Karolina Pawelczyk

Cosmic Grass is a two-channel video installation that functions as a critical reconstruction of a forgotten cultural artifact: a 1986 environmentalist children's music revue of the same name. Originally staged in the Upper Silesian coal-mining town of Knurów, the revue presented a story of ecological salvation. This project exhumes the original’s profound central contradiction: it was an ecological fable entirely funded and promoted by the local coal mine, a state-controlled entity. The performance, once applauded by the highest officials of socialist Poland, has since vanished from cultural memory, leaving behind an ideological ghost. My work does not simply re-stage this historical curiosity but repoliticizes it, using the revue as a lens to investigate the entanglement of state power, national identity, and fossil fuel dependency, both in the late-socialist 1980s and in contemporary Poland. The project dismantles the naive optimism of the original by reframing it as a speculative, fictionalized tale with two narrators: one human, and one non-human—the water itself. Adopting the uncanny, soothing aesthetic of an old-school television bedtime story, the work creates a dialogue between the past and the present, the human and the non-human, the archival and the imagined. Filmed on location at the edge of the Turów lignite mine—a current site of intense political and environmental conflict between Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany—the installation places the historical narrative directly into a contemporary landscape of crisis. The original synth-pop songs from the 1986 revue are merged with new, unsettling soundscapes and a contemporary narrative. This sonic tapestry is juxtaposed with archival footage and recent quotes from Polish President Andrzej Duda, who has championed coal as a "strategic resource" essential to national identity. Ultimately, Cosmic Grass uses speculative fabulation and artistic reconstruction as a method of inquiry. It questions how state-sponsored narratives are produced and how they decay, leaving behind complicated legacies. The work moves beyond nostalgia to explore how artistic practice can resist extractivist politics, challenge the weaponization of cultural memory, and reimagine collective agency in spaces defined by systemic failure. It is an exploration of how to stay with the trouble, both of the past and of the present.