LIVED TRACES

The scrapyard is the phantasmagoric flip side of our throwaway society. It is where discarded, used, consumed, and leftover items disappear—seemingly without a trace. Petra Polli explores this excess of the consumer society in a series of metal sculptures that she found in scrapyards. She often preserves the fragmented, twisted, and crumpled forms of these objects, giving them a fresh coat of paint that bestows a flawlessly smooth surface, making the marks of time seem to vanish. Some metal objects are combined by the artist with lines and words in neon. On one metal surface, for instance, a violet neon line stretches like a lifeline across it. These found objects, which have been stripped of their original purpose, are thus given new life by the artist.

Garage, 2023 Car sheet metal, paint, neon
GS-22-02, 2022, Aluminium, paint, 41x63x29cm

GS-22-05, 2022, Aluminium, paint, 87x77x27cm
GS-22-06, 2022, Aluminium 95x50x45cm

GS-22-03, 2022, Aluminium, paint, 41x63x29cm
Mut, 2022, Aluminium, paint, neon, 42x60x18cm

GS-22-01, 2022, Aluminium 33x52x15cm
GS-22-04, 2022, Steel, paint, 70x83x30cm
GS-22-07, 2022, Aluminium, paint, 73x20x8cm
GS-22-02, 2022, Aluminium, argon, 104x95cm

VIRTUAL TRACES

With the fitness app Strava, users can record their athletic activities such as running, cycling, or swimming and compare their performance with other members of the network. The app tracks routes, speed, distance, and elevation profiles.Artist Petra Polli uses the app to document the movements of the employees at the Fortress of Franzensfeste. Over a period of four months, these employees installed the app on their smartphones and recorded their daily movements through the fortress. Through this self-tracking process, the employees navigated both a physical and a virtual space simultaneously. The data collected became both the raw material and the tool for the artist. Polli does not lay down traces, nor does she read physical traces; instead, she employs the digital traces recorded by non-human sensors of others and turns them into traces through the act of interpreting them.A trace is what is regarded as a trace.

TRACKING, 2022, flexible LED-Neon Installation

Using flexible LED neon tubes and LED displays, she visualizes the movement and elevation profiles, thereby indirectly creating a blueprint of the building. Simultaneously, she also captures the fluidity of digital infrastructures and data streams that have become an integral part of everyday life in a media-saturated world. She provides an Ariadne's thread that grounds the virtual traces within the stone materiality of the fortress.

ALTITUDE, 2022, flexible LED-Neon, 245x18 cm

The project HOST serves as a repository for all tracked data: kilometers, elevation gain, date, and duration. These data scroll in digital text across the various lengths of the illuminated elements.

HOST, 2022, LED scrolling texts