The WRO Art Center is one of the institutions that recipients of the Gaude Polonia Programme, administered by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, can choose as the location for their six-month creative residency. The programme is intended for young artists and translators of Polish literature from Central and Eastern European countries, primarily Belarus and Ukraine.

In the first half of 2026, we will host Daria Syvakos, an artist and researcher from Ukraine. She graduated as Meisterschülerin from the Berlin University of the Arts in the class of New Media and Experimental Film led by Prof. Dr. Hito Steyerl and Prof. Mykola Ridnyi, and holds a master’s degree in economics. Her work has been presented at Ars Electronica, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Kyiv Biennial, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, and Documenta 15, among others. She previously worked as a research associate at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence Problems and has taught at the Berlin University of the Arts. Following the Russian occupation of her hometown in 2014, Daria has lived and worked across shifting geographies.

Her work examines hidden infrastructures – energy networks, irrigation grids, carceral regimes – and their effects on bodies, memory, and land. Daria works with the concept of disaster rehearsals to study how collapse is engineered as a tool of control and to explore strategies of resistance. Using game engines and 3D modelling, she creates animations and simulations that reconstruct altered or destroyed spaces. Daria’s projects follow the life cycles of built environments, the forces that sustain or dismantle them, and potential futures where new life forms and collective practices emerge from the remnants of imperial violence.

This is how Daria Syvakos describes her project:

My work in Wrocław will combine the history of cybernetics and computer science in Poland, Ukraine, and Germany with the long and ongoing history of the mining industries and material infrastructure. I am interested in how computing, automation, and technology management systems developed in parallel with mining and industrial production, and how these relationships function today in the context of policies on critical raw materials and algorithmic forms of control.

An important element of the project for me is to bring to the fore less visible contributions to the history of technology, especially the work of women in mathematics, programming, and the sciences, such as Kateryna Yushchenko and Helena Rasiowa. I treat these figures as part of an alternative genealogy of technology, combining cybernetics, the history of matter, and new media practices.

During my residency, I plan to develop this project as research-oriented work in the field of new media, working with archives and historical materials related to Wrocław and the broader contexts of Poland, Ukraine, and Germany.