Pride and appreciation to Katarzyna Kowalczyk, a doctoral student at our ICT & Design PhD school, who was selected to present her research at the ELIA Academy 2025 in Oslo, Norway.
Her presentation, based on her doctoral project on feminism in design and the cultural role of decoration, explores how traditional Polish folk art - particularly decorative practices carried out by women - functions as a form of resistance, identity and intergenerational transmission of knowledge. Katarzyna analyzes these practices from the perspective of visual communication, showing how they have been historically silenced or erased during periods of political conflict, and how they continue to be overlooked in contemporary design discourse.
During ELIA, she will present a multimedia performance combining storytelling, archival materials and sound, using her own family history and field research as a narrative thread. Her work is a reflection on the possibility of re-evaluating decoration as a critical pedagogical tool and an expression of cultural memory in the context of life-integrated learning.
