monica maria moraru

The Foundation Pit
01.17–03.01.2025
Room 1

To the depths, to the depths…

The Foundation Pit draws its inspiration from the myth of Master Builder Manole, a worker tasked with constructing a monastery whose walls mysteriously collapse every night. Whatever is built during the day vanishes by morning, and each morning Manole finds the structure in ruins. Desperate, he learns that the monastery can only be completed if he sacrifices his wife. To fulfill his mission—and avoid the wrath of the Prince—he must immure his pregnant wife, Ana, within the foundations. The next day, as Ana arrives with the workers’ lunch, Manole suggests that she take a rest in the pit, as the workers start to build around her.

At once exceeding its reference to the detritus of its economy—a consolation for origin, and the shedding of the centuries which sustain it—The Foundation Pit reframes the notion of reference itself. Where is nowhere, at once totally emplaced and nowhere at all? It asks: What do we do with the other when we create? Or, how to bury a shadow?

The answer comes at the final hour, where here is not an annihilated possibility but a future yet unfulfilled. Here, a fusion of horizons: hear the inside of an earth which cannot sustain us; here the dream whose material burns; here the boot aflame in the concrete. If being is the infinite concession that has been made to us, it is also eternity’s only claim. Here flesh becomes waste, its mysticism turned detritus.

In The Foundation Pit, monica maria moraru calls us to see. To witness the stakes of creation as excavation: will I or will I not give life? Here every scrap counts the seconds, and we retrace the steps. Like a single breath trapped in a tube or a hand surrendered to the soft sending. Lured into the logic of its disappearance through the soundscapes of the buried, from below the ground, and going where? The wall that sings, a grave, a screen, a pit-tube. It does not suffice to hear about the truth. We must go there.

Ana knows this. Maybe it was she who needed a secret life in order to live. 

Hear her calling us back. In a sussurro soft enough to dream: “I am before, I am almost, I am never.” 1

— Ami Xherro

1 Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, 1973.