Joëlle Meerbergen

Tarquinia

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.