Livre hommage à Ingeborg Bachmann

This artist’s book brings together Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann and Franco-Austrian artist Susanna Fritscher.

Susanna Fritscher discovered Ingeborg Bachmann’s texts very early in her life. They have stayed with her and inspired her artistic approach. While the artist and the author are not contemporaries, they share the same language and the history of their homeland that has been passed down. Her aim was to produce a book that would pay tribute to Ingeborg Bachmann the poetess, of course, but also to the political thinker and philosopher she was, this aspect of her work and the woman herself still barely known in France. And that is why the collection consists mainly of political and philosophical texts.

The bilingual edition, limited to 30 copies, the design of which was entrusted to Ruedi Baur, brings together in a single box: a work by Susanna Fritscher: Für Ingeborg Bachmann, as well as four booklets arranged on manipulable trays, each booklet corresponding to a part of the book: Poems, Lesson of Frankfurt: Questions and pseudo-questions, Journal and Postface.

More a gesture than an object, this tribute edition is made from a fine textile weave that the artist unravels to the limit of its structure and visibility. By unweaving it, she removes all constructive stability and opens it up to a fragile volatility that mingles with the air.

Susanna Fritscher pays tribute to the author and to her strength in lifting a weight so violently imposed on her by history, which she relentlessly transforms into an acute understanding of what we are made of.