Karolina Grzywnowicz

Green Belt (in progress) is an art documentary about “contaminated landscapes” and the ways in which territories are marked and controlled through vegetation. Landscape has long served as a tool of ideology and power — a medium for projecting and realising imperial imagination. By introducing plants from their native ecosystems, colonisers create a surrogate environment: a scenography subordinated to the new regime and masking its violence.

Focusing on various weaponised species — including pines and eucalyptus trees — Green Belt investigates the politics of planting and the role of plants in processes of displacement and domination. At the same time, the project engages in a speculative reimagining of these forests: exploring how they might shift from instruments of control to agents of care, solidarity, and resistance. The film gestures toward possible futures in which colonial structures are dismantled and reoriented, and plants previously used to camouflage violence begin to serve the needs of oppressed communities.