Using a wide range of media (installation, sculpture, video, sound art, artist books, and multiples), over the past decade Elsa Werth has developed a practice centered on appropriation, displacement, and subversion, engaging with the everyday world. With an economy of means and often incorporating humor, she challenges the socioeconomic systems that govern society, creating deliberately unspectacular works as a form of resistance.

Presented as a list, the sound installation Anywayland features a sequence of 1,349 terms recited by a female voice, compiled by gathering “all common nouns beginning with the letter A, in alphabetical order, to which the suffix ‘land’ has been systematically added. The list opens with Aland, ‘A’ taken as a single letter but also as an indefinite article, A+Land then becomes Land, taken in its broadest sense: all land. By invoking the privative prefix “a-,” it can also suggest the absence or loss of land.” [1] This lengthy enumeration of words can be perceived as a reflection on how the names of countries, states, and territories in were formed in the English language, some of which follow the very structure Werth employs. By simply adding this suffix, the artist shifts the meanings of existing words, creating new ones that, as she explains, “bring together different metaphorical registers that alternately evoke freedom, oppression, absurdity, triviality, abstraction, exoticism.” Through this sound installation, the artist alludes to contemporary territorial issues while also questioning our personal relationship with places. Anywayland responds to and extends Werth’s reflections in two works created the same year. In the first, she reconstituted the October 4, 2019, edition of Le Monde newspaper by erasing all textual elements, leaving only the names of the countries mentioned in the various articles and the graphic elements of the newspaper’s layout. This reduction reveals a geography shaped by the day’s news and the prominence of certain countries in the political landscape at that moment. In the video Color Strip, Werth compiled the flags of all existing countries, displaying them in a continuous sequence scrolling from left to right. The resulting succession of stripes, colors, and symbols generates new graphic compositions, redefining relationships between nations through unexpected connections and inviting the viewer to imagine a newly conceived world order.

Marie Vicet, 2025
Translated by Laurie Hurwitz

[1] Conversation with the artist.