Anka Wandzel
Residency as part of the Common Field project.
Anka Wandzel is a writer, translator, cultural researcher, interlocutor, and mother of two children. She regularly publishes in Dwutygodnik.com, OKO.press, Ładne Bebe, and the monthly Znak, where she runs her own series Plans from Around the Corner about urban ruderal vegetation. She has previously published in Teksty Drugie, Res Publica Nowa, and on Noizz.pl.
In her writing and everyday practice, she explores the intertwining of the environment, care work, and contemporary art. At the intersection of these areas, she searches for hope for the future and ways to survive together in the era of climate change. In 2024, she received an arts grant from the capital city of Warsaw for a project dedicated to this, as part of which she publishes the newsletter The Art of Survival, and writes a book about the agency of urban plants and the invisible care work behind the scenes of artistic projects by Elżbieta Jabłońska, Cecylia Malik, Joanna Rajkowska, Karolina Grzywnowicz, Diana Lelonek, Teresa Murak, and ZAKOLE. The book will be published in 2025 by Karakter. In 2016-2022, she did her PhD in the anthropology of ecological art at the Institute of Polish Culture at the Universiy of Warsaw, for which she received the Zachęta The National Gallery of Art / GESSEL Foundation scholarship. From 2018 to 2019, she was an assistant to Agnieszka Tarasiuk at Królikarnia, where she co-organized exhibitions, conferences, and book projects. Since 2023, she has been a member of the BRIDGE Cooperative Urban Farm in Siekierki, which cultivates wastelands and a local, inter-species community that can be cultivated.
