“Fossil” by Lynne Sachs (1986)
VHS and 3/4″ Video

The village women of Mambai in Bali, Indonesia collect sand and stone from the river. Each woman sells what she has gathered for construction material. But the river is more than a place to work. It is a place to bathe, wash clothes, laugh and tell stories.

“The labor of women in Indonesia is geographically and temporally removed from the labor of workers in New York City, but how might we think across the material intersections and connections of these various people, or the ways in which we are all materially implicated in both neighborhood and global structures of hidden labor? How does cinema help (formally) represent these structures? ” (Stephen Woo, Brown University)

“Fossil” is a collaborative performance piece crated by David Bronstein, Debbie Crowell, Ed Mitchell, Lynne Sachs, and Gede Tjok. The dance evolved through discussion and movement exercises as a collective response to the images from Mambai.

This project was supported by an artist-in-residence grant from Downtown Community Television (New York, NY).