Agáta Marzec is an interdisciplinary researcher working across ecology, photography, and media. Her practice connects environmental science, artistic research, and pedagogy to explore how environments, knowledge, and situated relations shape one another. She co-develops the Towards Atmospheric Care project and is an associate lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts, where she teaches On the Commons and Ecology in the Expanded Field.
Research interests:
My practice approaches ecology not as a fixed category, but as a field where environmental research, pedagogy, and aesthetic practice intersect. I draw on my dual background in ecology and photography&new media to engage with methods of knowledge-making, on pedagogy to explore the collective reproduction of knowledge and how it shapes our worldviews, and on artistic practice to cultivate sensory perception and new imaginaries of interconnected socioecological life.
Over the past five years, this orientation has developed through three main strands of work. First, I have been co-developing the long-term project Towards Atmospheric Care (with visual artist Hanna Husberg), which explores air as a naturalcultural phenomenon situated at the intersection of media, science, and politics. Through installations, audiovisual essays, lecture-performances, workshops, and publications, the project positions atmosphere as relational and entangled with uneven social contexts, multispecies ecologies, and historically situated practices of care. Its cases—As the Air Became This Number (2017–20), From Aurora to Geospace (2018–21), and the ongoing New Electronic Ecosystem—have generated works such as Often People Ask How Birds Are Affected by the Air, From Aurora to Geospace, and A is for Aurora, C is for Care. Second, I am committed to developing interdisciplinary pedagogies that reimagine ecology as inseparable from social justice and the material power of imaginaries. I have designed and taught courses such as Ecology in the Expanded Field (Urban Studies and Architecture, Estonian Academy of Arts), which examines how ecology and aesthetics mutually reshape one another, and On the Commons: Land, Knowledge and Practice (with Sean Tyler), which combines artistic-activist methods with collective learning. The latter engages partners beyond academia—including Nida Art Colony and Massia Officinale Residency—while asking how art and academic institutions themselves need to transform if they are to truly support practices of commoning. Third, my practice has been shaped by the experience of working as a primary carer to a young child. While it brings interruption and irregularity, it has also allowed me to learn to work through slowness, unlearning, and a deeper attention to socioecological reproduction as a vital necessity. Rather than accepting the division between mother, artist, and ecologist, I attempt to weave these positions together through care as a connective tool. Traces of this ongoing process can be seen in my essay Notes on Rewilding the Botanical Gaze (Finnish Bioart Society) and my earlier photo-essay On Forest Walking and Ecologies of Care (Forest as a Journal).
