The world is always inevitably changing. At the same time, we humans look for patterns and regularities. AiWHEtL revolves around doing and thinking as a process of understanding, in which the result essentially cannot be owned but remains in constant change, says Sophie Tottie.

In Sophie Tottie’s recent work re-workings of previous work, for example material and leftover products like paint and brush cleaner is incorporated and reused in new work. Tottie’s works function as prisms that weigh, measure, and materialize something that seem to belong to an inner, intangible reality but which manifest themselves in an outer material and physical existence.

The work in AiWHEtL* circles around the act of learning, where one main question is not what it is about but how it works. The book includes four texts that discuss Tottie's work from the 1990s up to the present – a work that is not a conglomeration of facts and an end point, but which remodels through actions, ongoing contemplation and re-evaluations of what has been said and done. 
Ultimately, if we think of all that we do as a form with which to improve society, and with it ourselves, all of it is social work. But it is social work that not only aims at achieving bearable levels of survival but also at guaranteeing an autopoietic system that eventually has its own sound dynamic and then doesn’t need us anymore.”
Fragments from an email conversation, Sophie Tottie and Luis Camnitzer, 2021

(* The title is an acronym of the sentence “As if We Had Everything to Learn” from the text: ‘Lygia Clark: A Space Open to Time’ by Cornelia H. Butler, published in the catalogue for Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014.)

SOPHIE TOTTIE: AiWHEtL (catalogue and related works)
Texts: Mårten Arndtzén, Magnus Bons, Connie H Butler, Luis Camnitzer, Sophie Tottie

Design: Jöran Rammhällen, Sophie Tottie
2023, English, softcover

120 pages, 21,5 x 27,7 cm
ISBN: 9789198672091
Order from Art & Theory Publishing

(Photo credit:Emil Fagander. Courtesy Art and Theory Publishing)