Edita Atmaja

Through this work, Edita Atmaja identifies the types of pioneer plants that live in certain areas. Places such as parking lots, lobbies of old buildings, corners of abandoned buildings, even floor gaps and cracked walls are fertile ground for these types of plants. Rather than perceiving them as 'wild plants', she is interested in observing the new life that is born after these places are no longer 'alive'. Pioneer plants - think of the sedges, the mosses and the purslanes, the herbaceous shrubs - are amazing agents for their environment: the first to grow and survive in any conditions. They support the adaptation, evolution, succession and interaction of vegetation over time. Mosses and the like, for example, fertilize the soil. That is the process of life of the rhizome: growing widely without hierarchy, moving and continuing to become. Pioneer plants are both a home and a source of nutrition for various types of animals, thus playing a role in increasing the biodiversity of their surrounding area.

For several days Edita collected plants and objects from neglected environments. Moving the 'pioneering' of these living beings and uniting them in a new space in the form of a 'growing' pillar arrangement. These remaining objects from an environment that was once full of interaction, emotion and communication mingled with the new organism that slowly enveloped it. 'Crux Anônumos' is burying our sense of familiarity with anonymity, and vice versa. Edita's meticulous drawings-stippling rather than drawing lines-contain stunning still life images alongside a series of geometric cross-sections of old buildings, traces of which are still etched in her mind.
Edita Atmaja was born in Jakarta, 1986. She graduated from Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology (AUT), New Zealand, 2009.