The Zakole Research and Experimental Group

About ZAKOLE

ZAKOLE is a project rooted in a wetland located near the heart of Warsaw. The Zakole Wawerskie area consists of a picturesque, mostly inaccessible marsh and vast meadows. Its inhabitants are a variety of creatures: beavers, birds, frogs, mosquitoes, alders, reeds, grasses, and people. Our goal is to discover Zakole Wawerskie, its inhabitants and visitors, and to identify and map its various meanings.

In ZAKOLE we search for ways of telling the stories of such areas and experiencing them as well as foregrounding the perspective of the creatures forming their complex ecosystems.

We find it crucial to highlight the significance of similar sites in cities, primarily for the reasons of biodiversity and climate, while still focusing on the complexity of relations and interests of various actors revolving around it.

In order to get to know Zakole Wawerskie better, we have developed a variety of observational methods, which make it easier to approach its ecosystem. We organised intimate gatherings to exchange experiences, information and thoughts about Zakole and similar places. These also offered an opportunity to reflect on our capacity of understanding other organisms and the networks of dependencies they build. We also sought answers to this question by conducting experimental walks with a group of artists and biologists, during which we practised attunement to non-human entities.

Activities within the ZAKOLE project create possibilities of generating and exchanging various kinds of knowledges: historical and scientific as well as personal, embodied and based on sensory experience. We also gather information about administrative proceedings concerning Zakole Wawerskie and potential scenarios for the future of the area, while constantly asking ourselves how to think about the multispecies right to the city. The gathered knowledges is shared on our continuously developing website www.zakole.pl. 

A swamp is a dense, mysterious, culturally ambivalent landscape. It is a valuable and entangled ecosystem that makes us look for non-obvious methods to get to know it and describe it.

As the ZAKOLE group working with and at Zakole Wawerskie – a swampy area within the city – we provide and clash different languages. In this way, artistic and analytical, scientific and critical, discursive and embodied intertwine to create a comprehensive and ambiguous image of a complex and ambiguous ecosystem. This is what we call multiknowledge – a knowledge formed simultaneously by many different methodologies and perspectives.

While a starting point for our practices was the concept of the multispecies right to the city, over time practices such as carrying wellingtons together, picking up trash, resting and listening became equally important. This allows for research based on attunement, where sharing knowledge means sharing emotions and experiences. By looking at the body as a research instrument that gathers also tacit knowledge, we generate space for a different, slow type of regenerative activism. It involves not only fighting to preserve Zakole Wawerskie, but also taking care of ourselves and each other.

In this way, Zakole became for us a meeting point and the emergence of new connections, a lens concentrating many topics, communities, people, entities and initiatives. The effects of these actions are the relationships built between us, Zakole and its various inhabitants.

Repair team members: Krysia Jędrzejewska-Szmek, Pola Salicka, Olga Roszkowska, Zuzanna Derlacz, Ola Knychalska and Igor Stokfiszewski.

In collaboration with: Maja Demska, Bartosz Jakubowski, Stanisław Łubieński, Grześ Stopa and Gosia Wrzosek.

What is a social nature inventory about?

Starting from the traditional formula of natural inventory of local species and bio-blitz, we want to expand this approach and also propose other methods of inventorying of Zakole Wawerskie. Our goal is for the inventory, prepared both bottom-up and professionally, to serve as a social tool, promoting integration and involvement of Zakole’s neighbors, and at the same time serving to protect the environment. By incorporating somatic methods and engaging our bodies in the experimental inventory process, we want to create an environment conducive to the exchange of expert and citizen science knowledge.

What is and what can a nature inventory be? 

An inventory is an attempt to describe the diversity of a given place, an attempt to organize and translate the complexity that is difficult to capture in a list-archive format. In the traditional approach, it is a list of species that strives to be as saturated and complete as possible. The methods used by biologists try to objectify this process by systematically conducting observations in various niches and habitats, under specific weather conditions, and visiting places in subsequent months. Toads can be heard on warm, rainless evenings, after dusk. Herbs from the forest floor need to be searched for in early spring, before they are covered by other, larger vegetation. The easiest way to count beavers is to look for their winter larders (it is assumed that there are 3.7 beavers per beaver larder).

However, even such a positivistic inventory is situated in a given methodology, season, knowledge and perceptive of the researcher. Moreover, a biologist wandering through a swamp with her whole body receives stimuli about the diversity of the place, which allows us to create a list as wide as possible, although it is always only an approximation of the complex ecosystem.

There is a risk that this list misses important information that is more difficult to verbalize. Although pimpinella saxifraga or lychnis flos-cuculi sound poetic in themselves, they are ultimately only a list of names and surnames, like a list of tenants of a block of flats or a telephone book. Moreover, searching for new species may unnoticeably become an aim in itself, where a hunting collector pays attention only to new or rare finds.

What are the implicit aspects of the scientific method? Is it possible to translate the precision of the scientific method into feelings, impressions, states and emotions? We reflect on these aspects during our walks and talks.

Our body-instrument is also an archive-body. Each experience flowing through it leaves its own tiny trace, giving shape to the stories that unfold within us and influencing how we experience the world and how we respond to its stimuli. The eye, the nose and the ear are trained along with our sensitivity and ability to find patterns and detect unexpected presences. The archive building within us allows us to perceive and feel more, build trust in our surroundings and better coordinate our own movement.

The wetland itself constantly updates itself as an inventory. On the one hand, it is an ever-growing archive of changing water conditions and plant-life succession contained in the peat deposits, and on the other, an area where the traces of the dominant species are particularly visible. By entering this space, we can experience the history reflected in nature – in an ecosystem from which we also come. Re-creating our relationship with the wet ecology  and understanding all the other entanglements that build it requires recognising the organisms involved in them – seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, being in their presence.

As a method of describing diversity of life in a specific environment, biological inventories seek to translate these almost ungraspable complexities into an ordered list-record-archive, which is important for legal procedures of nature conservation.

As much as the final outcome, saturated with Latin names, is a document with strict protocols that immediately forces categories and isolates beings from one another, initially it starts with deep observation, understanding circumstances like weather, humidity, time of day and with a methodology that relies on one’s bodily, sensorial experience, interpretations, guesses, approximations, blind spots, limitations.

The inventory is, at its core, a record of presence – the presence of species, relations between them, unexpected points of contact between worlds, presence of forces, matter, light, sounds, as well as the presence of people who make these observations, along with their corporeality, feelings, emotions, associations, ideas. While the latter factors do not find their place in institutionalised inventories, indexes, lists and archives, building a bottom-up, social record of presence welcomes the knowledge of our bodies, allowing for subjectivity and allowing space for the imagination.

Multi-knowledge built in this way has a chance of being strongly situated, aware of the researcher’s position, open to new languages, always incomplete and accepting of its own obsolescence.

Zakole Group in conversation with art-science collaborarors: Inventory Workshop ☼

(the talk and workshop set frame for the experimental walks series focused around the theme of unsealing nature inventory methods and purposes)