ZOEpolis-water

"ZOEpolis" is an interdisciplinary and, above all, interspecies initiative dedicated to
urban space, design and architecture as a platform for establishing and maintaining
interspecies relations. Each edition of "ZOEpolis" is devoted to a different issue, each one
rooted in the place where it is implemented, as well as its problems and specifics. In
collaboration with ART LAB Wyspa /Fundacja Wyspa Progress Foundation artists,
designers and architects will tackle the issue of water as vital, life-giving matter from which
all life on Earth originates and which continues to make that life possible. The core of the
project will be the coexistence between humans, other animals, plants, and microorganisms
and water. We will ask questions about how the river and the sea can be socialized, can they
have subjectivity, and what does this mean for them and the organisms coexisting with them?
The context of the meeting of the two estuaries of the Vistula River and the sea, as well as the
presence of water in other forms, sometimes ephemeral like periodic lakes, overgrown ponds
and other astatic reservoirs, wetlands, islands appearing and disappearing will prompt us to
think about the complex relationships built in and around water. The conflicts and
controversies inherent in the case of human-water relations, additionally those which are
specific to the Sobieszewska Island, will also be an area of our interest: river pollution, toxic
waste dumps, the presence of a port and maritime transport, or the presence of a refinery. The
contact between Gdansk and the shipbuilding industry also inspires us to rethink the inherent
themes of labour and social equality, as well as to ask questions about who – besides animals
and nature – pays the biggest price for unsustainable industrialisation and environmental
contamination.
The character of "ZOEpolis” will be of a research project, with elements of
performative actions, walks and talks. It will be carried out jointly with architects and artists
working in various media, as well as biologists who can not only provide scientific
knowledge, but also actively co-create the realisations that make up the project.