KVAERNER SHIPYARD, ROSTOCK, WARNEMÜNDE, IX: DECEMBER 5 | VERA LUTTER

A non-human skeleton, this is what Vera Lutter’s work presents to us, unfiltered and straightforward for the viewer. The formal exploration of photography is inextricably linked to technological development; this is the medium’s only constant. Lutter inhabits this dualism, one that pertains not just to conceptual realms but also to spatial and temporal dimensions, starting with the instrument she uses: an immersive camera obscura, lined with photosensitive paper and featuring a classic pinhole. The traces of landscapes and architectural segments captured on the paper generate large-scale photographs, which Lutter records, composing diptychs or triptychs that convey the monumentality of both the subjects and the process. Through the exposure of the negative, the submerged elements emerge.

The topic of transportation, whether of people or goods, is central to her work. Abandoned factories, hangars, or—as in the case of Kvaerner Shipyard, Rostock, Warnemünde, IX: December 5—shipyards, form the core of productive systems that have governed and continue to govern recent history. Her work is neither nostalgic nor a mere documentation of places destined to disappear. Disappearance—the ghost that Lutter pursues and successfully represents—is the reward for patience, for a process that can last days, in which the artist herself acts as an observer rather than an active subject. It is the light, in fact, that acts and dictates the timing: if it is too brief, what is recorded lacks significance; if prolonged, there is the risk of ‘burning’ everything and thus failing. The goal is not abstraction, but rather to reveal—one of photography’s recurring obsessions—what ‘cannot be seen.’
The belly of a large cruise ship resembles an anatomical diagram or a representation of mythical creatures, which, in its seemingly straightforward yet profoundly layered monumentality, towers over us.

Kvaerner Shipyard, Rostock, Warnemünde, IX: December 5 by Vera Lutter is currently on display at Fondazione MAST, as part of the solo exhibition “SPECTACULAR. Un’esplorazione della luce,” curated by Francesco Zanot, from October 11, 2024, to January 6, 2025.
The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue “Vera Lutter. Spectacular”, 2024, edited by Francesco Zanot and published by Fondazione MAST (Bologna); book design by Federico Barbon Studio.

Vera Lutter
Kvaerner Shipyard, Rostock, Warnemünde, IX: December 5, 2000
203 x 320 cm
Sam Trower, Princeton, NJ, USA
© Vera Lutter by SIAE 2024

20/11/24