Neja Tomšič
A garden, somewhat deserted
23/05 — 29/08/2025
"'It’s strange that a tree falls like that', a friend said while walking through Rafut Park, pointing to the red oak’s body, cradled gently by the earth. 'As if all the trees around it were trying to catch it.’’[1]
Neja Tomšič's practice departs from a slow observation of sites, noticing incidental or historical gestures within foliage, silence, and forgotten corners. It is at the enduring intersection between the botanical and the political that her works develop with a quiet urgency. In A garden, somewhat deserted, she invites us into a landscape of fragmented stories that challenge notions of indigeneity and belonging. The exhibition brings together drawings, watercolours, sculptural frames, bas-reliefs, embossed prints, and a multi-channel sound installation which are interlinked through a historiography of green spaces and the speculative imaginaries that they construct.
These presences in the exhibition grew from an inquiry of overlooked terrains that are physically distant from each other, yet connected by the movement of people, seeds, and ideas during the modern era. Tomšič constructs a temporal bridge between Rafut Park in Pristava, close to Nova Gorica, and a garden maintained by Slovenian women who migrated to Alexandria as care workers during the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. Her new works bring these spaces into contact, highlighting their overlapping histories and mapping their contributions to modern understandings of nature as something to be controlled and categorised. This relational approach brings forth questions about gardens, those who conceive them, and how they are remembered.
The series of watercolours was created following a period of fieldwork in Rafut Park and pays close attention to the materiality of the green space, depicting the fall of the oldest tree in the park (a red oak). They are a testament to the park as a place that bears scars of history and inscribes it in a lineage of green spaces that were influenced by the 19th century understanding of the metropolis, separating cities from nature which needed be domesticized and reconstructed. A series of embossed prints represent the cartography of the park and place it in dialogue with Gabriel Thouin's typology of gardens first published in 1819,[2] challenging the notion that these spaces can be reduced to a single type while also proposing new ones: the garden with a fallen tree, the garden of hybrid plants, or the erased garden.
Sporadically across the gallery space, Tomšič presents a series of bas-reliefs casts representing missing pieces from fragmented archaeological remnants of the altar from Petoviana (known today as Ptuj) depicting Nutrices, relics of a Celtic-Roman cult of maternity and motherhood. The motif of the imagined missing parts is based on oral histories of women who tended to the gardens of St. Francis Asylum and the cultural centre for Slovenian women in Alexandria, where they cultivated a native variety of Cichorium intybus. At a time whenthe private exotic park and the neo-oriental villa were being built by Anton Laščak in Pristava, women from this region migrated to Alexandria to work as wet nurses and domestic carers, travelling with seeds from home. The widespread chicory plant becomes the central decorative element of the bas-reliefs, bringing visibility to the everyday practices involved in maintaining families and places that were not monumentalised.
Throughout the exhibition, the motif of the garden recurs as a political and intimate site of resistance. In contrast to the colonial, male dominated tradition of exotic botanical collections designed to measure and display, the gardens tended to by Slovenian women in Alexandria appear to be almost invisible in history. The multi-channel sound installation reflects on the taxonomical categorisation of trees in Rafut Park, enunciating the names of those which survived and those which disappeared, as well as the scientific criteria used to establish their value as individual specimens. Tomšič worked with vocal group Ardeo and composer Gašper Torkar to create this work which builds on the notion of ritual calling and incantation, pleading for thetestimonies of the trees and evoking their symbolic space in relation to their scientific evaluation. In the series of drawings with a light palette, Tomšič gives form to an ‘empty’ landscape with minute details from the different periods of the green space which elude meaning: scattered stones, hidden roots, and shards of Villa Rafut or other buildings, folded into the earth after they were bombed during the first world war - all of which speak to the artist's sensitivity and determination to trace meaning.
Across mediums and motifs, the exhibition holds a subtle tension between natural growth and scientific categorisation, or between what is documented and what is felt. Tomšič treads the line between botany and mythology, reinterpreting history and engaging with speculative imaginaries. What kinds of knowledge do we allow to flower? Who gets to name, to map, and to archive? To walk through A garden, somewhat deserted is to enter a landscape shaped not only by species and stones, but also by the quiet labour of women who moved between worlds, leaving traces in soil, language, and lineage. In Tomšič’s hands, their memory becomes more than a subject of study: it is a ritual act of cultivation, of reclaiming what has long been silenced beneath the surface.
[1] Neja Tomšič, excerpt from a short text
[2] Plans Raisonnes De Toutes Les Especes De Jardins. Paris: Mme Huzard. C.1828.
TEXT & CURATOR: Nikolaos Akritidis
Composer: Gašper Torkar
Vocal group Ardeo: Maja Dobnik, Klara Kobal, Veronika Pregelj, Kristina Pregelj, and Mateja Mikluš
Sound equipment: MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art
Graphics were created at the MGLC printmaking studio.
Metal sculptures were produced by Uroš Mehle Locksmith Workshop.
Residency support in Gorizia: GO!2025 and KB 1909
Research assistance: Darinka Kozinc from the Association for the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of the Alexandrian Women, and Dominique Lassere from the CIRAD Historical Library in Paris.
The exhibition is part of the multi-year artistic research project Untangling a Garden, ongoing since 2022 in collaboration with numerous partners. More about the project and its previous phases is available at this link: https://ne-ja.com/untangling-a-garden
Neja Tomšič is research-based visual artist, storyteller, performer and ritual maker, working with drawing, objects and sound, interested in long processes and slow work. Her practice reflects on dominant historical narratives, researches into particularities, and creates situations in which new understandings of the present can be formed. She is a member of the Nonument Group, an art collective that maps, researches and intervenes into nonuments - public space, monuments and architecture that has undergone a shift in meaning due to political and social changes. The group was awarded the Plečnik medal for their contribution to architectural culture.
Her Opium Clippers performance saw more than 120 repetitions and was presented in 16 countries. Her artist book Opium Clippers published by Rostfrei Publishing was the recepient of the Best Slovenian Artist Book in 2017/2018 award and the Best Book Design at the Slovenian Book Fair. Neja also co-founded MoTA (Museum of Transitory Art), a Ljubljana-based research and production platform devoted to transitory art, where she worked as a producer and international projects coordinator between 2007 and 2020 and was the director of SONICA festival from 2017 to 2021. She lives and works in Ljubljana.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Zupanov
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