Jury Statement
Born in New York in 1960, Andrea Scrima is no stranger to the art world. After studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York and at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, where she has lived and worked since 1984, her artworks have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. Scrima has always maintained a close link to writing: through the literary criticism and essays she has published over the years, and through her large-scale text installations—essentially short stories applied to walls—that dominated her artistic work from 2000 on and that navigate the viewer’s perception by merging textual content and choreography. With the publication of A Lesser Day in 2010, Scrima made her celebrated debut as a literary author. The book takes the narrator’s past as the starting point for an artist’s biography, tracing the paths taken, revisiting memories, creating space for the erratic, and allowing for lacunae—imbued throughout by a poetic sensibility and by a gaze that generates atmosphere through its descriptive observations. This novel in fragmentary form can also, however, be read as an inquiry into the substance of any identity, of any life. Eight years later, the renowned Droschl Verlag in Graz published an excellent German translation titled Wie viele Tage.
In 2021, Droschl published Scrima’s second book: Like Lips, Like Skins (in German Kreisläufe, translated from the American by Christian von der Goltz and the author herself), in which she once again demonstrates her impressive narrative skills. In telling a family’s history, she focuses on various types of trauma: the damage young people suffered in the disciplinary institutions of the former East Germany as well as the trauma that arises from voluntary ties. In the process, Scrima assembles various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle—memories, facts, the imagined—into a compelling portrait of an existence.
Scrima, editor-in-chief of the English-language literary magazine StatORec, submitted a project that takes as its point of departure her research into her family’s Arbëresh origins; the focus, however, widens considerably to include immigrant groups everywhere. The work-in-progress is a collection of essays titled Displaced, which explores uprootedness, repression, mental illness, and the gradual loss of a mother tongue among migrants of the second and third generation.
To read the original German version, click here.
Many thanks to the Kulturressort of the City of Graz and the Kulturvermittlung Steiermark for making this fellowship possible.
Photo: Antonio Maria Storch
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