This page presents the COMPLETE RESEARCH FILE for FRAGMENTUM, an interdisciplinary, documentary, and artistic inquiry that maps the archaeology of memory applied on the fragile boundaries of historic human-plant co-habitation.
FRAGMENTUM | RESEARCH TOPOGRAPHY: DATA POINT REFERENCE + Fieldwork- LOG_02.2021
19th-century herbaria
[ Project Core ]
- Primary Sources: The research is founded upon a late 19th-century herbarium and original wall fragments retrieved from the sites. An inventory of 5 abandoned houses (4 in Neamț County, 1 in Argeș County) analyzed as narrative cells of habitation.
- Research Focus: Mapping the visual coexistence of humans and the plants within the house-garden urban ecosystem.
- Project Nature: A documentary-artistic (docu-art) investigation into the “absence of material culture” within community spaces.
Materiality & Fragility: The Atypical Support
The artistic discourse is linked to fragile and atypical supports (acrylic on paper in mixed media, a delicate medium that mirrors the vulnerability of the salvaged history.
The Philosophy: Painted Icons + Living Plants
- At its core, the project explores the wall as an expression of the limit, a boundary where the inside mirrors the outside.
- It analyzes the contrast between the “painted vegetal model”—the stylized, decorated flora inside human homes—and the “real plant” in the garden, now deserted by humans.
[ The artists ]
- The Painter (Roxana Donaldson): Donaldson translated the research into the “Parchment Wall”, a monumental 1.5×10 m Mixed Media work.
- The Anthropologist (Cristina Irian): Irian produced the “Mobile Walls”, utilizing theatrical props (butaforie) and found objects to symbolically reproduce the architecture and symbolic walls of an abandoned home.
The Temporal Loop: Saving Iconographies
FRAGMENTUM functions as a temporal loop designed to save and document different vegetal iconographies historically produced by humans and used in the urban habitat to mirror the living garden into their homes:
– The Window/Wall/Wallpaper:
– The Herbarium
– The Botanical Notebook
Modular Evolution: From the Ice House to the White Tower
- As an adaptable, modular installation, FRAGMENTUM was designed to alter its internal parameters with each site-specific display.
- The White Tower (Turnul Alb, IBCA Brasov 2021): The installation was reconfigured for a medieval architectural vestige. Moving the work from the subterranean shadows of an ice house to the verticality of a defensive tower proved that memory is not static, but an adaptable, modular archive.
- The Ice House (Ghețărie, Mogoșoaia): The project debuted in a subterranean environment, exploring the closed system of a deserted 19th-century house.
roxana DONALDSON 