Natalia Kalicki / Milena Soporowska

 For us, resilience means establishing exchange practices with people, spaces and nature that develop long-term knowledge and social networks. Resilience encompasses sustainable models of work and rest, and we would like to develop these through collaborations that create spaces responding to our own and our neighbours’ needs. Resilience is a kind of rootedness in what is simple, repetitive and seemingly unspectacular. 

 We also understand resilience as a way of adapting and searching for one’s own inner rhythm. This involves adapting to a natural, individual rhythm that is ‘drowned out’ by the hustle and bustle of city life and the demands of contemporary, technology-driven culture, with which the human body can no longer keep up. 

 Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, we are therefore looking for a new narrative: a vision of the future based on the model of the unhurried ‘collector’. This is a process-oriented approach, where various experiences are gathered and a sense of community is built on everyday gestures. As they walk, the ‘gatherer’ establishes new relationships and nurtures existing ones, allowing time for reflection. 

 We believe that true, long-term resilience cannot be achieved in haste or chaos. This is why we focus on a joint journey spread out over time and divided into stages. 

During the residency, we would like to create a space where we can learn through rest, at our own unhurried pace. We have access to a plot of land near Warsaw that has been vacant for years and requires maintenance. As an alternative to expensive urban premises, we are considering using the cottage as our temporary open art studio and a place for knowledge exchange as part of a project we have tentatively named the Allotment Academy. We are interested in alternative forms of education that are based on mutual exchange and are process-oriented and close to nature. During the residency programme, we would like to interact with our neighbours, the other allotment holders, by inviting them to meetings and encouraging them to share their specialist knowledge of gardening, land maintenance, and the surrounding nature. At the same time, we plan to invite people from the worlds of culture and science to meetings, walks and open discussions about their work and our needs. By making our space available to others, we would also like to explore how our allotment institution could function as a ‘respite academy’. The budget would be allocated to organising meetings with the aforementioned people and purchasing materials for workshops. 

 In return, we would expect you to provide substantive support in building relationships with the community, the opportunity to consult on organising meetings and the possibility of networking with other residents. Above all, we would expect you to trust us and our process. 

The portfolio includes a mind map reflecting our process and its assumptions.