Claudia Larcher
Recontemporary, Turin, Italy
26 November – 20 December 2025
Founded in Turin in 2018, Recontemporary aims to explore the impact of digital technologies on contemporary art, and make them accessible to as wide an audience as possible. In Extinction Story, artist Claudia Larcher focuses on an object that symbolizes origin, fragility, and finitude in equal measure: the egg. The starting point is her grandfather's collection of over 5,500 bird eggs—an archive that oscillates between natural history precision, family memory, and ecological ambivalence.
The film links personal stories with universal questions about species extinction and biodiversity. Experimental image sequences reveal a tension between individual biography and global ecology. The camera and the narrative voice open up a space in which the collector's story is linked to the narrative of species extinction. The film is complemented by a series of installation elements that recontextualize the egg as a symbol: a small “planetarium” made of eggs that evokes the cosmos in miniature format, a holographically animated bird skeleton that explores the boundary between nature documentary and virtual projection, and a large-format projection of various eggs onto the façade of Recontemporary, which extends the exhibition space into the urban space. The result is a multi-layered topography of the egg—as a biological object, a cultural symbol, and a projection surface for existential questions. Extinction Story invites us to reflect on the relationship between collecting and preserving, nature and memory, and loss and imagination.
Claudia Larcher (born 1979 in Bregenz, Austria) is an artist, filmmaker and AI researcher. She graduated in 2008 from the University of Applied Arts and works primarily with photography and film. Thematically she is interested in architectural spaces, and the abstract spaces of memory and imagination. She views photography not only as a technical medium but as a globally interconnected practice with social and political significance. Her work translates digital concepts into physical spaces and explores the interweaving of photography and artificial intelligence. Her work has been shown at Engländerbau, Vaduz; Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna; Galerie Lisi Hämmerle, Bregenz; Festspielhaus Bregenz; Galerie 22,48m2, Paris; Galerie Marenzi, Leibnitz; L’Art Pur Gallery, Riyadh; Francisco Carolinum Linz; Galerie beim Feuerle, Feldkirch; Tokyo Tower Arts Festival; Gray Area Festival, San Francisco; Atelier Basfroi, Paris; Kunstraum Dornbirn; Le109, Nice; Mixer Arts, Istanbul; Belvedere 21, Vienna; Neuer Kunstverein Vienna and Mobius Gallery, Bucharest.
This is her first collaboration with Phileas.
