Lisa Truttmann

Collection of rescued personal objects in vitrines, sound installation and prints.

Voice: Verena Dürr 

Technical-artistic support: Gerald Roßbacher 

Some years ago, the living and working space of the artist Lisa Truttmann was destroyed by fire. The flames and, then, the water that was used to fight the fire destroyed and deformed a large part of her personal belongings, artistic works and materials. Hence, the water played a twin role in these events, firstly, as an effective way of fighting the flames, and secondly, as an arbitrarily destructive force. Many materials react highly sensitively to moisture, with digital archives on hard discs suffering particularly serious damage. Since this dramatic event, the artist has intensified her focus on the relationship between humans and objects. She thinks about the links between the biographies of things and the life stories of people. She asks questions such as: What is the importance to us of specific objects? Which memories are stored within them? And how does a thing become an (artistic) object? 

Truttmann is now showing, for the first time, a selection of the objects that she was able to save. They include a severely charred book that has warped into a sculpture and melted video cassettes. They are exhibited on stands below glass—a form of presentation that recalls museums and further strengthens their sense of objectness.  

Truttmann juxtaposes a small number of rescued Memorabilien with an abstract mass of irretrievably lost objects. On the acoustic level, we hear a listing of the contents of the apartment at the time of the fire; intensified by the steady superimposition of the audio tracks, she makes the absence tangible.  

Lisa Truttmann (1983, St. Pölten) is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna. In her artistic practice, she combines documentary, essayistic, and poetic methods to investigate the sociologies and ecologies of landscapes and architectures. She is interested in relationships between human and non-human agents as well as in their spaces of interaction. Truttmann understands her subjective view as an approximation and considers her artistic process as an attempt to playfully comprehend complex systems. Associatively she intertwines collected material in image, sound and text as well as objects in installations and rhythmic montages. Oscillating between cinema and exhibition space, her works always reflect the language of their medium. Lisa Truttmann studied Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts, where she made her first essayistic feature film Tarpaulins (2017).