Sarah Tritz: Je suis une économie du désir

Models of heavyweight lorries form a convoy along the walls, accompanied by earthenware dinosaurs. Aeroplanes, sketched on slightly yellowed paper, appear to rain down from above. Some crash, while others take off, as the lorries and dinosaurs continue forwards.

The scene evokes a procession and, at the same time, a problem of representation. The dinosaurs refer to a child’s memory of an extinct species, reconstructed by Sarah Tritz through drawings that bring together different forms commonly identified as dinosaurs. Memory, repetition and the intermittent nature of consciousness create a strange but coherent relationship between dinosaurs, aeroplanes and lorries: a story of strata, disappearance and the accumulation of images.

The work can also be read through the economy of desire and the construction of history. The lorries evoke the history of men and industry; the dinosaurs, the history of extinct life; between them, the history of women; and above them, the history of childhood. These overlapping histories raise questions about memory, time and the status of the child as a figure of alterity.

Tritz gives material form to duration and to desires—remembered, fulfilled or still unknown. The lorries become carriers of hopes, memories, the future and the past. Their surfaces hold nothing and everything: a space of speculation where commodities, imagination and time intersect.