Tatiana Trouvé​, Hors-sol, 2025. Part of “Tatiana Trouvé. The Strange Life of Things” in Venice. © Tatiana Trouvé, by SIAE 2025 Ph. Marco Cappelletti and Giuseppe Miotto / Marco Cappelletti Studio © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

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.

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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 water, the same flux.

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........

© Observer