Tusche on scale paper, 2010
For a series of drawings Sissa Micheli has researched the topic of shipwrecks – tankers involved in accidents, that broke in two some time ago; ships having sunk to the seabed, unlocatable, never salvaged, are all the focus of this work. Sissa Micheli begins searching for these hulls, and, in effect, calls them to our minds. She lets them emerge once more as reconstructions of reality on the blue surface of the blueprint paper, where they are ascertainable within the grid of the coordinate system. Here too the titles shipwreck prestige and shipwreck argo merchant provide information about the ships. However, key background information remains concealed. For example, we neither learn about the causes of these shipwrecks, nor about the place where they occurred or under which consequences the catastrophes took place. Sissa Micheli does not unveil the result of her research, and merely provides sparse narrative strains. It is up to us to look up the incident, to get to the bottom of the story, to explore or to continue the story in accordance with our own imagination.
-Elsy Lahner
