REDEFUSE – Fluviale

On the Contemporary / Catania

Gertrude Moser-Wagner

REDEFUSE
Text in the catalog by Peter Zawrel

Opening Saturday, January 24 at 6:30 PM

January 24 — March 21, 2026

On Saturday, January 24 at 6:30 PM, On the Contemporary, a space for exploring contemporary art directed by Anna Guillot, located in the courtyard of the 17th-century Palazzo Manganelli in Catania, will present REDEFUSE, a solo project by Austrian artist Gertrude Moser-Wagner.

This is a multifaceted multimedia project focused on the city of Catania and, in particular, on Mount Etna. The core of REDEFUSE lies in the idea of a ‘lava bomb’ being transformed into a political-social metaphor. Gertrude Moser-Wagner’s pacifist political stance makes the REDEFUSE project an anti-war statement.

The performative action with which the Moser-Wagner operation opens at On the Contemporary unfolds across several simultaneous steps coordinated in space – involving documents, videos, sound research on the landscape with musical interferences, including a piece by sound artist Josef Reiter referring to the breathing and noises of Etna – culminating in an articulation of a documentary nature that directly involves volcanologist Boris Behncke (INGV-Catania).

In her writings, Moser-Wagner states: “In the wordplay REDEFUSE, I refer to my first encounter with a volcano, in other words, to the concept of a ‘lava bomb.’ I was shaken by this term in 1991, at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, on the occasion of a video documentation; It was shortly before the start of the First Gulf War, when the United States entered the war. I took the lava bomb from its museum stand, held it in my hands, and had the gesture filmed as ‘lava bomb held.’ As if I could stop something that was already in the air, something that would continue to fly: taking this bomb from its stand, defusing it, removing the stinger of language. I carried out this gesture as a performative action of the same name in the museum. Later, it was also presented as a photographic and video action/manifesto: on Stromboli in 1991, during an art-science meeting held directly on the volcano, to which I had been invited by a curator. The entire work is now in the art collection of the NÖ Landesmuseum. (All of this will be documented in Catania through materials displayed in a showcase and the video Defusing Lava Bombs, 1991).

My artistic gesture was performative and programmatic: a rejection of the warlike charge embedded in scientific language. The intention was to strip these lava stones, aerodynamically shaped and coming from inside the volcano, of the semantic sting of the term “bomb” and return them to what they are: sculptures worthy of the name, which for me, as a sculptor, they truly are. Here, in Catania, after a quarter of a century, it was like going back to the beginning. REDEFUSE, my new work for Catania and for Mount Etna, essentially consists of an action and a reflection. Mount Etna is also connoted in the feminine by the Sicilian population as an organism made up of many craters and fissures, just like a living being with which one coexists: almost a mother or a mythical figure that gives life (and takes it away, but this aspect is set aside). Indeed, Etna generates planets, spheres. The question that arose was: ‘how does one approach it from the outside?’, […]

On March 21, on the occasion of the finissage, the bilingual publication REDEFUSE/ Dare alla luce will be presented, featuring a text by art historian Peter Zawrel dedicated to the project and the work of Gertrude Moser-Wagner.

A conceptual artist and sculptor born in Styria, Gertrude Moser-Wagner currently lives in Vienna. She taught for several years at the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 2000, she has created an increasing number of works in the field of communication and project art, producing works, research, transpositions, and poetic interventions for public spaces, galleries, and international museums. Her work is interdisciplinary and versatile. Her preferred mediums are video, texts, radio, installations, and site-specific interventions. In recent years, her projects have often focused on language, places, and the ground. Ongoing project (2025-2028): FLUVIALE – along the line (curator Thomas Jelinek)