Marie Julia Bollansée

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

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, 2002.

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, 2004, created in Le Pouget, France.