Lullaby Toolbox reveals a garden and an emotional world. It is a landscape cultivated by the artist, where ideas and concerns regarding a world changing with increasing speed due to human activity are embodied as artefacts. On the one hand, Hirtentreu refers to the ecological crisis and the destruction it leads, on the other, the installation resembles rather a dreamlike and sensory vision than sharp critique. Her artefacts are meditative objects with each one encapsulating a story, as many of these objects have had a life in the artist’s previous practice. They are also tools and an invitation to a more empathic attitude towards other beings. And so, the space that has been organised into a lullaby toolbox, can be seen as a temporary crystallisation of Hirentreu’s practice, from which she encourages the viewer to discover and create contemporary lullabies.

 

Hirtentreu’s toolbox includes tools to tenderly sing the fading world to sleep and through a romantic-mechanical sensibility, find gentleness towards beings who no longer inhabit our world. Here, both remembering and commemorating are important, just like both ghosts and monsters and finding beauty in them. By giving ghosts a physical form and recreating their materiality, the artist allows the viewer to approach these ghosts as bodily beings, who do not exist in a closed-off world but in a welcoming garden set up for commemorating them.