Iza Koczanowska – artist and researcher – Berlin / Amsterdam















































Current reseach:
Spatial asymmetries, extraction and regeneration

I research how bodies, matter, and environments co-exist within unstable land conditions marked by extraction and mass tourism. I work with embodied exposure, field and material research, constructing situations that speculate on the boundary between regeneration and extraction, and develop spatial constellations with multispecies, relational arrangements.

— Landscape extraction, conditions and asymmetries of ground: how mass tourism produces uneven access, visibility, and more-than-human relations within neo-colonial structures.

— Infrastructures of care (including Polish sanatoria), places where extraction and regeneration intersect, where preservation can be understood as a form of resistance to standardized capitalist approaches to natural resources.

Pijałka
2026

Prototype of a communal spa drinking cup featuring multiple spouts‭, ‬for multispecies use‭.‬































Veillée
stay-up-late evening,
2026

M4 residency, Tetterode
Amsterdam

performance by Pita Kim
in collaboration with Martynas Nikitenka
with technical support from Łukasz Zuber

Inspired by the rhythm of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, Veille unfolds within a former type foundry as a composition of layered temporalities. Interior fragments hidden within the space, recorded sounds of the building, and narratives from long-term inhabitants are set in relation to the material agency of the space. Narratives are reinterpreted through AI prompts and Ouija-board interactions, producing continuous overlaps between past and present.

Typefaces once produced in the building are re-materialised and reconnected through a networked system of wires and responsive devices, reactivated as a communicating sonic medium.

An electrical installation with flickering lights responds to bodies within a field of deconstructed furniture structured around a central chimney, operating as a proto–smart home system. From the chimney, steam and condensation gather on windows, automated curtains rhythmically darken the space, and environmental responses modulate presence, while memory and technology co-construct a shifting temporal field.


*Veillée refers to the French tradition of evening gatherings where listening and storytelling turn the home into a space of dreaming.






























.,.,

audio installation
2026

Tetterode, a former type foundry
Amsterdam






As part of field recordings, I worked with the acoustic conditions of a large residential complex of over 35 studios, where largely empty corridors in an extracted, functionally suspended space generate spatial and sonic tensions.

I treated the building as an active system, engaging its material and infrastructural elements — windows, iron structures, doors and ambient noise — as carriers of residual spatial information. The architecture is approached as a site of layered temporalities.

To activate these conditions, I constructed a situation in which the building becomes an instrument: speakers hidden within its structure played fragmented punctuation from the Libra typeface (Sjoerd Henrik de Roos, 1938), translated into spatial sound.















Ugly Beach, 2025
Wrong Norma, Nieuve Insituut
Rotterdam



Ugly Beach is a research-based multimedia work which‭, ‬through a sculptural installation and a projected video‭, ‬explores the notion of the‭ ‬“beach”‭ ‬not as a curated paradise‭, ‬but as a space of contradictions regarding privilege‭, ‬exclusion‭, ‬and ecological instability‭.‬

Inspired by a disorienting encounter with yellowish sea foam in The Hague‭, ‬the project questions dominant beach aesthetics shaped by massive tourism‭, ‬media‭, ‬and resource exploitation‭. ‬The sea foam—both a material presence and a parable—becomes a figure of resistance aligned with Glissant’s notion of opacity‭, ‬refusing to conform to postcard-perfect imagery or the transparent legibility demanded by tourism industries‭. ‬Through its formless‭, ‬uncanny‭, ‬almost intoxicated appearance‭, ‬and its chemical traces in the seas‭, ‬the foam offers an alternative discourse‭: ‬quietly challenging idealisation‭, ‬appropriation‭, ‬and the extractive treatment of landscapes‭, ‬human labour‭, ‬and natural phenomena‭.‬

The installation uses unstable materials such as agar-agar‭, ‬foam‭, ‬seawater‭, ‬and sea foam as a material-parable to reflect the constantly changing‭, ‬untamed properties and complexity that the beach‭, ‬as concept and haptic context‭, ‬carries‭. ‬Projected on translucent curtains‭, ‬the beach image merges with soundscapes‭, ‬3D prints‭, ‬and a‭ ‬“stimulator of walking”‭ ‬projection satirizing bodies of varying proportions dominating and moving across the landscape‭, ‬creating a surreal environment‭ ‬where human bodies dissolve into the surroundings just as geopolitical and psychosocial agency vanishes when peripheral lands are abused‭, ‬occupied‭, ‬or forced into unsustainable spaces‭.‬

Ugly Beach reclaims ugliness through the slime and irritating aesthetics of sea foam‭, ‬using it as a lens to confront hidden‭, ‬often oppressive ecological‭, ‬social‭, ‬and political systems beneath the idyllic image of the beach‭.‬


Photos by @silvia__arenas.jpg



































Pearl play, 2026 
Interactive sculptural object
 

Pearl Extraction Game explores the intersections of play, value, and collective action. Drawing on the cultivation of pearls - objects linked to jewellery and tourist economies, the work transforms a found string of cultured pearls into a participatory game.

Players interact with swing-like structures, moving beads into openings within a tactile installation referencing hand-operated children’s games. The work reflects on the mechanics of play and the gamification of value systems, from board games to postcolonial economic strategies.



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