Susanna Fritscher - Für Ingeborg Bachmann, 2023

Launch
October 10, 2023
6 - 8 PM

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An Homage to Author Ingeborg Bachmann
Susanna Fritscher discovered Ingeborg Bachmann's writings at an early age, and they have inspired and accompanied her artistic approach ever since. While not contemporaries, author and artist share both a language and the history of their homeland. The artist wished to create a book in homage to Ingeborg Bachmann, the poet, as well as the political thinker and philosopher, aspects of the author’s life and oeuvre that remain all-too unfamiliar in France. For this reason, the book compiles primarily political texts and writings on the philosophy of language.

A dual work
This bilingual edition, limited to 30 copies and designed by Ruedi Baur, comes in a boxed set including a work by Susanna Fritscher entitled Für Ingeborg Bachmann and four booklets, each presented on trays that correspond to a part of the book: Poems, Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics: "Questions and Pseudo-questions", Journal and the Afterword.

The Author: Ingeborg Bachmann
Ingeborg Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1926 and met an untimely death in Rome at the age of 47. She was the author of a remarkable and important body of work in German literature in the second half of the 20th century. As a poet, writer, and rare and committed thinker, she ceaselessly denounced various manifestations of fascism and protested against war and violence. Greatly affected by the Hitler era, and particularly by the Anschluss, or the annexation of Austria, in 1938, her writings examine language as a “dream of expression", thus opening the way to reflection on matters of language and what was and would remain untranslatable between countries.

The Artist: Susanna Fritscher
Born in Vienna in 1960, Susanna Fritscher left Austria in 1983 for France, where she completed her art studies. Her works and visual and sound installations explore a fragile world, reinventing our relationship with reality by suspending apparent stability and constancy, and suddenly transforming our environment into a precarious, elusive, vibrating, and fluid landscape.

Today, Susanna Fritscher presents a book and a work created in homage to Ingeborg Bachmann and her strength in shouldering the weight that history so violently imposed on her. Made from a fine textile weave unraveled to the limit of its hold and visibility, her artwork is more a gesture than an object. By "unweaving," the artist removes all constructive stability, exposing the object to a fragile volatility that seems to blend with the air.

The Graphic Designer: Ruedi Baur
The layout for this edition was entrusted to graphic designer Ruedi Baur, who has worked with Susanna Fritscher on publications and collaborations or complementary projects in an urban context since 2000. Its graphics were conceived in the same spirit of dialogue between designer and artist.

Since the 1980s, Ruedi Baur has approached his work as a designer in the context of a civic space in need of transformation. Having worked as a graphic designer for a number of cultural institutions in France and around the world, in the 1990s he established a transdisciplinary teaching program based on critical research into design culture.

© Editions Leal Torres