Projekty

Keeping Flowers Alive: Acoustic Ikebana.

Flowers alive: A symbiosis of sound, nature, and architecture at Sogetsu Plaza
This autumn, Tokyo?s iconic Sogetsu Plaza will be transformed by Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka?s installation, Keeping Flowers Alive: Acoustic Ikebana. Blending architecture, sound, nature, and textile design, the work draws inspiration from ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, and the Sogetsu Art Center?s experimental legacy.

A harmonious intersection of nature and sound
Krakowiak-Bałka redefines space by turning architectural voids into vibrant, living environments. Through advanced acoustic technology and hand-pleated textiles, the artist creates a dynamic soundscape where flowers resonate through space. This ?acoustic ikebana? mirrors the balance and emptiness of traditional ikebana.

At the heart of the installation is the Lycoris radiata, a red spider lily known for its toxic properties and deep symbolic meaning in Japanese culture. This flower serves as a metaphor for beauty and danger, as Krakowiak-Bałka explores its acoustic qualities, using their sounds to evoke a deeper connection between the natural and constructed world.

Women in Sogetsu: A legacy of creation
The project pays homage to the contributions of women to the Sogetsu legacy. While the Sogetsu Art Center in the 1960s was renowned for avant-garde artists such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham, the overwhelming majority of the ikebana school?s members were women. These women, practicing the contemplative art of flower arranging, shaped both the physical and acoustic spaces of Sogetsu. Krakowiak-Bałka honors their role by blending the meditative silence of ikebana with experimental soundscapes, bridging tradition with modern creativity.

Exploring toxicity and survival
A unique element of Keeping Flowers Alive is its focus on poisonous flowers, particularly the Lycoris radiata, as well as their acoustic resonances. Krakowiak-Bałka uses contact microphones and speakers to amplify the subtle, usually inaudible sounds of flowers. These sounds reflect the survival strategies of plants, such as the toxins they produce. By incorporating the names of toxic flowers into the installation, Krakowiak-Bałka explores themes of beauty, danger, and resilience.

Immersive experience in Noguchi?s Garden
Set against the backdrop of Isamu Noguchi?s iconic stone garden, the installation transforms the space into an acoustic chamber. Hand-crafted pleated fabrics respond to the garden?s acoustics, and submerged speakers transmit vibrations that simulate flowers? responses to environmental stress. This sensory experience invites visitors to explore the unseen rhythms of nature, offering a meditative journey into the world of flowers.

A call to keep flowers?and the world?alive
At its core, Keeping Flowers Alive delivers a hopeful message. It invites reflection on the balance between human intervention and nature?s autonomy. Drawing on the Sogetsu School?s philosophy of ?listening to flowers,? Krakowiak-Bałka creates an environment where sound, nature, and architecture converge. The work emphasizes the power of sound as a transformative force, offering new possibilities for sustainable urban design.

This exhibition celebrates nature?s resilience and beauty, reminding us that both architecture and the natural world must be nurtured and preserved.

Revisiting the garden?s legacy
The artist previously explored the garden?s unique acoustic and artistic environment in her 2013 project When a stem breaks the water perpendicularly…, created and published online in collaboration with Post MoMA New York, for which Miki Kaneda was the founding co-editor.

The project is being developed in collaboration with the Sogetsu Foundation, led by its Art Director Kiri Teshigahara, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and in partnership with Zachęta ? National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and Plissé Lognon, workshop of Maison Lemarié, SORA BOTANICAL GARDEN Project, a Japanese horticultural studio led by Seijun Nishihata and Eidotech.

This exhibition not only builds on historical legacies but also seeks to push the boundaries of what is possible when sound, nature, and architecture merge in harmony.

The Opening Concert: November 8, 4?5pm
Singers: Isabelle Duthoit, Michał Sławecki, Asthma, Yuusari. Performers: Hikaru Kawasaki, KAi MiWA

The Morning Concert: November 9, 11?12am
Singers: Isabelle Duthoit, Michał Sławecki, Asthma, Yuusari. Performers: Hikaru Kawasaki, KAi MiWA

The Afternoon Concert: November 9, 4?5pm
Singers: Isabelle Duthoit, Michał Sławecki, Asthma, Yuusari. Performers: Hikaru Kawasaki, KAi MiWA

The Mornig Concert: November 10, 11?12am
Singers: Isabelle Duthoit, Michał Sławecki, Asthma, Yuusari. Performers: Hikaru Kawasaki, KAi MiWA

The Afternoon Concert: November 10, 4?5pm
Singers: Isabelle Duthoit, Michał Sławecki, Asthma, Yuusari. Performers: Hikaru Kawasaki, KAi MiWA

Human Antena project
Gdańsk, May 2011
Tel-Aviv, 2009

“Free Radio Jaffa” video documentation

“Human antena” video documentation

Radio free Jaffa is Katarzyna Krakowiak in cooperation with Ronen Eidelman and the Israeli Center for Digital art, Holon.

