Driven out of Moravia as a teenager, the artist spent her life in search of her lost origins. She created a very idiosyncratic, wild work out of it.
The Swiss writer and artist Erica Pedretti (1930-2022) in a photograph from 1998.
The early trauma has inscribed her life to the core. And she created an artistic work from it that did not call for reconciliation with the past, that just kept trying to find words and images for it. Every work that the artist and writer Erica Pedretti created was a faint aftershock of those shocks that had ejected her from her origins forever.
Born in 1930 in Moravian Sternberg as a child of Sudeten Germans, she and her family were forced to leave the country at the age of 15. She got to Switzerland with a Red Cross transport via Auschwitz, Prague and Munich, as ancestors on her father’s side lived here and vouched for the family. Their stay, however, was only granted temporarily.
Until the family moved to the USA in 1950, Erica Pedretti was still able to attend the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. Here she met her future husband, the artist Gian Pedretti. The marriage allowed her to return from New York in 1952. Since then she has lived in Switzerland, first in the Engadin, later in La Neuveville on Lake Biel and finally back in Graubünden, where she died on July 14 at the age of 92.
Filigree wing creatures
Relatively late, at the age of forty, Erica Pedretti published her first book. “Harmless, please” is the name of the volume of stories. It contained anything but harmless, rather the threatening rift that ran through Pedretti’s existence opened up for the first time: between a “here” of her present and the “there” of her origin there was a gap that could no longer be closed, only for her there were always new words to be found.
The ephemerality of existence, the longing for the lost homeland and finally the speechlessness in the face of this loss have taken on an equally dramatic and incessantly insistent emblematic form in the life and work of Erica Pedretti: The most suggestive sculptural works that she has created as an artist include the filigree, airy and ephemeral winged objects that she designed in many variations. The vulnerability of existence as well as the resistance of art come into their own here.
If these wings tell of an existence between here and there, Erica Pedretti has given this inner feeling a remarkable expression in her way of life: for many years she maintained a small trailer not far from her house on Lake Biel, in which she used to relax Writing and retreating to escape from writing. So she created the place that stood outside of all ties, that depicted being on the move in no man’s land and perhaps even ironized it a little to make it more bearable. The roulotte over the lake had become the habitable wing. The rift in existence remained, but there was a remedy.
The crack stayed
Erica Pedretti found it in language, in a doubtful skepticism that didn’t fix anything, that kept everything moving and translated it into the lightness of her winged creatures. She used language to grope her way towards the lost past. And each of her books made this seeker of speaking audible and visible. “Just before she stopped being a child, Anna swore to herself that she would never forget what she now felt and thought as a child feels and thinks,” she said in her 1995 novel Closest Home.
Every sentence in Erica Pedretti’s work testifies to the impossibility of fulfilling this promise. And every sentence in her work is an attempt to live up to the child’s oath. The rift remained, but now it had become language. You couldn’t get any closer to the child’s desire.