Warsaw Under Construction 18. Sovereign and Fed

The eighteenth edition of the Warsaw Under Construction festival ran at the Museum of Modern Art from 30 August to 27 September 2026, with 27 free events in the museum, across Warsaw and in Mazovia. Its theme was food sovereignty: where the city’s food comes from, and whether Warsaw could feed itself from its own region.

Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej on the exhibition:

The main theme of WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION 18 in 2026 is food sovereignty, which is becoming an important element in contemporary urban development strategies. In a world where large supply systems and energy policies are losing stability, and global supply chains are increasingly disrupted, cities capable of self-regulation and based on local production networks are the ones that can survive and develop. Warsaw, with its historical agricultural background and still existing cultivated areas, has a real opportunity to become a laboratory for such a model.

A sovereign and fed city is one where agriculture constitutes one of the main elements of urban planning. Countryside and city are not opposites, but parts of a single ecosystem. Urban cultivated areas - agricultural land, allotment gardens, orchards, home gardens, and community crops - form its structure just like roads, squares, and buildings. Agriculture penetrates into the very center of the city, and food becomes the bond connecting its economy, culture, and daily life. Realizing this vision requires developing agricultural areas surrounding the city - the so-called nourishing zone, from which crops for residents’ needs originate. This zone extends approximately 80-100 kilometers from Warsaw, but its elements are also present within the city: in the form of traditional ground crops, greenhouses, hydroponic systems, or mushroom cultivation in basements and garages. What is local forms the foundation of the city’s self-sufficiency and resilience.

Warsaw is built on fertile land. As late as the first half of the 20th century, its outskirts consisted of a belt of villages and orchards - cultivated areas that fed the center. Today, many of these places have disappeared under development, but traces of the former nourishing zone are still present in the city’s space: in street names, in allotment gardens, in home orchards, and in the memory of residents. Returning to these themes today does not mean nostalgia, but an awareness that the city’s development has always depended on soil, water, and people who knew how to work with them.

The festival also does not propose a vision of a distant future, but practical answers to the present - a project for a city that feeds itself from the region’s resources and integrates agriculture, horticulture, and communal cooking and eating into the basic circulation of urban life. At the same time, it is an invitation to look at Warsaw from the perspective of its metabolism - how it nourishes itself, how it breathes, how it manages energy and matter. Food here becomes a starting point for a discussion about the relationships between people, nature, and infrastructure, and the question of food becomes a question about the whole - about space, economy, and responsibility for the place where one lives.

Bazar Egipska, Aleksandra Bilewicz, Agnieszka Chołuj, Maja Demska, Agata Dudek-Wojewoda, Aneta Englot, Monika Fedorczuk, FLOW (Agnieszka Brzeżańska & Ewa Ciepielewska), Tomasz Fudala, Anna Galas-Kosil, Agnieszka Gąsiorek, Stanisława Golinowska, Ryszard Jaśkowski, Gosia Kępa, Michał Kuź, Grzegorz Lewicki, Maciej Łepkowski, Katarzyna Maciąg, Ludwik Majlert, Sébastien Marot, PIOTROWSKA / SZCZĘŚNIAK (Sara Piotrowska, Maciej Szczęśniak), Łukasz Radziszewski, Ryszard Rawski, Adam Rogala, Jan Sajdak, Sebastian Sarzyński, Ewa Smuk-Stratenwerth, Spółdzielcza Farma MOST, Łukasz Maurycy Stanaszek, Carolyn Steel, Spółdzielcza Farma MOST, Stowarzyszenie Dla Nas, Wiktor Strumiłło, vgtbl.pl, Anka Wandzel, Warszawski Rolno-Spożywczy Rynek Hurtowy „Bronisze”, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Małgorzata Zarzycka, Zbiory, Patryk Zduńczyk, Izabela Zygmunt

What to expect

The starting point was the idea of a nourishing zone - a belt of agricultural land stretching roughly 80-100 kilometres around Warsaw, supplying the crops that reach the city’s residents. The festival showed that parts of this zone also operate inside the city: traditional ground crops, greenhouses, hydroponic systems, mushroom cultivation in basements and garages, allotment gardens, orchards and home gardens. The historical thread went back to the first half of the 20th century, when a belt of villages and orchards on the city’s edges fed the centre. Much of that land now lies under development, but traces survive in street names, allotment gardens and the memory of residents.

