Magdalena Siemaszko & Katarzyna Hertz

COLLECTIVE PORTFOLIO – ‘KULTURA KRESU’

Magdalena Siemaszko: researcher, activist and social educator. Biologist and anthropologist, graduated from Warsaw University, combining the perspectives of environmental and social sciences and humanities, scientifically engaged with ecological conflict and social change. Socially engaged activist working with communities through different tools ranging from action research to practice of embodiment, choreography, body and movement work, and narrative. Through last years, along the ethnographic research, she moved towards developing different practices related to art-research approach, centered around social maps and choreographies, co-habiting interventions and inter-species intimacies. She has gained her experience while realizing different projects in diversed urban, rural and forest spaces in Poland, Copenhagen, Indonesia, Katalonia and Tanzania, e.g. at CIFOR and Warsaw University of Botanic Garden. She now lives in the rural eastern region of Poland (Podlasiea), in the middle of Białowieża Forest, where she conducts ethnographic research related to the conflict around the logging of the forest. She participates in supporting local networks of cooperation, especially among women and animal activists, provides workshops empowering communities, observes and supports local resistance and negotiation activities and cocreates local artistic projects embedded in local practices (e.g. Kultura Kresu). She works in Center for Wetlands Conservation, coordinating project “Let’s remember about wetlands”, supporting local caregivers of small peatlands; realize project of Forest Intergenerational Network for Cultural Activization in Białowieża Forest (within European Solidarity Corps scholarship) and Forest Intervention Patrol (Civic Europe Capacity Building Programme). She forms Camp for Forest collective, association “House for Nature and Culture” and ecofeminist collective “Wypuszczone”.

Katarzyna Hertz: filmmaker, visual and sound artist, researcher, founder of the non profit cultural organization Kultura Kresu (Endlands), working on a transection of nature and culture in the context of Eastern and Central Poland (for now). Graduated from the University of Arts in Poznań, Poland, German Film and TV Academy in Berlin, currently undergoing an MFA in Philosophy at the Warsaw University. For the last 4 years, she has been developing artistic and collective practices in the region of Białowieża Forest and Podlasie region.