The project is done in the framework of  ?The Jaffa Project; Autobiography of a City? by the Ayam Association.

Liberating space through art and action – all.FM

Along Jerusalem Boulevard the entrance into Jaffa. , Radio Free Jaffa will be making a radio intervention into all radio transmissions in the proximity.

Radio Free Jaffa, offers a free space which is much needed in Jaffa.

Radio Free Jaffa will be walking in Jaffa as a human antenna, broadcasting in close-range. It may not be noticeable, but if your radio starts behaving strangely, you can assume we are in the area.

Part of the project all.fm carried out by Katarzyna Krakowiak in different locations worldwide. A transmitter hidden in a bag broadcasts the artist?s radio programme to radio receivers located in the immediate vicinity in Tel Aviv?s Jaffa district.

All. Fm Free Radio Jaffa (Broadcast)
Translation of Hebrew:
Traffic report: (Translation) Heavy Traffic on Jerusalem Blvd. due to the eviction of a single mother with six children from a public housing project owned by ?Halamish?. Please use alternative routes to bypass the harsh reality of Jaffa cleansing.

Jaffa advertising: (Translation) Living in Jaffa! A dream than can come true, live in an authentic Arab style house, walk the old city alleys, and view the historic port ? all is possible. In planning: up to 500 homes ? now in process of clearing. One of them can be yours.

(In informative voice) this offer is limited; visit our website to see if you are suitable: www.radiofreeejaffa.com

General advertisement: (Translation) Free space! Free radio Jaffa is giving you free space for free? (5 second quiet) This free space was brought to you from free radio Jaffa. For more information visit: www. radiofreejaffa.com

sound sculpture
curators: Aleksandra Jach, Katarzyna Słoboda
Łódź, September 2011

video documentation

Landscape painting in its most classical form sought to present more than one was able to observe while taking a walk ? the painting was supposed to depict the ideal sphere, raising the viewer above everyday life. Often such paintings contained hidden symbols for the viewer to decode. Art history scholars disagree over interpretations and, as a result, give two different names to one painting. Katarzyna Krakowiak discovered the trail of the ?pleasant place? in the middle of the urban buildings by one of the busiest streets in Łódź. It was the natural sound of flowing water. Locus amoenus (Latin for pleasant place) is an ancient pastoral staple of an idyllic place of pleasure. The pleasure resulting from nature, yet bearing a lot of danger at the same time.

Part of “Urban ecologies” project curated by Aleksandra Jach i Katarzyna Słoboda.

curator: Prem Krishnamurthy
P.!, New York, November 2012
http://tumblr.p-exclamation.com/post/36162964343

The work was produced during a studio residence at Residency Unlimited in New York, where a sound sculpture and a performance served to endow silence with a physical dimension. A book, which was the final stage of the process, was prepared by means of stenographic method: all sounds of space collected have been recorded.
The multi-stage production, Shorthand, was the second part of the temporally accumulating exhibition, Possibility 02: Growth, exploring, by means of various ways of space occupation, myths about unrestricted expansion, space gentrification and an impossibility of being situated outside this process.

In the course of one night, the front of former offices at 334 Broome Street, where the exhibition was held, was listened to from a central position ? from an interior of an unused closet (a peculiar non-place, a secret observation point), and sounds (operation of the very room, sounds arriving from other parts of the building and from the outside) recorded. Thus created audio document was amplified, so it was fully accessible to the human ear. The ?white noise? accompanied visitors to the space as a continuous murmur, emitted by a system of loudspeakers suspended at the entrance to the room, so it was audible both within and without.

A base for a sound sculpture was formed, on which acoustic experiences were superimposed. Throughout the exhibition, the centrally situated closet issued a sound of shaking up the building made by the artist performing inside. Visitors to the gallery and passers-by?s steps were being recorded and gradually added to the soundtrack, and in the course of the week-long installation, the artist herself enriched the soundtrack with further aspects, using elements found within the space and manipulating collected audio material. Ultimately, the sound of this particular silence was written down in signs of the Latin alphabet, in the form of a score or a performance script, making further interpretations possible. Thus, a sound sculpture of several incarnations was made: these were formed by subsequent stages of the process of its emergence taken, both individually and collectively, as successful and mutually enabling.

Shorthand is a workshop approach to the questions of silence, emptiness, translation and extension, breaking away from usual ways of understanding architectural space. Silence (absence) and sound (presence) acquired a different dimension in the multi-stage process of translating space into a record. Attention was drawn to the very process of emergence of an audio experience: first, the compressed air produces a wave, which resonates in the ear, to become, interpreted by the brain, an auditory experience. In the case of language, another level accrues: a particular soundtrack develops into phonemes, and those ? into signifying units. The piece, annexing successful sounds arising within its field, precluded being a passive listener, and emphasised the stratified levels of abstraction and their potential for equivocality in the process of translation of one sensual experience into another.

