[…]

The garden of idea and forms that Trouvé has created is an invitation to navigate the unseen in ways that are both new and old. Our reliance on technology has consolidated belief systems founded on Euclidian measurements of space and time. But it does so at the expense of other forms of knowledge—be they animal or ancestral. The guiding principles of the stick charts that enabled the people of the Marshall Islands to cross thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean are no more recognizable to us as “maps” than those that guide migrating birds from their feeding grounds close to the Poles to their breeding grounds toward the Equator. Made of coconut fibers, bent palm ribs, and cowries, the stick charts were less an attempt to represent a world as seen from above than to sensate in diagrammatic form a complex of winds, currents, temperatures, shears, wave intervals, and other oceanic phenomena for the Micronesian navigators who understood the ocean as something more than the featureless blue boundary that separates land masses. Art has the capacity to investigate a space where human knowledge either ends or has been lost. In their referencing of the stick charts, Trouvé’s cast bronze entanglements of roots and branches are literally portals into another world of lost knowledge. They invoke a relationship to a world no longer bound by the rigid coordinates of GPS, a suggestion of something far less unyielding but infinitely more compelling—the idea of a space where multiple orientation procedures can interact to create a cosmology where human and non-human possibility exist side by side.

Even though maps of different kinds are embedded throughout Trouvé’s work, they refuse to give us direction. Instead, they offer openings in knowledge, windows onto non-exclusive Umwelten. They frame ideas of territory, connectivity, and space. Collectively, like the exhibition itself, they become a meta-map—a cartography of the very idea of mapping—which embraces the possibility of getting lost. As with the fictitious line of dead reckoning, art is here rendered as fiction, as a fabrication, made not out of a fear of the truth but as part of a desperate attempt to preserve faith in its existence. When we lie, we are actually hiding from the truth. Our dread may be that if we ever stop hiding from the truth, we might discover that the truth—our truth—does not exist. But only in accepting that possibility can we open ourselves to the idea not of a world ruled by a single point of view—let alone a single species—but of multiple worlds coming together to create a cosmology of ideas greater than ourselves.

Excerpts from the catalogue of the exhibition "Tatiana Trouvé. The Strange Life of Things" at Palazzo Grassi