I have always worked where I lived. I would perhaps do better to say that I have always slept where I work. I have often visited my studio at night and from these nocturnal visits, Remanences, a series of black pencil on black paper drawings, was created. They depict my nighttime studio, or rather what I can see of it then.
The universe in which I work by day, whether actively or passively, is worlds apart from the one I leave behind at night, to come back to by day. It is a universe where time is at work, linking things together; a universe full of life, one that can get along very well without me, and that I surprise myself rediscovering.
In his video installations Mapping The Studio I and II (2001), Bruce Nauman shows images of his studio, filmed with an infrared camera for forty-two minutes at a certain time of night over a period of some months. If nothing much happens in these nocturnal views, there is a world rustling here, as you can hear in the sounds of insects and animals (dogs barking, coyotes howling), as well as distant trains, and the passing of a cat, of mice. The studio is an environment connected to living beings and things endlessly harbouring and producing microevents. It lives by day and night. Above all, it is time that passes through this space, awake, possessed of thought and dreams, when the things that populate it are resting, night fallen.
The studio is at once a physical and a psychic space. It is connected to a whole array of living beings and things that make it up, but it is also a place where ideas and things connect (a place where ideas become things and things become ideas), brought to life by the mind, by consciousness and unconsciousness, by things themselves. For me, these two dimensions are inexorably bound up in one another. In the environment of the studio, every object is brought to a point of transformation, of finding a new definition, whether in the way it connects to other objects (whatever these are), or in its materiality, in its dimensions…
The observer leaves with freeze frames of the worlds explored, and it is indeed a snapshot of this waking universe, this world of possibilities, that I have kept in suspense for my exhibition. Here, everything has mutated, changing its materiality in order to become fixed in time, in binding ties that fix things one to the other. This frozen movement and this doubling of the objects in their mutated cause the environment of the studio to appear as if in a dream. In the strange process of fossilization that has taken hold, the elements populating this space, however different, acquire the status of a work, and the differences separating them are forgotten, put to sleep for eternity. This is where the voyage around my studio takes place.
Tatiana Trouvé was born in 1968 in Cosenza, Italy. She lives and works in Paris, France. She has participated in major international biennales such as the Biennale di Venezia (2003 and 2007), the 29th São Paulo Biennale (2010), the Biennale de Lyon (2015), the Istanbul biennale (2017), the Yokohama Triennale, (2017) and the BIENALSUR, 1st Contemporary Biennal of South America (2017), and group shows at the Hayward Gallery in London (2010), and the Pinault Foundation Punta della Dogana, Venice (2011), at the ACCA, Melbourne (2012), the Museo Jumex, Mexico City(2013), the Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2013), and the Albertina Museum, Vienna (2015).
Solo exhibitions include Double Bind at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007); 4 Between 2 and 3 at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2008); A Stay Between Enclosure and Space at the Migros Museum of Zurich (2009); Tatiana Trouvé, the South London Gallery (2010); and Il grande ritratto, an extensive exhibition inspired by the title of Dino Buzzati's science fiction novel and conceived in response to the challenging architecture of the Kunsthaus Graz (2010). The travelling exhibition I tempi doppi was presented at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museion Bolzano-Bozen and Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2014). The Longest Echo — L’écho le plus long at Mamco, Geneva inaugurated her first retrospective exhibition (2014). The Sparkle of Absence was her first solo show in China at Red Brick Museum, Beijing (2016). Public Art Fund commissioned Desire Lines on view at Central Park in New York in 2015. In 2018 she had solo shows at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, at the Via Medici in Roma, and at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv. In 2019, she will inaugurate a solo show at the Broad Art Museum in the Michigan.