The entire exhibition lasted seven weeks and each artists, in succession, proposed a week-long realisation. The reconfigurations activated a scarce resource ? space itself ? allowing the pieces to work as separate and potentially oppositional bodies, each of which, in turn, filling the architectural volume. Thus, the exhibition changed in time, accelerated by the accumulation of productions. An appearance of a new work dislodged the previous and redefined space.

The resultant microcosm distances itself from the rhythm of urban growth, and the exhibition was itself an experiment in proliferation and a speculation about ways in which displacement and cohabitation detune conventional exhibition models and social relations, reflected in those modes. An inspiration for the whole laboratory came from Gerard K. O?Neill: ?Nothing in our solar system is truly unlimited, of course; no expansion can go on forever; but an exponential growth of wealth can be considered rationally if we can find the environment in which that growth can proceed for many hundreds of years?? (The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, 1977).

exhibition
curator: Patrycja Ryłko
collaboration: Łukasz Jarząbek
expert consultant: Jacek Dominiczak
organiser: City Culture Institute
partner: Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk

The Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts Grand Armoury, Targ Węglowy 6, 27 June?6 July 2014
A large-scale architectural installation which consisted in annexing a historical space and introducing functionalist elements therein: built from prototypes of the smallest elements acceptable in its architecture according to official norms. The piece was accompanied by a sound recurring in its space: a short and dull, shotgun noise, drawing attention to the paradox of employing maximum resources with minimum efficiency, and to the collision of the world of utopia with a historical actuality.

The installation is a headlining of a contentious contact area of two different and, simultaneously, temporarily and spatially exclusive narratives. The artists employs the matter of the building on 1:1 scale, completely annexing its pre-existing space: over 700 square metres of void, and over 400 years of history which have had a bearing on the internal organisation of its spatiality. She uses the scale in such a manner that it directly determines the actual size of her sculptural, temporal realisation. Intervening into the place, she re-defines its parameters by means of a partial introduction of ostensibly abstract spatial divisions, which in reality are defined divisions based on old formulas (architectural norms, initially recorded by Ernst Neufert in 1936, could be fitted into ci. 40 typed pages, while currently they cover over 800 printed pages) which regulated functionalism, understood here as the most economical and efficient way to create public space.

Inserting the geometrically elaborate structure into the pre-existing space of the Arsenal, she employs a void in a void, by means of abstract directives, mechanically determining the most programmatically and spatially complex objects of public use, and, therefore, employing the thoroughly instrumentalised and modularly fabricated norms of space dedicated for communal use, the artist opens up a discussion on the subject of functionalism as a limit of an organicity of use.

Krakowiak, treating functionalism as a physical limitation of space, defining it in terms of a systematised limit drawn to format an actual operability of a building, often counteracting its organic dynamics, underlines the complex relationship between the body of an object and its spatial contents, signifying capacity and functional capacities. In juxtaposing the two temporarily and spatially exclusive formulas regulating operations of space of the Arsenal, whose inner logic is, nowadays, certainly hardly understood or naturally employed, the artist uncovers clandestine codes of dependency, particularly those related to communicational incomprehension, dysfunction and the notion of error.

installation
curator: Anna Smolak
co-ordinator: Małgorzata Miśkowiec
BWA Sokół Gallery, Nowy Sącz, Poland, 23 January?1 March 2015

A glass-covered staircase of a three-story building of the BWA Sokół contemporary art gallery in Nowy Sącz, Poland, has been inhabited by messenger pigeons (at the time when they are also living in cages waiting for the exhibition season). They could be seen and heard through a glass-paned expanse of walls, but they could not be reached. The main passageway of the gallery had been cut off, and display rooms remained empty. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication and an educational programme.

Architectural compositions are barely perceptible interventions into buildings, whose force of impact lies in a combination of media of a radically different weight: monumental and solid, architectural forms and non-figurative sounds. A critical potential of the work is never directly expressed, but transpires in a disclosure of tension between the enduring and the ephemeral, the palpable and the fleeting, the available and the excluded; in its capacity to disrupt a hierarchy of use and a perception of space. Waves and vibrations they produce form an element of reception and a description of reality.

When birds inhabited the space of stairs, the grand, glass cabinet, hollowing the building, was amassing an alien energy. The tightly closed room precluded the energy from breaking out. Sole images which filtered in were fragments of the cityscape, including the winter-hibernated nature. The glass pane isolated and produced a distance. It set a limit between the two suggested realities. The dissonance has also been underscored by an acoustic layer. The transparency and superimposed worlds of the external and the internal image create a visual collage, separating us sonically from the source of sound: a mute image producing a soundless sonic composition, where the image furnishes us with an understanding of what transparency means in reference to sound.

Absolute Beginners / Całkowicie początkujący is a piece about a pre-emptied communication. It is a precise procedure performed on the addressee?s habits, their expectation and tendency to idealization, which are continuously verified by crashes with reality.

The piece was produced thanks to openness and involvement of the local community of homing pigeon fanciers in Nowy Sącz, Poland. [description based on a curatorial text]