A guided tour to Ana Jotta's most immersive project.
For the 2022 edition of the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Ana Jotta created the site-specific project entitled Une chambre en ville (A Room in Town). During her autumn sojourn in the city, she transformed a Parisian apartment through her occupation of the space. She installed works and objects brought from her homes and studios in Portugal, and arranged the discoveries of her trawls through the streets and flea markets of Paris; she presented new works, such as wall drawings and paintings inspired by the Swiss caricaturist Rodolphe Töpffer, offering the visitor a surprising, personal, and "domestic" artistic experience. In parallel, the retrospective exhibition A comme encre (A is for Ink) dedicated to her printed matter practice—artist's books, posters, invitation cards, "footnotes"—highlighted her creative take on and lucid critique of 20th- and 21st-century aesthetics through her versatile practice.
This publication proposes a guided and immersive tour of these two projects—wall by wall in the case of Une chambre enville—and features an essay by curator Clément Dirié and a conversation with Ana Jotta.
Ana Jotta (born 1946 in Lisbon, Portugal)'s output is one of the most singular art practices of the European art scene. Appropriating and giving new life to the objects, images, writings, and inventions of others, whether artists or amateurs, she questions the notions of categorization and originality. Her practice explores all artistic mediums: painting, sculpture, installation, audio, photography, as well as the so-called minor arts (sewing, embroidery, ceramics). Her work frees itself from any identifiable style, rejecting the very notion of signature, with a biting irony and an intelligent use of space and assemblage.
Since the 1980s, Ana Jotta's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in numerous prestigious institutions in Europe and the United States such as WIELS in Brussels, Belgium (2024-2025); Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland (2024); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, USA (2023); Festival d'Automne in Paris, France (2022); Le Crédac in Ivry-sur-Seine, France (2016); Établissement d'en face in Brussels (2016). In Portugal, she has also exhibited her work regularly, notably at the Museu de Serralves in Porto (2022 and 2005), at the Casa São Roque - Centro de Arte in Porto (2019), at Culturgest Porto (2016) and at Culturgest Lisbon (2014 and 2009).
