Fossa
Gee Lee-Wik Doleen Gallery, Hume Global Learning Centre
75-95 Central Park Avenue, Craigieburn, Melbourne
2 July - 30 August 2015

fossa / fos.sa/ (fos’ah) [L.] a trench or channel; in anatomy, a hollow or depressed area.

This exhibition is a response to a trip in 2012 to the village of Dalj situated on the banks of the Danube river in Croatia. It was both a pilgrimage to the land of my ancestors and to museums housing archaeological and cultural artefacts that inform my art practice. 

The title of this exhibition encompasses a double meaning; my previous work references the study of human bone and anatomy to explore concepts of identity, language and displacement; the hollow or depression evokes the image of a cradle where many stories and layers of world evolution are held.

In Latin, fossa means ditch or trench, and is linked to the ancient "Etruscan rite" for the founding of a city. This custom appropriated by the vast Roman Empire involved digging a small trench symbolic of the city outline; the walls of the city then raised behind this ritual line. There is speculation that Dalj is the possible site of the Roman Fort Teutoborgium. The old village brick factory, no longer operating but still standing near this supposed site, is where many archaeological artefacts have been dug up, and are now housed at the Archaeological Museums in Osijek and Zagreb. These artefacts span between the Neolithic Era (10,200 – 2,000 BC) and the Roman Empire (27BC – 476 AD). 

This site on the Danube River, the village where my mother was born, belongs to my personal history. It is also an uncertain place where the frontiers and borders have always shifted, new territories founded on events fraught with conflict and destruction. 

I came to the river every day to stand within my future.
I found myself flooded with the history of the earth.

Between geographical and historical zones, there are other zones where myth and archetype come alive; frontiers shift and assume another kind of power; essence. German painter Anselm Kiefer describes this space:

When I speak of frontiers, I speak of our very essence. Frontiers are where we come from, what we are, what will come. Everything. We are the membrane between the macrocosm and the microcosm, between the interior – that which we are – and the outside – also that which we are. We live from this. The interference between the two is very complex; it’s life itself, because we are that exchange between interior and exterior. The frontier defines the world as it defines us.

The landscapes and objects in this exhibition arise out of this terrain. With a motion similar to the magic of celluloid film, these images spiral from the past into the future and back again; merging exterior facts and impressions with the remnants of an internal process. This innate passage of fracture and reconstructive possibility is the essence of our personal and shared cultural histories; the same object may show signs both of charred ruin and purification by fire.

These objects and the dreams they carry are in a state of constant flux. This plays out in my art practice whereby new materials may join the debris of previous works. Without any definitive final point an ordered system of classification is collapsed. There are no dead artefacts which a museum display may imply, but a re-visioned context where new forms and new meanings can replace the old. A new deciphered language emerges through the body of things. 

Finally, this work is a prayer for the land, the river, the air, and all the ghosts which guard this frontier. May it fulfil the promise of rebirth as it travels back into the golden sun at the centre of the earth. 

quickened, gold-radiant, it ascends, leaving the old world to its cinders. (Johanna von Keyserlingk)

Natasha Dusenjko
Melbourne, 2015

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