Jáchym Myslivec – Morana Island

Morana Island is located on the peninsula of the Elbe Meadow – a place that is not a real island, but for most of the year it becomes one. A space regularly flooded by the river, changeable, difficult to access and long abandoned. A landscape where natural processes mix with what human intervention brings to them.

The river brings both silt and waste here. It is here that the torsos of Moranas–- the straw figures traditionally associated with bringing out winter – accumulate. They lose their original meaning and become part of the environment. They disintegrate, become trapped in branches, overgrown with mud and gradually transform into the material of the landscape.

Moranas on the island exist as a transitional state between object, ritual and organism. They are dependent on what the river brings and are subject to the same processes as the surrounding nature. Their bodies change, decompose and reassemble from natural and artificial elements.

Morana Island is not a place of purification, but of memory. It is a reminder that what has been sent away has not disappeared – it has merely taken up residence elsewhere. The exhibition works with the tension between ritual and its consequences, between human gesture and the long-term mark it leaves on the landscape.