14 Ekim 2009 Çarşamba

Tardigrada Botanica (2009) Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz

This project provides for the creation of a botanical garden on the sire of a former waste dump near the village of Tumanek, Wyszków area, central Poland. The concept stems from the general issue, long explored by Kozakiewicz, of man’s relationships with his environment and the idea of revitalising degraded (in the broadest sense of the word) spaces and areas. The site of the waste dump, which was created in the late 1960s, would thus be returned to the environment and to man by means of creating here a unique tropical park. Moreover, the now disused waste dump – the effect of man’s anti-ecological activities –would become a ‘host’for the projected garden, the biogases emitted by it used to heat the park’s facilities. The garden, where tropical plants would be grown, would also have scientific, didactic, popularising and leisure functions. Jobs would be created for the inhabitants of Tumanek, Lucynów, Rybienko and other villages in the area. The main part of the project is a structure whose form has been inspired by the bodily shape of an invertebrate called the water bear (Tardigrade). It is a dome consisting of several thousand semi-transparent ETFE-plastic triangles that are moisture- and air-permeable. The 40 metre-tall structure is built on the plane of an almost exact ellipsis, its longer diameter some 140 metres long. Inside the structure, a humid biome of a surface of approximately 1 hectare would be created. The water bear is not a random element here –to the contrary, the microscopic invertebrate’s presence is actually symbolic and of crucial significance for the whole concept. The Tardigrade is the most resilient of all living creatures known to man (in a state of suspended animation called cryptobiosis it can survive temperatures ranging from –°C, withstand radiation 1,000 stronger than any other animal, it can also survive over 10 years without water, and even survive in the cosmic vacuum), so it can symbolise the power of natural processes, as opposed to the environment-degrading activities of man.

construction: Sebastian Szafarczyk, visualisation: Piotr Twardo

Water bears (Tardigradae) –a phylum of microscopic, segmented animals with eight legs that occur over the entire world, from the high Himalayas to the deep sea and from the polar regions to the equator. At last 700 Tardigrade species have been identified. They are 0.05-1.2 mm in length, and have a body with four segments (not counting the head), four pairs of legs without joints, and feet with claws or toes. The cuticle contains chitin and is moulted. They are transparent, colourless, and most are phytophagous (plant eaters) or bacteriophagous, but some are predatory. Although some species are parthenogenetic, males and females are usually present, each with a single gonad. Some Tardigrade species have as many as about 40,000 cells in each adult’s body, others have far fewer.









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