Throughout her career, French-Italian artist Tatiana Trouvé has explored the psychological, mnemonic and emotional dimensions of architecture and space, creating evocative environments that engage themes of transition, fragility and resistance. Coinciding with the Venice Architecture Biennale, Trouvé is currently the subject of a major presentation at Pinault Collection’s Palazzo Grassi—“The Strange Life of Things”—bringing together a group of works that resonate deeply with many of the Biennale’s core concerns, as architects grapple with the precarious state of contemporary civilization and the failures of capitalism, which have pushed them to conceive buildings not as isolated structures but as integral components within a broader, deeply interconnected system shaped by social dynamics, environmental urgencies, biological rhythms and technological change.
Marking the most wide-ranging exhibition of the artist’s work to date, the presentation is intentionally fragmentary—rejecting any notion of linear time, fixed site or coherent narrative. Instead, it embraces the precarious yet highly malleable nature of human consciousness and experience. Microcosms and macrocosms of physical and psychological states unfold throughout, freely blending urban remnants with classical references and celestial motifs with subterranean, earthbound matter.
What Trouvé stages is an open system—an ecosystem of parts and fragments that stand in for larger wholes. Like a form of contemporary archaeology, we are presented only with traces: fragments of actions, emotions and thoughts that hint at the intelligence behind these material presences. This is the “strange life of things”—the objects and environments that surround us, shape us and contribute to our sense of being and to human development. In this sense, Trouvé’s work becomes a deliberately aleatory exploration of the material world as a state of flux, transformation and continuous metamorphosis. She embraces the fragmented nature of suspended forms and provisional structures that attempt to define and contain our existence, only to expose their inherent instability.
Occupying all three floors of Palazzo Grassi, Trouvé guides us through a continuous, uneasy oscillation between upper and underworlds, between material and spiritual realities. The palace’s marble courtyard becomes a personal constellation, an abstract cosmological chart centered on Hors-sol. Cast from various manhole covers, the different metals take on the appearance of medals, their symbols arranged on concrete as if to map a shared universe that relativizes the supposed limitlessness of human experience. Their fluid positioning across the ground evokes atomic particles drifting on liquid surfaces, echoing the stream of human consciousness and expression. At the same time, they appear to siphon away the failures and distortions that have prevented humanity from recognizing how everything—every thought, form and element—is part of the same current, the same
From there, Trouvé brings us into the in fieri dimension of her studio. Apparently incoherent assemblages of materials settle into the rooms as inherently symbolic still lifes, frozen in time as a testament to human passage and experience. In the artist’s “Notes on Sculpture” series, each work is titled after a specific moment or a person who occupied Trouvé’s thoughts during its creation, with a diaristic impulse translated into three-dimensional form that captures the unpredictability of events and materials shaping a life. Interior and exterior worlds, past experiences and inherited memories blend seamlessly into sculptures that feel at once personal and collective, suspended between order and entropy.
Trouvé’s Poverista language of raw, humble materials reveals not only their physical properties but also their psychological resonance, transforming them into metaphors of both individual and collective existence. Her sculptural compositions read as a diary of humanity and poetry, staging unexpected encounters between objects that already carry embedded political, cultural and social meaning even before they are articulated into a message. Notes on Sculpture, April 27th, ‘Maresa’, for instance, reassembles a working desk, yet within this palimpsest of everyday gestures one object rises upright, asserting itself like a character claiming presence and individuality. For Trouvé, recycling materials and objects becomes a way of weaving new stories, a means of expressing the persistent urge to blur inside and outside, psyche and form, as if striving toward a more porous mode of perception beyond the strictly visual.
In this process, the low and the high merge seamlessly, memorializing encounters between material forms within the endless cycle of production and consumption, an existence perpetually oscillating between regeneration and decay. The fragility of urban structures collides with the grandeur of contemporary architectural space, exposing the tensions that define today’s urban condition. Throughout the exhibition, Trouvé reminds us that nature inevitably outlasts humanity’s attempts to contain or escape it, revealing a quiet resilience in the face of human constructs. The obsolescence of technology and architecture meets the enduring force of natural environments while confronting the timeless majesty of art from the past. Trouvé ultimately embraces the idea that, in this post-capitalist phase of human development marked by systemic failure, sculpture can only be precious insofar as it is resistant and resilient: a commentary on material survival that acknowledge the inherent fallibility of all human endeavor.
While the human body is never directly depicted in Trouvé’s work, it is frequently evoked through the societal frameworks and constructed roles that shape identity, often overpowering the more authentic call of the soul. In a witty turn, even the room guardian is transformed into an onyx and bronze fetish, a figure as heavy as its symbolic role yet as fragile as the ghostly presence of custodianship itself—mute, isolated, unable to relate or communicate. It becomes a curious object of both artifice and weight, suspended between presence and absence.
In Storia Notturna 30 Giugno 2023, the artist confronts the failures of social systems of control by evoking communal resistance through material traces of shelter and defense. The rough surfaces of two monumental plaster wall casts stand in stark contrast to the richly adorned coffered ceiling of Palazzo Grassi, generating a charged tension between the turbulent reality of earthly existence and the idealized harmony of celestial realms. Embedded within the casts are impressions Trouvé took directly from the streets of Montreuil in the aftermath of the riots sparked by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old boy of North African descent in June 2023. Molds drawn from the remains of the unrest—burnt garbage bins, melted plastics, scorched shopfronts—are transformed into an abstracted landscape that channels the volcanic rage of the disenfranchised and maps the volatility of the present.
