Kombinować
Kombinować is a Polish verb that can be translated as to figure something out, to improvise, or to make do. These translations, however, only partially capture its meaning, since there is no English equivalent for kombinować. In everyday usage, kombinować describes a practice developed in conditions of material, social, political, or institutional limitations and scarcity, or when official systems or resources are inaccessible or insufficient. It describes a way of making things work, or actively and creatively trying to make them work despite these obstacles, often through informal channels, tacit knowledge, and unconventional routes.
The word carries a moral ambiguity at the crossroads of ingenuity, survival, and rule-bending, without necessarily implying dishonesty. In socialist Poland, kombinowanie emerged as a survival practice responding to scarcity, bureaucracy, and systemic failure. It is observed and transmitted socially rather than formally taught.
Kombinowanie is enacted through material, bodily, and relational practices: through repairing and repurposing objects, improvising arrangements, negotiating access, borrowing time or resources, and sustaining work through provisional means. It requires wits, unconventional thinking, and often a slight bending of the rules. Much of this language is undocumented, operating outside institutional archives, yet it continuously evidences the presence, endurance, and creativity of people and communities navigating hostile or indifferent systems.
Within creative practices, kombinowanie often underpins work that institutions depend upon but rarely acknowledge, such as sustaining art practices with limited resources, organising exhibitions without adequate infrastructure, or navigating opaque funding and administrative systems. As such, it functions as a counter-language to dominant institutional vocabularies of efficiency, optimisation, transparency, and productivity.
To include kombinować in this glossary is to assert the value of a practice that continues to visibilise people through material, bodily, and relational means. It insists that survival, adaptation, and makingdo are not flaws or failures of language, but languages in themselves.
Bio
Marta Marsicka (they/them) is a Midlands-based curator, researcher, and art historian working across contemporary art and collaborative curatorial practice. Their work is grounded in feminist, queer, and post-socialist frameworks, with a particular focus on Central and Eastern European identities, migration, class, and gender.
Marta is currently Artist Development Coordinator at BACKLIT Gallery, Nottingham, where they support studio-holders and associate artists through professional development and care-led organisational practice. Alongside this role, they are a TECHNE-funded PhD candidate at University of the Arts London, researching the representation and reception of Central and Eastern European women artists in British exhibitions from 1989 to the present.
Marta is a co-founder of The Lilac House, a queer, feminist, working-class curatorial counter-practice that foregrounds care, shared authorship, and non-extractive ways of working within curatorial contexts.
Institution(ing)s is a medium-scale collaboration project co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.