Where the River Hurts
Maja Liro
Strata collective is an architecture and research practice founded by two polish architects, Maja Liro and Zofia Krupa. Having long mirrored each other’s paths across Europe, their collaboration is shaped by an ongoing dialogue around memory, ecology, and matter. The name Strata (pl. singular “loss” , eng. plural “sediment”) reflects their joint interest in what lies beneath and between: geological strata, histories half-buried, and political residue.
Maja brings a multidisciplinary background shaped by political engagement, hands-on repair, and narrative practices. They’ve taken part in human rights-oriented youth programs, local advocacy with House Europe, and diverse editorial work. Their interests span collaborative making, film production and exhibition design, shaped by studies in Warsaw, Lisbon, Zurich and Delft. Maja explores architecture as a medium for interspecies coexistence and ecological storytelling across scales.
Zofia works at the intersection of material flows, memory, and care. With experience across Warsaw, Munich, and Zurich, she is interested in how the built environment registers both ecological impact and emotional histories. Her approach blends typological research with a sensitivity to transformation - treating debris, landfills, and ruins not as endings, but as beginnings.
Together, they engage architecture as a tool of research, resistance, and reactivation. Their projects move between the poetic and the practical, asking how the forgotten can be made visible through narration, curation, and spatial intervention.
Where the River Hurts is a research and design project tracing the wounded body of the Vistula River: a landscape shaped by amputations (sand extraction), paralysis (embankments and regulation), infection (pollution and untreated waste), and parasitism (disused port infrastructure, predatory real estate practices). In previous projects, we explored the city’s erased ecologies and material histories: Maja reimagined the Warsaw Zoo as a precedent in rewilding dried wetlands; Zofia studied the infrastructural afterlives of demolition waste. Both led us back to the river as a central spine of the city: a protagonist, carrier, and contested ground.
The project builds on this premise, approaching the Vistula as a site of ongoing fieldwork. We navigate it repeatedly - by foot, bike, ferry - composing each journey as a score. This choreography becomes a method: a way to track rhythm, condition, and change. Through archival research and site-specific acts, we read the river’s terrain for past visions and observe present ecologies, looking for crossovers that allow new stories to emerge: acts of care, disruption, or reactivation. The outcomes will take the form of ephemeral spatial interventions, participatory gatherings, and a collection of situated artifacts - soil samples, audio recordings, or remnants from moments shared. As these events unfold, we document what is seen, felt, and unearthed - root and branch - through writing, photography, and film, creating a layered testimony.
This approach is part of a broader ecology of practice - collaborative, situated, and open-ended. We aim to create spaces for public engagement and local alliances in Warsaw, while extending our methodology through talks and workshops abroad, adapting it to new terrains and communities. By sharing tools for reading and working with wounded landscapes, we hope to exchange ways of thinking and acting in the face of ecological and spatial neglect.