Who bears witness when bodies disappear?
When sediments settle, layers accumulate, and time compresses into matter until fossils are formed. Fossils register gestures, impacts, violence. They hold what history erases, what human memory no longer contains. But how can these vestiges be made to speak? What becomes of the role of an object in times of war? What remains? How can absence be materialized, made tangible?
Ex-sistere brings together objects that are half-ruin, half-myth, creating spaces that resist destruction and erasure. The exhibition situates itself in the aftermath, post-flood, post-cataclysm, where events are no longer visible, yet continue to inhabit matter. It asks how one can carry the weight of reality when justice has not been done.
Through accumulations of sand, olives, and bones, (I) explore narratives that are both collective and intimate. Each piece becomes a site where matter takes the place of departed bodies, where objects stand in for those who are no longer there.
The work does not seek to reconstruct a narrative, but to render perceptible what has settled within it: cracks, displacements, wounds. The installations create places where the gaze rests on what remains, and where the viewer, in turn, is placed in a position of witnessing.
Within this fragmented landscape, (I) seek less for answers than for a way to hold. To exist.
To exist comes from the Latin ex-sistere:
ex — out of, from, beyond
sistere — to stand, to set in place, to make appear
This exhibition resides in the hyphen of ex-sistere. A space, an interstice between
leaving and settling. A condition that echoes (my) sense of home; somewhere between
East and West.
—Mia Naja
