A fox has lived in the Royal Baths of Warsaw for years now— probably more than one. I have been seeing roe deer there for  over fifteen years. A badger moved in quite recently. He was even  given a name, selected in a democratic competition by humans:  Jan Chryzostom w Pasek (a wordplay on the Polish phrase for  “striped” and the name of a famous memoir writer). A raccoon sometimes scurries through the Muranów housing estate.  Wild boar have moved into the Białołęka and Międzylesie suburbs; I recently came across one near the Royal Baths, and then  there is the one that runs straight down the middle of Powiśle’s  streets. Not to mention the bear that recently took a stroll through  the city of Przemyśl. Back in Warsaw, goosanders sometimes pass  me as I walk between Legia Stadium and the embassies of Korea  and Japan. Or am I the one passing them? No—it must be them  passing me, because, as those clever scientists—ornithologists,  in other words—tell us, their apparently carefree stroll represents nothing less than the processes of synurbisation and  synanthropisation. Which means that Warsaw’s celebrated  goosanders have not always been here.

They did not always breed in the Royal Baths, nor did they always  follow their famous migration route, culminating in a spectacular crossing of the busy, six-lane Wisłostrada thoroughfare.  Goosanders arrived here in around 1987. This year—some forty  years later—we have all suddenly realised that the road crossing is not the most dangerous stage of their journey. Goosanders and their chicks face still graver adventures along the way,  not all of them ending happily. Consider the dramatic story of  the ravenous catfish which, in a single gulp, swallowed a mother  goosander leading ten chicks towards the Vistula. Yet their adventures can also be profoundly moving. Consider another mother  goosander, christened Josephina, who adopted those ten orphans  despite already having ten young of her own—without so much  as blinking; well, perhaps with the faintest narrowing of the eyes. Could today’s domestic cats and dogs have undergone a similar  process tens of thousands of years ago—the process now beginning among present-day badgers, roe deer and goosanders? Will  the goosander become a household pet thousands, perhaps millions, of years from now? Behold the synanthropisation of Warsaw’s goosanders at the very moment it begins to bud!

When the idea for a project about goosanders first came to  me, I had no notion that their migration routes—or even their  walks—were serious processes observed and named by scientists.  I had assumed that the Polish word nurogęś denotes a hybrid:  a cross between a duck and a goose. Fortunately, the science  soon put me right. Yet the spirit of the hybrid still hovers over  our audiovisual installation, Goosanderopolis. The process known  as synanthropisation (the adaptation of living organisms—especially animals and plants—to life in environments transformed  by human activity, whereby synanthropic organisms learn to function in close proximity to people and exploit the conditions  created by civilisation) itself suggests hybridity. It is perhaps not  so much a goose–duck cross—the goosander is simply a sawbill,  Mergus merganser, not really a duck and certainly not a goose— as a human–animal hybrid; here, specifically, a human–bird one,  and a hybrid of the worlds of civilisation and nature.

Hybrid thinking, it turns out, is characteristic not only of humanity but of nature itself. To survive, to create something greater, to  cope with difficult conditions, to improve one’s chances of a better  life or to solve a problem, the answer often lies in an unexpected  combination—in hybrid thought or action. Was that not precisely what the lichens thought when they settled on the concrete  paving blocks of the terraces around Warsaw’s Muranów Cinema? “Perhaps we shall fare better here than where we usually  live?” And just like that, the lichens coloured the surroundings of  Muranów Cinema a murky green. Art—the act of creation itself,  and what it brings forth—is one of the most extraordinary manifestations of hybrid thinking.

Goosanderopolis is itself a hybrid installation. It took shape at  the meeting point of many ideas, phenomena and forms that  might appear contradictory or far removed from one another— and through the encounter of very different personalities. Most  importantly, it emerged from the cross-fertilisation and fusion of  the imaginations and creative ideas of artists and children: that it  embodies their union. You will therefore encounter extraordinary  figures here—beings that are at once human and goosander, and  at the same time neither. They are simply something entirely new:  a new species. Goosanderfolk, perhaps? Homo merganser?

Goosanderopolis is not merely a metaphor for a city, or for a space  in which nature, civilisation and homo civilis coexist harmoniously, each adapting to the others with care and close attention. It is a human–goosander hybrid: a metaphor for the union  of an adult artist’s imagination and that of a child, unfettered  by the conventions and pressures of civilisation. Come and dive  into this hybrid world!  

Anna Kierkosz