Marie Julia Bollansée

Performance, 23 September 2005, at Zoersel, Seppenshuis. Avens are relics from prehistoric times (3000 BC). They are natural cavities in the limestone soil that have been washed out by water. The early inhabitants used those cavities as a quarry from which they extracted the clay for their pottery. When the clay ran out or had become too difficult to reach these caverns were used as depositories for food. Usually an AVEN was connected to an underground vein of water. I saw AVENS like this in Cambous, Languedoc. They date from 3000 BC. "I think they’re wonderful. Time and time again it surprises me that as soon as I perform a work existing in my head, it begins to lead a life of its own. During the try-out I discovered that an AVEN could also be the crater of a blue meteor fallen from Sirius into our garden or just as likely a hole in the ground caused by the impact of a poisonous gas bomb."

Video installation, 2005, at LOKAAL_01 Breda 2007, Burning Marl, curator Frederik Vergaert in Seppenshuis Zoersel, 2005. A woman walking through 3 video images. Three screens display how the day’s light passes by: from the early morning light until late at night. Along with the woman the artist walks through the forest, in the same rhythm, the same pace. Off-screen she looks through the camera, fragmenting time. The age-old androgynous trees are a vertical constant along which the woman moves, as if in an interval between visibility and invisibility, between sound and silence, while the light keeps on evolving metabletically.

Video performance, 2003. At nightfall, the fire smoulders, the artist stirs it up. It begins to sputter and spark, waking up petrified life. The sounds of the day quiet down, songbirds, the ice-cream cart, peacocks, a barking dog… Only the woman keeps on humming after the silence of the night has fallen.

Video performance, 2001. Video installation at CC Strombeek in X, Highway to reflection, 2011, curated by Luc Binst and Luk Lambrecht.

Video performance, 2002.

Single channel video, 2003. Installation on view at Locus Loppem, Kunsthalle Lophem, 2005. Lucy was found in Ethiopia. She's considered to be the eldest human being ever discovered. She was born about 3.5 million years ago. She was small and lightly built, probably not much more than 1m tall. In a pink bed lies a naked young girl with a pink felt doll. The girl is about ten, eleven years old. The doll has the same size and physiognomy as the girl. It may be her alter ego, or it may be the girl that soon will be a woman, or maybe it’s just the last doll a mother sewed for her daughter. These two fragile images show the search for identity in a kind of reflection. The contact between the girl and the doll slowly disappears, the child soon becomes a woman.

Video performance, 2004, created in Le Pouget, France.

Single channel video projection, 2005. "It’s rather cold today." Grandad goes for a hiking tour with his grandsons. Nine days earlier they buried his wife, grandma: at that time too these 3 men walked like this next to each other, behind her coffin. They pass a long wall in an old oak wood until they reach the open field again. The spectator can tune in to their conversation. The old man has a lot of memories; the young men look ahead. It is obvious that their patterns of life are different but they complement each other, their lives are interwoven. Their connection and friendship are conveyed by the humour and lightness of their conversation. They each have their own pace; they don’t walk synchronously; none of them sets the rhythm, the dynamics occur naturally through their kinship. That ancient chemistry holds these three men together as allies, surrounded by an invisible magnetic field, as they journey through the forest.

Video performance, 2001, filmed in Calossa d’En Sarria, Spain.

Video installation, 2006, at M HKA Antwerpen 2007 “Lonely at the Top”, curators Dieter Roestraete & Grant Watson. The title of Marie Julia Bollansée’s work refers to an old Etruscan city near Rome. Tarquinia was the most important of the twelve cities of the Etruscan League and is now an archaeological site primarily known for its necropolis – an underground cemetery containing more than six thousand tombs, many of which are decorated with splendid colourful murals. However, of this partially macabre history hardly a trace can be found in Bollansée’s “Tarquinia”, a three-part projection in which a festively laid table with an ever changing line-up of guests is the central point – a picture which is loosely based on Tarquinia’s ancient wall paintings. Although associations with the iconographic tradition of the Last Supper are brought to mind, “Tarquinia” definitely plays on a different emotional register – that of a festive beginning rather than that of a majestic fatal ending.

Video installation, 2004, in Kunsthalle Lophem, curator Roland Patteeuw. Film sequences of one and the same woman are projected next to each other on different screens. 9 characters with, apparently, their own stories without beginning or end. A woman dissociates into 9 personalities but only one at the time can manifest itself in front of the camera. It is as if one of the characters temporarily borrows the space in the woman, in order to become image. Without any formal directions imposed upon her, the woman sculptures herself nine times from within herself. Unbearably fragile and incompatible with the will of our ego. So the origin of the work can be situated in a grey area of reality where thinking, feeling and observing have fallen apart irreversibly and now try to come closer to each other again.

Performance, 1999, at NICC Antwerp, 9 September 1999, in ILLUSION FREE SPACE FOREVER YOUNG, curated by Gert Robijns & Francesca Lesac. The BODI are a nomad tribe long since living in the Omo-valley in the south of Ethiopia.

Video performance through 4 seasons, 2005. The artist infiltrates nature four times. Nature flews through her veins and nestles under her skin. The color on her skin evolves with the 4 seasons we have in Belgium: winter, spring, summer, autumn. The blue hue that predominates in the sky at that particular moment in the circle of the year is condensed on the artist's skin. Marie Julia Bollansée uses 4 blue pigments: cobalt in winter, ceruleum in spring, indigo in summer and ultramarine in autumn. The Impressionists studied the same setting in different lights or different seasons. They looked at it with their eyes and painted it. Marie Julia Bollansee goes into nature, into the same small biotope several times of the year-circle. And she becomes nature for a while.