Iza Koczanowska – artist and researcher – Berlin / Amsterdam
︎
_tracing unstable territories
_more-than-human agency, materiality, and speculative futures

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
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


in progress

Entanglement

2025   
Rondo Sztuki, Katowice 
Curated by: Zofia Małysa-Janczy 


An entanglement moves through the intimacies of practice‭, ‬grounded in memory and place where no written traces exist‭, ‬but where‭ ‬histories were transmitted orally and remain sensorially present‭.‬

The rural ground once inhabited by peasant ancestors and animal life coexisting under the same roof‭, ‬a land that remains legally‭ ‬and materially unresolved across four generations‭, ‬with ownership circulating through archival and juridical systems‭, ‬returns as a legacy gift‭, ‬an unstable condition of inheritance activated through field recordings‭, ‬scanning‭, ‬and embodied engagement‭, ‬alongside an ongoing negotiation with systems of land registration and its material claims‭.‬

Collapsing structures, memory of place, and scanned fragments, where wire-and-straw construction techniques and material re-assemblages do not perform history but press against its silences, entangling past and present as a lived and ongoing condition in which forms of habitation and origin continue to resonate - where does land end and identity begin when place, inheritance, and belonging remain unresolved?

Lullaby For Depressed River Mussels

2024 
Sound intervention on site, interactive sound installation
MIARD, Piet Zwart Insitut
Dutch Design Week


Developed as a speculative sound installation, the work engages with aquatic environments affected by noise pollution, combining hydrophone recordings of ferries, motor infrastructure, and underwater soundscapes with vocal experiments based on lullaby structures tuned to specific frequency ranges.

The process involves walking, listening, and singing within the site, using voice as a resonant tool that interacts with water-borne vibrations. A hydrophone is submerged to capture underwater sound transmission, translating sonic pressure between surface and submerged environments.

The work acknowledges the extreme sensitivity of river mussels to acoustic disturbance, positioning this fragility as a central condition of the system rather than a representational theme.

Silicone casts of mussel shells function as tactile interfaces that trigger sound events when activated, sending signals back into the water through a responsive system of embedded speakers and electronic modulation. The resulting acoustic field can be accessed through headphones, creating a feedback loop between submerged sound, vibration, and bodily perception.

The installation constructs a speculative non-human listening condition, where human, infrastructural, and aquatic perceptual systems partially translate into one another while remaining fundamentally misaligned.