Settlement

The geographical gaze: On lightly coloured carpet, behind glass, a cross-section landscape (the technical term is profile sketch) emerges from the recycled snippets and other refuse pouring gaily out of the big blue studio rubbish bag. When the Swiss artist duo Lutz & Guggisberg evoke notions like colony, settlement or condominium with their installation, further associations of microbe-metropolis in futuristic architecture made of dust, sawdust and rubbish are not far. The viewer may imagine a utopian bacterial stronghold behind the screen, burgeoning over its edges into the weave of the carpet. This cultivated landscape in a living-room is practically minimalist in comparison to the Swiss artists' usual, materially "overflowing installation universe of the absurd"*. And yet it plays, true to usual form, with the infinite expanses of macrocosm and micro-format while rejoicing craftily at the second, third and fourth glance of the biologist, the social scientist and the model train maker.

Beatrix Ruf: Lutz / Guggisberg Ich sah die Wahrheit*, Kunsthalle Zürich, press text, exhibition, 2004