Tardigrada botanica - Interior_Winter Reference Image

Tardigrada botanica is an ecological architectural project of utopian flavour, destined to create the structure of a botanical garden on the area of a landfill site in the village of Tumanek near Wyszków (Masovian Voivodeship). The bio-gases emitted there are to provide heat for this colossal structure, so that tropical plants can be grown even in winter.
The construction's organic, oblong shape, with an ellipse plan, was inspired by the microscopic water bear (tardigrade). Tardigrades are transparent invertebrates, highly immune to any kind of conditions they come to live in. In the context of the project, their unprecedented immunity is a metaphor for the unusual power of the ever regenerating life on the planet. The garden, designed by Jarosław Kozakiewicz, consists of a couple of thousand triangles covered with moisture and air-permeable plastic. [A. Markowska]

Tardigrada botanica is an ecological architectural project of utopian flavour, destined to create the structure of a botanical garden on the area of a landfill site in the village of Tumanek near Wyszków (Masovian Voivodeship). The bio-gases emitted there are to provide heat for this colossal structure, so that tropical plants can be grown even in winter.
The construction's organic, oblong shape, with an ellipse plan, was inspired by the microscopic water bear (tardigrade). Tardigrades are transparent invertebrates, highly immune to any kind of conditions they come to live in. In the context of the project, their unprecedented immunity is a metaphor for the unusual power of the ever regenerating life on the planet. The garden, designed by Jarosław Kozakiewicz, consists of a couple of thousand triangles covered with moisture and air-permeable plastic.
Tardigrada botanica is a summary of the artist's sculpting and architectural experiments, following the trend of bio-architecture (designing architecture that imitates forms of nature and/or warrants the use of renewable sources of energy), as well as the so-called sustainable art movement, i.e. art promoting sustainability. This stylistically diverse trend is concerned with degraded terrains, and it fights for a new image and identity for the post-communist and post-colonial areas. By the artist's design, and through the use of modern solutions, the degraded area would become a place generating positive changes – both in the devastated “body” of earth as well as in the psyche of the citizens. It was Monika Bakke who indicated the sensual, intimate relations built by Kozakiewicz, between the body of earth and humans, stressing the fact that they bestow new nature upon people. Moreover, the piece relates to the neo-avant-garde projects of the 1970s, to the land-art concepts of using landfills (Robert Smithson), finding its place within the broad trend of exploring artistic achievements of the preceding generation. The probability of a potential realization relates to the fact that the project of the Tardigrada botanica dome originated in cooperation with a constructor. Thus, it is sometimes difficult to judge whether the most crucial element of Kozakiewicz's output is the realization itself, or perhaps the provocation and the focus on a particular social situation in Poland, in a specific historical moment, as well as on the opportunities that come from linking art with science. [A. Markowska]