Project
Rabbit and the City
A fanfold-artistbook … an object made of paper bags …
… which contain nothing less …
… as a story about ….
… the human society …
… which is (stuck) between image and text …
“By elffriede © Hanne Römer c/o .aufzeichnensysteme Wien 2006 handmade and assembled from paper bags, partially colored ink-pen drawings and typewritten texts, the book-art object, which has been made into a fanfold, tells the story of the Rabbits, who, under the leadership of the anti-hero Rabbit Robert and with the help of international cooperation (including with the sea creatures), manage to ward off their expulsion and annihilation by a dictator. Apart from its eternal and renewed topicality, distantly leaning on the classical form of the animal fable, boldly designs itself over the bulky-rough image carrier, almost paper body, a fantastic-opulent visuality reminiscent of Bosch/Breughel, countered by apt texts, which, through extreme eliptical foreshortening, challenge the reception to a text-pictorial linkage, in order to create, together with it, a generally valid statement about (bureaucratic) violence and its humanistic-collective overcoming, and refreshingly enough, not through a flat-didactic-mediating, illustrative-descriptive presentation, as is unfortunately common in the general (children’s and adult) picture book literature, but through the artifice of minimalism, which the artist Hanne Römer also masters virtuously as an author, the artifice of omission, an intellectual montage, which on the other hand the seemingly naive drawing style consciously conceals by opening up to a playful approach at a medial, narratively decisive interface: in the linking of text and image.
The idea of artfully assembling an artistic book object from rough paper bags taken from the context of use of past commodity worlds that are now current again due to sustainability, and thus enhancing it / quote Hanne Römer in her dialogic 111 Kōan (series since 2015) “do you recycle everything?” – “verwertung is the wrong word, i’m talking about aufwertung” / once again vouches for the material-haptic spectrum or a poetically highly sensitive view of Hanne Römer (under textual-drawing leadership of her (© 2000) concept .aufzeichnensysteme, once pupated in the alter ego elffriede), which in graphic-textual vitality, yes, naughtiness, creates continuously referencing spaces in which tickets, satin pizza packages, blotting paper misproductions, papers borrowed from submerged office contexts, and writing revalued into artistic editions circulate around one another.”
Friedrich C. Heller 2023