A volume that brings the reader closer to the artist’s complex and multifaceted imagination, along a journey full of surprises.

“During my travels, I have collected all sorts of elements and objects from city and village streets, forest paths, or by the sea: flowers, branches, bones, insects, feathers, stones, shells, lighters, rubber bands, tissues… stranded, lost, discarded, or gifted by the environment (in the case of native species). I grouped them under the name of the place where they were found, then created, for each location, a necklace that brings together the various collected elements, transformed into bronze. This system of symbolic exchange allows me to imagine that each object carries the story of what it is made of, that each element bears witness to its environment and to what once was, and that their coming together tells us something about a certain place at a particular time.” —Tatiana Trouvé

On the occasion of the major exhibition Tatiana Trouvé. The Strange Life of Things, held at Palazzo Grassi in Venice from April 6, 2025, to January 4, 2026, Marsilio Arte is publishing the exhibition catalogue of the same name, curated by Caroline Bourgeois and James Lingwood.
Site-specific installations, sculptures, paintings, and drawings unfold along a carefully designed route, developed in close collaboration with the artist—Italian by birth and based in France—combining new creations and earlier works, which together acquire a renewed temporal dimension.
Inspired by the architectural and urban thinking of Ugo La Pietra and his research into redefining the relationship between artwork and viewer, Tatiana Trouvé—through her works and their renewed presentation in the exhibition—invites visitors to expand their physical and mental awareness. As Bruno Racine, CEO of the Pinault Collection, puts it, the visitor is thus faced with “the strange life of things,” a beautiful title chosen by the artist as a key to access her universe.

The volume, designed by the incisive French graphic designer Anaïs Lancrenon—who selected materials such as a paper made from algae, which have proliferated abnormally and afflicted the fragile ecosystem of the Venice Lagoon—becomes an integral part of the exhibition, thanks to a rich corpus of installation views that bring the reader the experience of a unique occasion.
It opens with an introduction by Emma Lavigne, highlighting the deep bond between the artist, Venice, and the Pinault Collection. The importance of the lagoon city, and its role in the production and setup of the works in the exhibition, is carefully emphasized in the conversation between the artist and the two curators: beginning with a quote by Astrida Neimanis on the vital importance of water, a central theme of the show, Trouvé explains how “Venice is a body: it is crossed by arteries and canals. […] It is a body, because it lives and vibrates to the rhythm of the water, because it is inhabited by organisms and species connected to water, because it is traversed by desires, stories, by a memory of water. Venice is a city where departures and arrivals blend into the waters.”

The volume concludes with in-depth essays by Bruno Racine (Tatiana Trouvé and Italo Calvino: The Inexhaustible Surface of Things), writer and curator Neville Wakefield (Dead Reckoning), and critic and curator Barbara Casavecchia (The Absent Majority).