The Self Defense project by Karolina Żyniewicz is inspired by Noah Whiteman’s book Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature’s Toxins—From Spices to Vices (as well as other similar publications), which demonstrates how many organisms develop defensive strategies that can be adapted by humans as a broadly understood form of self-defense.
In the face of contemporary global threats, Karolina sees an urgent need to engage in dialogue about defensive practices—both physical and psychological—grounded in knowledge of nature.
Such knowledge, like any other, entails ethical responsibility. As Paracelsus observed: the dose makes the poison.
She is interested in how plants considered poisonous use toxins within their life cycles and interspecies relationships, and how these toxins may be used—or misused—by humans.
Her interests focus on the thresholds and doses that mark the boundary between therapeutic potential and danger, where a plant substance shifts from a protective agent to a deadly tool.
The Self Defense project develops simultaneously on several levels:
1. Work with source materials and consultations with botanists, phytosociologists, and chemists.
2. Workshop-based activities that symbolically refer to the folk tradition of knowledge transmission in rural communities—knowledge once held by our grandmothers and great-grandmothers about the power of plants and other organisms—incorporating embroidery as a craft of quiet resistance (supported by the recollections of women in shelters during wartime).
3. The creation of a performative installation of resistance. This part is inspired by a multisensory experience in a shelter in the town of Kranj, Slovenia, and by a story heard there about how women, through sewing and embroidery, fought fear and tried to maintain a semblance of normality for their children while remaining in the shelter, experiencing air raids and bombings with their entire bodies. Creating the installation requires the use of sounds from the shelter as well as vibrations. An essential element of the installation is also an alarm instrument based on measuring threshold doses of a given plant-derived substance (dose per kilogram of body weight). The first experiments with solutions intended for use in the installation took place during the AreHolland residency in Enschede.
Project is supported by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
