How do we write about the conditions of production, about processes, materials, about craft and artistic creation? How can the context flow into the description of art? With a publicly announced writing competition, the Sitterwerk Foundation searched for new forms of art description that focus on production processes and materiality. A jury selected two texts from the 37 submissions, which were awarded prize money and published on the Sitterwerk online journal.
"18.8.23 Written Matter - What turns me into a membrane" by Sara Grütter is one of the winning texts. The jury was convinced by how freely the text is written in form. A text in fragments that describes a close-up view of the research process of a day as it takes place in the artist's head. The text is somewhere between a notebook, a trail of thoughts and concrete poetry, and makes the movements of the thoughts during the research tangible. The heterogeneity of the text reflects the heterogeneity of the sources of the research and reflections, which can also become an overload. At the same time, the text itself becomes the material, which seems to the jury to be very contemporary.
The jury included Rémi Brandon (founder Soccochico and lecturer HEAD, Geneva), Deborah Keller (editor-in-chief Kunstbulletin, Zurich), Julia Künzi (art historian and curator, Bern and Zurich), Barbara Preisig (art historian and lecturer and art critic, Zurich), Laurin Schaub (ceramist and artist, Bern), Kathrin Siegrist (artist, Basel), and Bettina Zimmermann (art historian and collaborator Kesselhaus Josephsohn, Zurich and St. Gallen). The jury defined terms such as seductiveness and authenticity, intrinsic logic in form and content, conciseness and otherness as well as topicality, language and originality as criteria by which they were guided in their assessment.
