iza
koczanowska|
koczanowska|
Errancies
2025
Research through wandering and
trace-based font
Costa del Sol
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.
Ugly Beach
2025
Sculptural video installation and walking stimulator
Wrong Norma, Nieuve Insituut
2025
Sculptural video installation and walking stimulator
Wrong Norma, Nieuve Insituut
Rotterdam
Ugly Beach is a research-based multimedia installation exploring the beach not as an idealised paradise, but as a contested landscape shaped by tourism, privilege, exclusion, and ecological instability. Inspired by an encounter with unusual yellow sea foam on the coast of The Hague, the project uses sea foam as both material and metaphor—a form that resists the polished aesthetics and extractive narratives imposed on coastal environments.
Through unstable materials such as agar-agar, seawater, foam, and 3D-printed elements, combined with video, sound, and projected imagery, the installation creates a surreal beach environment where human presence merges with the landscape. Referencing Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, the work explores forms of matter and landscapes that resist simplification, ownership, and commodification. Ugly Beach challenges the romantic image of the beach by revealing the ecological, social, and political tensions hidden beneath its idealised surface
Photos by @silvia__arenas.jpg
Ugly Beach Walking Simulator
_on going
Seasonal Grounds
2026
Research supported by Stimuleringsfonds
Research notes (on going) ︎︎︎
Biomaterials, post-natural matter and fragments of seasonal infrastructure collected across different beaches, catalogued through their material biographies and transformed into experimental composites.
I look at the contemporary beach as a landscape formed through natural processes, tourism and temporary infrastructure. Local matter becomes entangled with parasols, ropes, textiles, fastenings and other traces of seasonal use. By collecting and tracing these fragments, I explore their origins, functions and transformations, and how they eventually become part of the post-natural matter of the beach.
I am intrigued by how tourism becomes matter.
2026
Research supported by Stimuleringsfonds
Research notes (on going) ︎︎︎
Biomaterials, post-natural matter and fragments of seasonal infrastructure collected across different beaches, catalogued through their material biographies and transformed into experimental composites.
I look at the contemporary beach as a landscape formed through natural processes, tourism and temporary infrastructure. Local matter becomes entangled with parasols, ropes, textiles, fastenings and other traces of seasonal use. By collecting and tracing these fragments, I explore their origins, functions and transformations, and how they eventually become part of the post-natural matter of the beach.
I am intrigued by how tourism becomes matter.
Speculative Warsaw Old Town Tour
2026 _on going
Performative guided walk / artistic research
Who gets to narrate the city?
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.
Developed within Traseologia by Marek Krajewski, Fundacja Puszka
2026 _on going
Performative guided walk / artistic research
Who gets to narrate the city?
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.
Developed within Traseologia by Marek Krajewski, Fundacja Puszka