Iza Koczanowska – artist and researcher – Berlin / Amsterdam
iza
koczanowska|



Speculative Warsaw Old Town Tour 

Performative guided walk / artistic research
2026 (ongoing)

Following the structure of a tourist trail, I trace other ways of moving through the history of Warsaw’s Old Town. Shifting away from dominant narratives of destruction and reconstruction, it follows folklore, archaeological remains, urban matter and more-than-human witnesses: a centuries-old waste mound, spiders inside surviving walls, microorganisms inhabiting the stone of Sigismund’s Column, crows, insects, roots and lichens.

Drawing on the morphology of the folktale, historical research is intertwined with legends and their speculative retellings. Repeated, altered and passed on over time, these stories form a fluid palimpsest of place, where human and more-than-human perspectives overlap.

Who gets to narrate the city?

Developed within Traseologia by Marek Krajewski, Fundacja Puszka























The Living Wall of Brokenness

Group show
Curated by Pita Kim
Oud House, Rotterdam
2026

The exhibition reflects on the demolition and redevelopment reshaping Bospolder-Tussendijken (BoTu) in Rotterdam. Where redevelopment hides breakdown, the exhibition lingers in cracks and fragments. A grid of poles, recalling the exposed frames of a demolition site, holds light, sound, garments, carpets and performances made from neighbourhood materials, forming a new Living Wall of care and repair.

From biomaterial containing dust, dirt and residues collected in BoTu, I made a carpet as well as fragments attached to a sound installation by Pita Kim. Discarded local matter, collected and reorganised, becomes a temporary architecture and a material image of Brokenness.  



Photos by Teresa Miarka





















On opposite sides of a corner, a nod to J.J.P. Oud’s housing, where a repetitive system had to bend to the irregular streets, two ESP32 microcontrollers with single LEDs blink in sync. A motion sensor breaks their rhythm whenever someone passes, and a Raspberry Pi with an LCD screen records each passage as a notation of dots and lines.


Technical support by Lukasz Zuber
Photos by Teresa Miarka





















Errancies

Research through wandering and
trace-based font 
Costa del Sol

2025


Grounded in feminist geography, the work

uses walking as a research method along

the densely populated beaches of Spain’s

Costa del Sol. Through GPS-mapping my

trajectories, I remap the beach through

bodily movement, examining how mass

tourism reshapes access to shared space.

Walking reveals compressed and inacces-

sible fragments of terrain, where bodies

interrupt the postcard image of the beach

and become part of its landscape.


The recorded trajectories are transformed

into forms corresponding to actual beach

fragments shaped by mass tourism. These

fragments are rescaled and materialised as

sculptural forms using biomaterials, while

their shapes are also developed into a

typographic alphabet. Together, they re-

cord changing conditions of access, bodily

presence, and spatial pressure.