212 Medea (Perpetual Silence Prevails in the Empty Space of Capital)

In 1880 Johan Palisa, an Austrian astronomer, discovered a large asteroid from the observatory in Pula and named it Medea, the 212 being the standard serial number assigned to heavenly bodies at the time. Stefania Strouza has repeatedly worked with the ancient Greek myth, associating Medea with notions of the feminine and the alien. In the current work, located in the towns of Pula and Rasa, she reflects on ideas of Otherness by creating two installations in which geological and feminine forms merge within each other. Medea is thus associated with a distant planet as much as with a chthonic goddess. By placing her work within two (historically and culturally different) sites representing distinct ideas of modernity, Strouza introduces Medea as an intermediary between the extra-terrestrial and the geologic; an insurgent figure that, in opposition to rationalism and by extension utopic thinking, introduces a counter narrative to the commodification of Nature.

Text by Christian Oxenius
Commissioned for the 3rd Industrial Art Biennial, Croatia, Ride into the Sun, 2020