Buenos Aires, CheLA – Art residency, January 2026

Complementing by Karolina Pielak and Zuzanna Smigielska | Videos & Movies on Vimeo

“Complementing” is an interdisciplinary residency project by Polish visual artists Zuzanna Śmigielska and Karolina Pielak.
The project explores how different artistic sensibilities—intuitive, emotional and research-based—can coexist and reflect one another. Through spatial objects combined with video projections, the artists seek to reflect on the relationships between inner experience and external reality, intuition and observation, organic matter and the digital image.
The starting point for the project was pampas grass (Cortaderia), a plant native to Argentina and widely used in Poland as ‘exotic’ decorative flora. This reversed cultural circulation became a metaphor for displacement, transformation and the shifting meanings of nature depending on context. The artists seek to examine the cultural and ecological significance of pampas grass both in Argentina—where the natural landscapes of the pampas have been transformed by agriculture—and in Poland, where the plant has been aestheticised and separated from its original environment.