This unveiling of human psychological and societal constructions as inherently precarious and temporary is echoed throughout the exhibition. An underlying apocalyptic tone permeates the space, as if everything were teetering on the verge of collapse. In more than one installation, such as Navigation Gates from 2024, Trouvé evokes fragile shelters rooted in ancient yet increasingly eroded cultural systems of survival, while also gesturing toward older, more symbiotic relationships with the natural world.
In Somewhere in the Solar System, the artist appears to have already accepted societal collapse, envisioning a world reduced to shelters built from ruins, fragments of navigation maps, cosmic charts, diagrams and codes. These remnants offer a means of searching for a deeper, more ancient meaning of existence beyond the contingency and overwhelm of unfolding events. Along one timeline, inscriptions read “2060 NEWTON END OF THE WORLD” and “2100 ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE.” Arranged like a camp or a totemic circle, the installation suggests a sculpture that functions as premonition, a contemporary monument in the lineage of Maya structures that likewise sought to mark the end before it arrived.
Throughout the exhibition, Tatiana Trouvé blurs the boundaries between the observed and the imagined, between what may have occurred in the past and what could unfold in the future. The act of artistic creation, informed by both historical memory and imagination, emerges as one of the few tools of resistance and survival amid the speed and confusion of modern life, a way to resist the current of forgetting and anchor oneself in ancient truths while projecting new visions of what lies ahead. As the exhibition text suggests, Trouvé plays with these temporal shifts to mirror the speculative fictions of writers like Dino Buzzati, Italo Calvino and Ursula K. Le Guin, inviting visitors into narratives in which protagonists often find themselves in strange, disorienting circumstances that unravel linear time and logic.
What Trouvé ultimately reveals is a post-truth world marked by profound forgetfulness, where the values and knowledge of the past slip into obsolescence, leaving humanity without stable reference points to confront the recurring cycles of history. Yet she holds onto a belief in the power of artistic creation to imagine and construct alternative scenarios, a way to confront cultural and existential decay through the collective strength and imagination of the community.
An intimate act of both sentimental and poetic resistance is embodied in Trouvé’s Cities (2024), which reflects the endless circulation of bodies and objects across the world. These necklaces, composed of materials gathered in various cities, become a form of personal coding of sensations and experiences that spoke authentically to the soul. By casting them in bronze and preserving them in time, Trouvé invites contemplation of their broader meaning within the economy of social and physical relations. New archetypes emerge as impossible, tactile votive offerings, reviving a symbolic and mythic language as perhaps the only tools left to confront collapse. As Walter Benjamin once suggested, the past “flashes up” in moments of crisis, just as Trouvé gathers fragments, ruins and temporal dislocations to root memory in lived experience, resisting the current of forgetting.
The faculty of deep memory, combined with the force of expansive imagination, becomes, as Michael Meade writes, what continues to flow into the world as ongoing creation. Embracing this vital fluidity of matter and energy, Tatiana Trouvé conceives of her work as an ecosystem, a circulation of elements configured into a community of forms, each capable of generating new and open-ended narratives. The Residents exemplifies this approach, a cluster of sculptures suspended in time and space that invites viewers to move around them and imagine scenarios drawn from their unfinished, suggestive forms.
Yet Trouvé is acutely aware that even deep memory and expansive imagination inevitably confront the boundaries imposed by societal structures that contain and regulate reality. This tension is rendered in L’appuntamento through an intricate layering of glass barriers and walls, transparent yet obstructive. And still, there is always a door, a portal that appears once the viewer shifts perspective, a means of escape from the rigid frameworks through which society seeks to control not only individual behavior but also the inherently chaotic nature of the universe. Trouvé’s composition suggests that reality is, in fact, porous, malleable and multiple, urging us to embrace the fluidity of transformation and the fundamental relativity of all so-called truths.
However, it is in her enigmatic drawings that Tatiana Trouvé most fully explores the tension between the human urge to impose order, to meticulously chart and contain reality within graphic systems and architectural plans, and the opposing pull to surrender to the unbounded torrent of imagination. Within these intricate visual tapestries, real and imagined places, past and future fluidly intertwine, giving rise to impossible, speculative landscapes. These are spaces imbued with a haunting, almost ominous quality, where the spectral outlines of a post-capitalist world begin to take shape.
Yet amid this embrace of boundless imagination, there remains a deep and deliberate attempt to discern order, to safeguard and preserve fragments from the ceaseless flow of time and experience. Like a memory chamber, Trouvé transforms an entire room into a sculptural inventory composed of an extraordinarily varied array of ordinary objects she has found or collected over the years. Far from mere curiosities, these objects form a personal lexicon, a tangible testament to the overlooked “life of things” within the expanding cosmos of her artistic practice. Here, while she yields to the transformative power of imagination and its capacity to envision new political and social futures, she simultaneously anchors her work in the vast, enduring memory of the past and the cyclical rhythms of history. In doing so, she positions her art outside the overwhelming mainstream of contemporary life, with its relentless overflow of temporary truths and disorienting barrage of information.
As a meticulously staged exercise in remembrance, resilience and imagination, the exhibition as a whole resonates deeply with a poignant quote by author and mythologist Michael Meade: “If we lose our natural connection to the deep river of memory and the flow of imagination in our own souls, we can lose the future as well as the past, and we’ll find ourselves losing our footing in the present as well.” Trouvé’s work, through its sustained engagement with memory and the imaginative possibilities of the future, stands as a vivid testament to the enduring human need to preserve these vital connections. Even as we drift within the relentless current of time, disoriented and increasingly detached from the essence of who we are, her art offers a quiet insistence on reorientation, anchoring the self in forms of meaning that resist erasure.
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