What Is OS: Warszawa?
OS:Warszawa (or OS:W) is a real-time documentation project exploring Warsaw as my chosen home base within the practice of sequential residency. While The Warsaw Winter Theatre Company provides the theoretical framework - analysing cities as performances - OS:Warszawa is the lived application. The raw data. The field notes from inside the performance.
Think of it as an operating system in the literal sense: the foundational software that runs beneath everything else, the invisible architecture that makes other programs possible. OS:Warszawa documents how Warsaw functions as my home operating system - the city that allows me to run all my other creative and professional programs, the base layer I return to between displacements.
The Belgrade Precedent
OS:Warszawa draws direct inspiration from OS:Belgrade, a three-month documentation of my time in Serbia's capital during late 2025. That project emerged as a way to capture the texture of displacement in a city that was productive but ultimately draining - a place where I completed intensive work on Phenomenal Sobriety but never quite felt at home.
Belgrade taught me something crucial: not all cities want to be your operating system. Some are temporary installations, pop-up programs that serve a specific function before you close them. OS:Belgrade documented that recognition - the awareness that productivity and belonging aren't the same thing.
Warsaw is different. Warsaw is the OS that keeps running even when I'm elsewhere. The system I've chosen as home base, the place I return to for restoration and recalibration. OS:Warszawa documents what it means to finally find your home operating system after years of sequential displacement.
Relationship to The Warsaw Winter Theatre Company
The Warsaw Winter Theatre Company (WWTC) is my theoretical framework for understanding cities as performances. It's the lens, the methodology, the analytical structure. WWTC asks: What kind of performance is this city staging? What role am I playing? How does the urban theatre reveal itself through winter light, architecture, social choreography?
OS:Warszawa is what happens when you apply that framework to lived experience. It's the documentation that emerges from inside the performance rather than from the audience. WWTC provides the questions; OS:Warszawa provides the answers—or at least, the evidence from which answers might be constructed.
Think of it this way:
- WWTC = The theoretical framework / The lens / The methodology
- OS: Warszawa = The lived application / The documentation / The self-investigations
WWTC is how I think about cities. OS: Warszawa is how I live in this one.
The Self-Investigation Model
OS:Warszawa operates through "self-investigations" - focused inquiries into specific phenomena that emerge from living in Warsaw. Each investigation documents a moment when the city reveals something about belonging, meaning, or the nature of displacement.
The first self-investigation, The Glide: On Earning the Right to Move Slowly, explores the physical sensation of metro surfing - that moment when the city grants you permission to move with grace through her infrastructure. Future investigations will document other phenomena: the world underground, the passages handlowe, the way winter light performs across different districts.
These aren't tourist observations or expat musings. They're phenomenological investigations by someone who has claimed Warsaw as home base, who has earned the right to document from inside rather than outside the performance.
Why "Operating System"?
The OS metaphor does several things at once:
- It acknowledges construction: An operating system is built, maintained, updated. My relationship with Warsaw isn't natural or inevitable - it's something I'm actively constructing through attention, documentation, and repeated return.
- It suggests infrastructure: Like a computer's OS, Warsaw provides the foundational architecture that makes my other work possible. This is the city where I register businesses, maintain creative practices, build community. Everything else runs on top of this base layer.
- It implies process: Operating systems aren't static. They evolve, update, occasionally crash and require rebooting. OS:Warszawa documents that evolution - the ongoing process of calibrating my relationship with this city.
- It resonates with Travels in Hyperreality: The OS metaphor extends my earlier work on postmodern urbanism, suggesting that cities function as programmed environments we navigate through constructed interfaces. We don't experience cities "directly" - we experience them through the operating systems we've installed.
What to Expect
OS:Warszawa will unfold through irregular self-investigations published as I discover phenomena worth documenting. There's no predetermined schedule or fixed structure. This isn't a blog series or a systematic survey. It's an ongoing documentation practice that responds to what Warsaw shows me.
OS:Warszawa will have it's own dedicated website, that is currently under construction.
Some investigations will be photographic. Some will be textual. Some will combine both. Some might incorporate sonic cartography, video documentation, or other experimental methodologies. The form follows the phenomenon, not the other way around.
What unites them is the commitment to documenting from inside the performance, to treating Warsaw as my chosen operating system, and to remaining open to what the city wants to reveal about belonging, displacement, and the construction of home.
The Larger Context
OS:Warszawa exists within a broader ecosystem of creative documentation:
- Sequential Residency: The overall practice of living three months at a time in different cities
- The Warsaw Winter Theatre Company: The theoretical framework for analysing cities as performances
- OS: Belgrade: The previous operating system documentation project
- Reticulate.blog: The home for all philosophical documentation of displacement
- Travels in Hyperreality: The postmodern investigation that established the theoretical groundwork
Each feeds the others. Each provides context. OS:Warszawa is both continuation and evolution - building on what came before while establishing new methodologies for documenting what it means to finally find home.
Begin Here
The first self-investigation is live: The Glide: On Earning the Right to Move Slowly. It explores metro surfing as embodied theory, as the moment when years of postmodern analysis became physical grace. It's the perfect entry point into OS:Warszawa - a documentation of the moment when Warsaw granted me the upgrade, when the city I'd chosen finally chose me back.
More investigations will follow as Warsaw reveals them. The operating system is running. The documentation has begun.
Welcome to OS: Warszawa.
For more on the theoretical framework behind these investigations, visit The Warsaw Winter Theatre Company. For the previous operating system documentation, explore OS: Belgrade.
David Henzell
