Feature published in ArtReview (London), no. 23, June 2008, pp. 96-101.
At last year’s Venice Biennial, Tatiana Trouvé initiated a series of elevators (Extension of Closure) whose doors are designed to shut so slowly that it would actually take ten years to finally see them closed. Since there is no machine that can actually carry out the lengthy process, the artist plans to exhibit a new elevator every year until the doors are shut.The second elevator was exhibited at Villa Arson in Nice last winter. As the artist remarked in a recent interview at her Paris studio: “There are things that cannot exist within an exhibition frame. To inhabit a place, a world, you must first appropriate it mentally. To inhabit an exhibition, it’s not about the time you spend in it or the time it lasts, but it’s about the time you can spare to mentally constitute yourself within it. The unconscious has no temporality. The inhabitants of my architectures are you, the visitors.” Indeed, the transformative quality of material and time is a constant preoccupation in Trouvé’s work.
The Italian artist, who spent her childhood in Dakar and later studied at the prestigious art school of Villa Arson, gained notoriety over the past ten years with her evolving architectural ensemble Bureau d’Activités Implicites (Bureau of Implicit Activities, BAI). Initiated in 1997, this series has grown into a dozen life-size cubicles furnished with office appliances and file cabinets. All the cubicles, which the artist refers to as ‘modules’, suggest activities whose objectives remain unclear, as they don’t result in any material product or advantage. While mimicking the relentlessness compartmentalization of bureaucracies, the various modules are the shells in which Tatiana Trouvé protected and revealed her early artistic existence. She was, to put it bluntly, unable to get exhibited. Indeed, this series of modules, this fanciful and disorienting bureaucracy, was originally inspired by the difficulties Trouvé experienced with the French administration at the beginning of her career in Paris. In France, artists are expected to complete long-drawn-out administrative tasks, because the state has largely taken charge of cultural life. Thus Trouvé decided to make of these obstacles and failures the starting point of the BAI. For instance, she collected all the rejection letters she received when looking for a job on her arrival in Paris in the early 1990s, and filed them meticulously in a cabinet that furnished the first cubicle of the BAI, the ‘administrative module’. In doing so, she transformed her lost or wasted time, allowing it to unfold into a contemplative dimension. A related process is found in the numerous ‘waiting modules’ that punctuate a visit to the BAI. They are spaces dedicated to introspection, where the viewer is left to herself, physically paused. For instance, one of the waiting modules serves as a kind of sound installation, an aural record of places in which Trouvé languished: offices, bus stations, etc. The artist, while she waited, recorded her environment. In time, she edited together these various recordings, effectively composing her own private work of Muzac. What Trouvé achieved with the BAI was to give a poetic value to these moments normally thought of as fruitless.
From the residues and scraps of this expanding architecture (which is personal in the autobiographical sense of the term) another type of installation, the polder, was raised. Trouvé’s polders, generally tube-shaped sculptures or architectures, are strange environments that take over exhibition spaces. Although partly constructed with sculptural representations of common objects (like chairs, tables, lamps, doors or exercise equipment), the polders disorientate the viewers either because of their reduced size, suggesting mysterious uses or dreamlike experiences, or because an original function is rendered negligible, or simply because they are out of reach, enclosed behind bay-windows, for instance. In the Netherlands, a polder is a tract of low land reclaimed from the sea; in Tatiana Trouvé’s world, they are installations that invade the exhibition spaces beyond the BAI – although her first polders were actually kept within its archives: miniature architectural models that reconstructed from memory sites that the artist had visited. Passing through all the deformations of recollection, the results were completely different from their origins. Little by little, these micro-architectures became more and more autonomous, emerging from the archives to invade every nook and cranny of the exhibition space, suggesting further space hidden behind the walls. For example, light emanating from small, forbidden doors points to an invisible and unreachable space behind. Or numerous tubes stretched from floor to ceiling suggest a mysterious and unseen skeleton of the exhibition space — that is, they allude to a hidden, or fictive, structure of the architecture. “I am interested in what the gaze cannot penetrate. For me, it is not that far from my ‘implicit activities’, which don’t necessarily end up in a form of production,” Trouvé says. The scale of her polders has changed considerably over time, and they have finally taken over from her BAI. “It’s got to the point that I don’t know if they’re still polders. They’ve changed so much, like a bundle of molecules that develops and propagates itself in contact with certain substances. We don’t know what it becomes. This is what happened to the polders”. Similarly, Trouvé’s drawings, which were originally architectural projects filed in the BAI archives with the early micro-polders, have become independent pieces of work. Indeed her current output has lost evident autobiographical reference.
Last year Trouvé was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize, and her reputation has been steadily growing both within France and internationally. A solo exhibtion, Four Between Two and Three, opens at the Centre Pompidou this month. “The idea is that the fourth dimension of time is stuck between the second dimension of drawing and the third of architecture and sculpture. All the forms to be shown in the exhibition will be the prisoners of a dimension that is not their own.” At the time of writing, Trouvé is planning to fill the Espace 315 with sculptures that echo architectural units seen in drawings on the walls. In the entrance, the visitors will be tricked by a trompe-l’oeil installation created by invisible mirrors which show off an illusion of the main room. In the actual main room, a double installation of sand continuously flowing from the ceiling will suggest a hidden space whose temporal emptying will give shape to variable, ever changing, ‘sculptures’ (two mountains of black sand that will grow night and day until the end of the show). “It’s the story of these three dimensions which are twisted together and don’t manage to come loose from one another.” This figure of the knot reflects Trouvé’s concept of the ‘double bind’, which was also the title of one of her solo shows at Palais de Tokyo in 2007. Her installations are bound by, knotted within, trapped between, two dimensions: the dimension of the actual exhibition-space and the dimension of the mysterious worlds and activities suggested by the pieces. Tatiana Trouvé likes to say that fiction is nothing more than a doubling of things. Thus the gap between two spaces, or dimensions, is where the viewer’s imagination can finally move unrestrained.