
During the evaluation of the 1st edition of the residency, the participants shared their processes using metaphors of images, complementing each other and developing them with empathy. The months of reflection and experimentation were compared to: islands in the ocean, the pleasant feeling of floating on water, or tending a garden. One of the participants, Veronika Ivashkevich, presented the group’s experiences using her own painting technique.
Documenting the residency process
The starting point of the one-and-a-half-day workshop was to focus our attention on experiencing ourselves as a source of inspiration in the acting profession. We focused on how working with one’s own body shapes our inner and group sense of security and how it can influence the individual acting skills. Drawing on the heritage of contact improvisation, as well as the Gestalt approach, we looked at how body and movement awareness can help us care for our own and collective boundaries in the here and now.
The first part of the workshop was looking at the different ways of presenting plants and visually narrating our relationship with them. We looked at Renaissance herbaria (such as Syrenius’ herbarium), cyanotypes of aquatic plants by Anna Atkins, and works by contemporary Polish artists such as Cecylia Malik and Diana Lelonek. This was followed by a writing workshop where we read texts with plant motifs using the interrupted reading method, individual walks in search of inspiration, and the joint creation of a mind map featuring sketches and associations. The second part of the workshop was dedicated to developing individual zine pages and scanning them. We wanted to consider and analyse the way we look at plants in the city with sensitivity and attention.
The theme of the meeting was about relationships with plants, their healing powers, inspiration and world-creation. We talked about where we are in relation to plants, what they mean to us and what we can do for them.
Recruitment for the first edition
