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.