Arjun Das
SOME ARE EXTANT……. Transient city and rooted one;
Maastricht bears the debt of its own excavations and those who carried them out.
Two thousand years ago the Romans excavated Limburg to marl the land and
forge building bricks. In the thirteenth century, the region’s limestone was used to
build the city’s walls and churches. By the 1920s, ENCI (Eerste Nederlandse
Cement Industrie), located on Mount Saint Peter, had become the biggest cement works
in Europe. As ever more ground was unearthed, so too were fossils, including the
first Mosasaurus skull in 1764. Many of these are housed today in Maastricht’s
Natural History Museum. Since arriving at Jan van Eyck, Arjun Das, whose work is
always rooted in working class communities in the places in which he lives, has made
a point of visiting construction sites across the city. Though ENCI’s mining practices
ended in 2018, several former employees entrusted Das with original bricks
from Maastricht’s historic wall as well as more recent ones being used to repair
it. Employing archival techniques inspired by archaeological excavation methods,
he carves new “fossils” into these recovered fragments. Titled SOME RUINS
ARE EXTANT....... Transient city and rooted one, they depict instruments of the
city’s unheralded workers. Across recovered limestone, found wood, and drawings,
Das creates an iconography of the laboring class. The imagery contrasts with
depictions of bourgeois power and comfort that frequently appear within the same
works. Carving into limestone and wood, he reveals deeply stratified layers of
society: mirrored worlds of rich and poor. If Das’s fossils are an attempt to fill the
lacunae of the region’s historical record, his wood carvings and drawings introduce
a visual vocabulary of the working class in the present.
