Tatiana Trouvé

I’m rather fond of the idea that things appear from the moment they are deformed, in the play between what is identical and different, between repetition, alteration, and renewal—like the movement my voice makes in its journey in front of the mountain’s belly, which allows me to measure the architecture of the mountain.
—Tatiana Trouvé

In her large-scale drawings, cast and carved sculptures, and site-specific installations, Tatiana Trouvé assesses the relationship between memory and material, pitting the ceaseless flow of time against the remarkable endurance of common objects. By pushing the very definitions of “copy,” “echo,” and “image,” she invents, even inhabits, environments that straddle studio, street, landscape, and dream.

Trouvé was born in Cosenza, Italy, and spent her childhood and early teenage years in Dakar, Senegal. After graduating from the Villa Arson, Nice, France, in 1989, she moved for two years to the Ateliers 63 in Haarlem, Netherlands. In 1994, she relocated to Paris where she eventually established a studio in Montreuil, a historically industrial suburb on the city’s eastern periphery. In 1997, while searching for a job, she began the project Bureau d’activités implicites (Bureau of Implicit Activities) (1997–2007), in which she displayed her personal documents in architectural “modules,” interspersing them with invented résumés and other fictionalized papers. This experiment in crafting and comprehending identity through a bureaucratic lens would be a foundation for Trouvé’s archival impulse; it also required her to accumulate a vast collection of images and small objects that she continues to reference in her drawings and sculptures today. In the sculptural series Polders (2000–), Trouvé scales up objects and interiors, yet often incorporates windows or mirrors that prevent the viewer from physically accessing the spaces. Thus, while accumulated documents reveal the fictions of identity formation in Bureau d’activités implicites, in Polders, physical limitations alienate the mind and body from seemingly familiar interiors.