Dunja Krcek
Dunja Krcek is a visual artist based in Vienna, Austria. She works with various media like painting, drawing, textiles and installations. In her work she visually researches the concepts of atmosphere, relational space, ambience and the felt sense and uses the term collage as a connection for all juxtaposing methods when bringing shapes and materials of different origins together.
Dunja spent the month of September in Peru at GoctaLab. Raw wild cotton grows on the surroundings of the residency and Dunja got to know the whole process of picking the cotton, making it as a yarn, dyeing it with plants from the same lands to the weaving techniques with Olinda, the local artist.
Read more about the process with the material︎︎︎
The remoteness of the place and its location next to one of the longest waterfalls in the world have an inescapable presence and this really affected the artist's stay and work at the residency.
“I thought about the emotionality in landscapes and how to connect emotionally with a place. The waterfall gave the place its rhythm. When it rained, the waterfall transformed into this loud, place filling force of water. You could hear it from far away. It echoed in the valley. But on other days it was this very fine stream, almost like smoke, softly meeting the stones at the bottom of the fall. Like salt or sugar.
But it was always there and it was my first correspondence in the mornings. I started to observe how this landscape manifests itself in my own body. Many times I was just sitting there, being with
the landscape. It felt very hard in the beginning. Somehow I couldn’t find the relief I was hoping for. The expectation, that, away from urban life, you could just be and breathe. The presence of this place was charged with so many „things“. And I couldn’t find a way in. Within time I started to accept the circumstances. And the surroundings seemed even louder.
I imagined the landscape as sort of ‚extension‘ my bodily feelings are embedded in. Even though I traveled so far and fast - which made me feel to some degree being taken out of a context an put randomly into another one, I was already in relationship, in symbiosis with nature here. The air I was breathing, the fruits I was eating. But a notion of distance was accompanying my days. And the sentence – being at the edge of the natural / human world – came to my mind. What does it mean? Where is the human, where is the nature, what do these definitions even mean?
I feel a kind of resistance when it comes to the word nature, as it introduces a dualist approach to my thinking about existing in space. At the moment I am searching for ways in my artistic practice which gravitate towards investigating lived experience of interrelationships between the human and non-human. I want to open up intimate spaces of inbetween where impulses I get from my surroundings and I develop in some sort of language through material can meet with interactions from other living beings, with no intentionality coming from me.”
— Dunja Krcek
