Apollo Magazine

Around 15 minutes into the Italian artist Rossella Biscotti’s five-channel video work The City (2018), a Venus-like figure appears. She looks to be an immaculate specimen, gleaming white marble against the black cloth on which she has been laid flat, her ovoid belly protruding into the air. Only a brief glimpse of a hand working to assess the figurine gives an inkling of her size (17 centimetres, to be exact). She lies silently, and then, after about a minute, the film cuts to an image of archaeologist’s dig site. An off-camera voice asks: ‘Have you seen any hands and feet in there?’

This is Çatalhöyük, an archaeological site dating back 9,000 years to the Neolithic period in southern Anatolia (just southeast of the Turkish city of Konya). In the summer of 2016, the discovery of this small marble woman excited the media the way attractive archaeological finds often do – first locally, and then internationally, often with a pinch of hyperbole. The female figurine may at first appear to be a symbol of fertility, but recent research at Çatalhöyük posits that she is no ‘mother goddess’. Her distinctive figure, with large breasts and thighs and sagging stomach, is believed to have represented age and wisdom – this is an elderly woman with community status. Multiple similar figurines have been found at the site.

Biscotti had just begun her second dig season with the Çatalhöyük archaeological crew when this remarkably well-preserved figurine was being cleaned and examined. As the scholars documented, so did Biscotti, turning cameras on the site’s 150 archaeologists, researchers, and local workers. Biscotti’s two dig seasons as a member of the Çatalhöyük team evolved into The City, currently presented by Protocinema in a subterranean space in central Istanbul. The 50 minutes of collected footage offer a close examination of the intersections between ancient and contemporary communities at Çatalhöyük.