About reclaiming

Words: Weronika Murek

Photo: Michalina Kuczyńska

In December 2025, at the invitation of the ARTeria Foundation, I had the opportunity to take part in a GreenCCircle project meeting held in Venice. From my perspective – as an artist, editor, and someone working at the intersection of literature and theatre – this initiative offered an invaluable opportunity to deepen, or perhaps more accurately, to begin building my green competences in relation to cultural practice.

Over the past decade, I have worked with a wide range of cultural institutions across Poland, and those experiences have varied greatly. In some places, environmental action was dismissed outright as unnecessary, too complicated, or simply too time-consuming to be worth implementing. Elsewhere, ecological awareness functioned primarily as a branding exercise. Sometimes, attempts to “go green” stemmed less from environmental commitment than from practical necessity: limited budgets encouraged the recycling of stage sets, costumes, and production materials.

The conversations I had in Venice with fellow artists and cultural practitioners returned to me several weeks later, when the poet and writer Barbara Klicka and I began discussing how we might rethink and expand our own artistic practice. We found ourselves drawn almost immediately to the idea of recycling – not only of material objects, but also of things far more fragile and intangible.

We spoke about the market’s relentless pursuit of novelty. About the pressure to publish another book every year. About the widespread belief that nothing is more valuable than the next theatrical premiere. Contemporary culture seems intent on convincing us that something is good simply because it is new. Ever since someone conceived the idea of assigning products an expiry date – after which they would become unusable, or even “legally dead”, no longer repairable or exchangeable – the wheel driving industry, including the creative industries, has never really stopped turning.

A similar imperative to innovate – or at the very least to produce the new, fuelled by the dopamine rush of acquiring and creating ever more novelty – shapes the circulation of ideas, artworks, and cultural forms. New has ceased to be a neutral adjective describing something recently created. It has become a value in itself – a fetish, almost. We abandon books that are still alive and ideas that still carry meaning, as though the labels debut, premiere, or for the first time alone were enough to promise significance, relieving us of the need even to read the book or attend the performance.

This led us to wonder whether our own creative practice might open up a space in which we could explore how what has been abandoned, deemed worn out, or simply overlooked might continue to exist. The irresistible pull of the word new reveals itself even here: it is surprisingly difficult to describe any activity – even one rooted in recycling – without resorting to it. But perhaps the point is not to grant something a new existence at all. Perhaps what matters is allowing it to exist within a different context.

Following this line of thought, we began asking ourselves another question: if we are just as wasteful with intangible culture as we are with material goods, how might we resist that tendency? Where should we place ladders, and where should we press our ears against the wall?

Several years ago, in an interview, the Polish writer Dorota Masłowska observed how our relationship with books has changed: we no longer want to read – we want to have read. A text becomes something completed, checked off a list and, consequently, disposable. We returned to that conversation, and to what Nicolas Bourriaud wrote about this very process when he proposed the idea of postproduction: an artistic practice that does not create forms from scratch, but instead reprogrammes those already circulating through culture, shifting them towards new forms of sharing and reuse.

So we thought: if we keep producing novelties, consuming books simply to tick them off, discarding texts we consider unsuccessful, treating author events as one-off experiences for rapid consumption – and then forgetting all of it just as quickly – perhaps our first task is to find ways of working seriously with what has already been rejected, overlooked, or deemed obsolete.

We decided to borrow the vocabulary of the circular economy and apply it to cultural practice. From the outset, we knew we did not want this to become merely an elegant metaphor. We wanted it to become a working method. We began thinking through the ideas of recycling, upcycling, downcycling, composting, and fermentation, asking what their cultural equivalents might be and how they could be translated into concrete workshop formats and artistic practices.

Within ODZYSK (RECLAIM), the collective we founded together with Barbara Klicka and Aleksandra Andrzejewska, we have been exploring these ideas in practice by attempting to:

• reclaim recycling through Wymianki (“Exchanges”) – a series of cultural gatherings inspired both by the Human Library and by community clothing swaps, informal events where people meet, talk, and exchange things they no longer use. Building on this idea of exchange, we created Wzmianki (“Mentions”): gatherings devoted to stories, creative work, and literature. There are story exchanges, creative exchanges, which provide writers and artists with an opportunity to test their work in front of others, and literary exchanges, where participants share beloved short literary forms by reading them aloud;

• reclaim upcycling through the Bad Book Club – moderated discussions devoted to books that, for one reason or another, have fallen into obscurity. Perhaps they were dismissed as mediocre, derivative, or simply appeared at the wrong moment. Rather than correcting them, we want to recover them as raw material: to transform rather than improve them, rereading them in ways that reveal possibilities previously overlooked;

• reclaim the very idea of creative writing schools by transforming them into schools of creative reading. Our aim is to restore careful attention, concentration, and responsiveness to literary texts, while exploring how reading itself can nourish and shape our own writing.

• reclaim fermentation through our SLOW Author Encounters. Rather than offering a single meeting with a writer or artist, we propose a slower, more sustained process of getting to know their work through a series of conversations, readings, shared film screenings, and workshops. We invite one creator, but their presence unfolds over several stages or weeks. Each gathering focuses on a different aspect of their work or personality, giving participants the rare opportunity to develop a genuine relationship with an author they admire, rather than encountering them only once.

• reclaim composting through speculative design workshops inspired by Speculative Everything by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Our ambition is to “compost” reality and conventional design alike, transforming them into prototypes of possible futures.

• reclaim downcycling through sensory walks. Here, the idea of downcycling operates at a deeper conceptual level. Instead of constantly seeking richer, fuller, and more stimulating experiences, we ask what might happen if we deliberately reduced perception – limiting our experience of the world to a single sense – and explored how such constraint might activate imagination and reshape perception.

Ultimately, what motivates us is neither nostalgia nor a longing for the retro. We want to think of recycling as an alternative—a modest stronghold of resistance against the relentless fetishisation of the new. And, following Dunne and Raby, we want to explore how we might widen the cone of possibilities: to imagine a future for culture that does not have to pass exclusively through the narrow bottleneck of ever more premieres and debuts.