The organisers were explicit that this was not nostalgia, but an awareness that the city’s growth has always depended on soil, water and the people who knew how to work with them. The list of participants was broad and mixed: artists, researchers, architects, farming practitioners and institutions. Among them were FLOW (Agnieszka Brzeżańska and Ewa Ciepielewska), the duo PIOTROWSKA / SZCZĘŚNIAK, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Wiktor Strumiłło, Sébastien Marot and Carolyn Steel, alongside Bazar Egipska, Spółdzielcza Farma MOST and the Warsaw Wholesale Agri-Food Market „Bronisze”. Communal cooking and eating featured too, treated as part of the basic circulation of urban life.

The organisers proposed looking at Warsaw through its metabolism: how it feeds itself, how it breathes, how it manages energy and matter. The festival ran from 30 August to 27 September 2026. Events took place in the museum’s building at Marszałkowska 103, in the city centre by Plac Centralny (the arcades, the auditorium and the forum), and out where city and countryside meet: community gardens, urban farms, markets and bazaars, wholesale markets, grocery shops and restaurants.

Every event was free, thanks to the museum’s partnership with Audi. The schedule of all 27 events remains on the festival page on the museum’s website, where the museum uses the English title “Warsaw Under Construction 18: Sovereign and Well Fed”.

What the press says

• Polskie Radio Trójka (Polish national radio, 11.08.2026, Izabela Dudkiewicz, based on MSN material): the preview stressed the new format - instead of one central exhibition, a dispersed network of events in the museum, across Warsaw and in the Mazovia region, with Urzecze, the historic farming belt south of the city, as one of the key sites - trojka.polskieradio.pl
• Polskie Radio Jedynka (24.08.2026, compiled by Katarzyna Karaś): the piece asked whether Warsaw could feed itself and picked out a trip to the „Bronisze” wholesale market and a lecture on old apple varieties from the Polish Academy of Sciences Botanical Garden in Powsin - jedynka.polskieradio.pl
• TVN Warszawa (27.08.2026, Alicja Glinianowicz): curator Joanna Erbel said the festival goes back to the history of Urzecze and to the Middle Ages to show a city that relies on its own nourishing zone and shorter supply chains - tvn24.pl

Three press pieces, all previews published before the opening; no reviews from the run of the festival were found (as of 28 September 2026). No English-language coverage was found.

After the show

Press attention came mainly before the opening: Trójka stressed the dispersed format with no central exhibition, and TVN Warszawa quoted curator Joanna Erbel on shorter supply chains and support for local farmers. The museum has not published attendance figures.

There is no catalogue in the museum shop. The easiest way back into the subject is the curators’ essay by Joanna Erbel, Alicja Wójcik and Jakub Depczyński, free as a PDF on the Polish festival page. It draws on, among others, Carolyn Steel’s book “Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World”, whose title she also gave to her lecture at the museum on 11 September.

What to see now:

• Edward Dwurnik. Pride and Shame - in the same museum building, until 28 February 2027; paintings from the 1970s and 1980s from his Sportsmen and Workers cycles, read as a record of social advancement in Poland.
• Home on Roots at Zachęta - National Gallery of Art - until 11 October 2026; co-created by Łukasz Radziszewski, who led the festival’s bread-baking workshops.
• Everything Will Change at the State Ethnographic Museum - until 27 October 2026; an outdoor show about natural resources and the consequences of exploiting them.
• Four Seasons - Mazovia at the Museum of the Polish Peasant Movement - the Mazovian landscape through the seasons, the same region the festival called Warsaw’s nourishing zone.

Museum profile: Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej.