Lorma Marti was formed by Karen Lohrmann and Stefano de Martino and are currently based between Berlin and Rome. Their work covers a range of scales and tools, from architecture to installation, photography, video and painting.
Their project Waiting Land observes the escalation of illegal construction that typifies the modern Italian landscape, a phenomenon that, exploited in equal parts by governments and enterprising citizens alike, skirts the edges of populism and anarchy. Waiting Land articulates the distance between ideal values, ambitions, aspirations, dreams, and their actual manifestation, as a series of photo-reportages, sculptures, installations and videos.
Site Surveys is an ongoing documentation in digital media of possible or impending conflicts arising out of the territorialization of landscapes by infrastructures, production processes, settlement policies and consumer patterns.
Other projects include the Dynamic Series, paintings and murals based on fluxes, commenting on means of representation by abstracting the subject/object relation, and CMYKs, a series of paintings on the issue of visualizing latent and implicit information through color separation.
Return to Occupation is an observation on the re-united city and new German capital of Berlin. Implications of international security laws and the ambitious urban densification plans, that locate most embassies within the city center, have made this city once again a place of blocked-off public space, large-scale traffic deviations and extensive surveillance of the individual citizen that the population of Berlin had only just overcome.
Recent exhibitions and publications include 2005/6 Waiting Land, Comune di Napoli (in preparation); 2005 One Minute Wonder, Lighthouse Brighton/UK; Old Market Hall Film and Digital Media Centre, Shrewsbury/UK; 2004 SSFVF Bilgi’de Sinema, Istanbul; Bath Film Festival/UK; RACA Gallery, Copenhagen; SSFVF 3rd Floor Arts Centre, Portsmouth/UK + publ.; Limiti Chiostro di Santa Chiara, Cutro/I + publ.; Camp for Oppositional Architecture An Architektur, Berlin + publ.; 2003 Mobility Rotterdam Biennale; Waiting Land and Calabria Eden ‘Clear Skies with Patches of Grey’ Berlin, publ.
Projects by Lorma Marti have recently been supported by the Austrian Ministry for Education, Research and the Arts (Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur, BMBWK), the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Copenhagen and the German Art Project Grant IFA.