A thick net to fill up an empty pit

Letter from Zakole Wawerskie wetland to Gillbach River
2023
Reeds from Zakole Wawerskie formed into a figure of Marzanna, audio piece, 2 channel video, notebook
as ZAKOLE, coauthors: Zuza Derlacz, Pola Salicka, Olga Roszkowska

A little shorter than 30km, Gillbach river was once springing in the Bethelem Forest – nowadays she emerges directly from a pipe located at the back of the Niederaussem powerplant. Reshaped, heated up and dislocated through industrial transformation, her waterbody deposits extractive history of the region, carrying it continuously through it.  Drawing analogies from the past and for the future, we are interpreting a dialogue between waters of Zakole Wawerskie, a wetland in Warsaw transformed through agriculture and urban development with those of Gillbach river. In a sisterly tone based on pain empathy to the experience of Gillbach’s waterbody, Zakole is not only sharing its own story, but also lending knowledge of mourning rituals, seeing them as a necessary collective act against denial, forgetting and helplessness. Instead of bargaining with the logic of extraction, through magical acts we escape it all together, sourcing from a different vocabulary – one that is familiar beyond species and which expresses shared agency of water, plants, peoples, land and seasonality in their effort for healing and rewilding.  Leaning into the magic of abundance specific to the current season as well as to central-eastern europe we are activating the figure of Marzanna, commonly built, burnt and drowned in the river at spring solstice. Reed is introduced as its building matter and main physical agent of this act – an odd, but powerful cosmopolitic multi-being, lent from Zakole to Gillbach. During the ritual that will be performed at the riverbank of the Rhine in the last week of March it will change its form and purpose to end up as ashes flowing downstream. Spreading a wish for forming new alliances to overgrow the old wounds, it is magically re-organising the post-mining land for its feral upturn.