Co-financed by the Greater Poland Voivodeship Government
Self Defense – Workshops
We invite you to a two-day workshop with Karolina Żyniewicz. These sessions are an integral part of her ongoing project, *Self Defense*.
The *Self Defense* project draws inspiration from plant defense strategies, which can be adapted by humans as a form of self-defense in the broadest sense.
In the face of contemporary global threats, Żyniewicz sees an urgent need to initiate a dialogue on defense practices—both physical and psychological—grounded in knowledge of the natural world.
Such knowledge, like any other, carries ethical responsibility. As Paracelsus noted: the dose makes the poison.
The project explores how plants classified as poisonous utilize toxins in their life cycles and interspecies relationships, as well as how they can be used—or misused—by humans. Work on the project focuses on the thresholds and dosages that mark the boundary between therapeutic potential and danger—the point where a plant substance shifts from a protective agent to a lethal tool.
The workshop will be divided into two three-hour sessions:
Day 1: Fieldwork—a walk to locate plants with toxic potential. Preliminary plant identification will be facilitated by the FloraIncognita app. A small sample will be collected from each identified plant, and an extract will be obtained by grinding the material in a mortar. This extract will then be used to soak a length of white thread.
Day 2: Creating symbolic shields. The threads prepared the previous day will be used to embroider an image of the specific plant from which the extract was derived. Registration required: edukacja@palcdabrowski.pl
Maximum of 10 participants. Age limit: 16+.
Produced with the support of a scholarship from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage.
Dr. Karolina Żyniewicz (PL/DE) is a Berlin-based artist, researcher, and educator—a liminal being existing and operating between various contexts and disciplines. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Visual Arts at the Władysław Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź and holds a PhD in Cultural Studies (awarded through the transdisciplinary Nature-Culture program at the Faculty of "Artes Liberales," University of Warsaw). While pursuing art-research projects rooted primarily in biotechnology and medicine, she also conducts ethnographic and autoethnographic observations. Her work emphasizes the epistemic and pedagogical dimensions of art. Between 2016 and 2018, she collaborated with the education departments of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, leading workshops and museum lessons for general audiences as well as accessibility-focused sessions for the visually impaired and the Deaf community. She incorporates these educational experiences into her own liminal practice. Her work frequently addresses life and death in a broad sense, exploring their social and biological dimensions. She is a member of the Good Death Institute (Instytut Dobrej Śmierci) in Warsaw. Her practice is strongly process- and collaboration-oriented; consequently, she frequently participates in residencies—such as the European Media Art Platform (EMAP) at Kontejner Zagreb or Coalesce in Buffalo, NY—and group projects, including the Stretching Senses School organized by the Humboldt Cluster of Excellence "Matters of Activity." She has exhibited internationally at venues such as Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin, Kontejner Zagreb, and the Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdańsk. Additionally, she serves as a reviewer for the journal *Technoetic Arts*.