NELLA PIATEK

A a multimedia chronicle of a coven, materialised through performances, films and haunted operating systems. Through the lens of media archaeology, hauntology, and eco-feminist thought, Nella reflects on how the practice of anarchiving can offer insight into the myths and politics of cultural, ecological and digital archives.

The alter-ego, Xris and the clan of cyberwitches and eco-priestesses, offers a perspective on how sites can be perceived as living archives. Anarchiving or ‘re-animation’ of these archives offers the opportunity to unveil the forgotten, often hidden narratives and failed futures that deserve existence as an alternative reality. Such a perspective offers a vessel to embody a voice against the consumptive relationship of the human species with nature and a figure that challenges the cyborgist behaviour already present in our everyday interactions with information technology.

2026

Performance Lecture Collaboration

Through postindustrial landscapes to contemporary data infrastructures ︎

Industrial and computational infrastructures are not neutral technological developments, but ideological systems that reorganise agency, ecology, and temporality under capitalism. Through postindustrial landscapes and contemporary data infrastructures, this performance lecture explores how modernity continuously imposes alien architectures onto communities and environments while simultaneously producing myths of progress.

Collaboration between
Nella Piatek x Melissa Schwarz

This project was commissioned by Xeno Futurism  as part of the symposium In/Human Infrastructures at Alt_R, May 2026

2025

Short Film Collaboration

An eco-feminist journey across Dartmoor’s mythical sites ︎

Forest, Stone, Flesh is an eco-feminist journey across the mythical sites of Dartmoor National Park in Cornwall. Through the process of anarchiving, the body is used as a material to access histories and to activate the few locations which carry myths that centre around women and slow violence. Anarchiving relates to the idea that sites can be understood as living archives; as such the film ‘re-animates’ local narratives to imagine alternative realities. The film is a ritual performance in which two travellers journey across the site’s past, present and future. Through the lenses of hauntology and post-humanist thought, the history and mythologies of the area are re-examined in connection to an eco-feminist approach.

Collaboration between
Nella Piatek x Melissa Schwarz

This project was created as part of the Mayes Creative Residency: Creative Inspiration From An Ancient Landscape funded by the Lottery Fund. 

2025

On-site Installation Collaboration

A methodological and conceptual tool that treats the act of scarring as a an intervention to reclaim what is typically hidden, dismissed, or pathologised ︎

Scarring is a site-specific evolving process that uses the act of scarring as both method and metaphor; an intervention that reclaims what is often hidden, dismissed, or pathologised. Centring a waste pipe as subject and collaborator, the work explores its presence as a scar: a visible glitch in architectural systems that speaks to histories of erasure, marginalisation, and resilience.

Collaboration between
Nella Piatek x Andrea Cheng

This project was created as part of the Ethereal Maison Residency

2025

On-site Installation and Performance