The Words

Artium Museoa has collaborated with Amsterdam-based author and graphic designer Louis Lüthi on two occasions over the last few years. A frequent collaborator of artist Katinka Bock, he designed all graphic elements of her exhibition Logbook (March-September 2021). He did the same for Jutta Koether’s exhibition at the museum, Black Place (October 2022-April 2023).

Luthi’s contribution for AMAonline titled “The Words” (the title page includes all the languages of the original sources) is a collection of sentences gathered over the years in which different authors describe words, often resorting to metaphors. Lüthi is interested in “the language that attempts to capture the materiality of words, the way words are seen as acting upon other things or as being acted upon themselves.” Some of the quotes are slightly altered and the initials of their authors can be found on the left side of the page while the full list of sources sits at the end of the essay.

Louis Lüthi is the author of On the Self-Reflexive Page (Roma Publications, 2010; second revised edition, 2021); Infant A (Paraguay Press, 2012), a short fiction about the artist Ulises Carrión; and A Die with Twenty-Six Faces (Roma Publications, 2019). He is a thesis advisor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Click on the image or here to read «The Words»