Critters Chorus, Cycle 1

Whirring and flashing in the night sky. Wild foliage on a moist forest floor, rapidly passing by. Nervous encounters at a redwood tree, gurgling chatter with turkeys at dusk. Casually coiffed horses, unpredictable flying objects and flapping rotors. Speckled skin scrabbles, covered in lush ferns. Swirling fog, dripping haze, old man’s beard, light – diffracted. Sassy badgers, strings and figures. Lead by questioning the so-called “species problem”, Truttmann investigates the (im)possibilities of taxonomic categorization of living organisms from an artistic point of view. This way she creates a fictional ecosystem of rhythmic montage and unruly composition, in which the species raise their voices against imposed classification. Audio and video recordings have been collected during artist residencies in southern Estonia (Maajaam Project Space, 2019) and in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California (Djerassi Resident Artists Program, 2022).