5 Artists Interviews #2 The Open Call

5 ART _ISTS

INTERVIEWS __#2 THE OPEN CALL

GUILHERME BERGAMINI PATRICIA BORGES TOINE HORVERS JIEYUAN HUANG IOANA NICULESCU-ARON

KIM ENGELEN

5 ART _ISTS

INTERVIEWS

INTRO KIM ENGELEN

PAGE 05

GUILHERME BERGAMINI

PAGE 08

PATRICIA BORGES

PAGE 26

TOINE HORVERS

PAGE 44

JIEYUAN HUANG

PAGE 60

IOANA NICULESCU-ARON

PAGE 76

COLOPHON

PAGE 93

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INTRO 5 Artists Interviews—The Open Call is the second book in a series of 5 Artists Interviews. 5 Artists Interviews is a 5-year book-project by me, Kim Engelen. Each book holds interviews with contemporary artists. The interview itself contains questions. Each artist can show up to images of their art.

All interviews were sent via email.

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With the Artists Interviews book-series, I showcase 25 (5x5), fellow artists, in all stages of their art career. With each new book in this series, I touch on a contemporary topic.

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For the first book (2020), I interviewed of my artist-friends.

These are in alphabetical order: Federica Buonsante (Italy), Đejmi Hadrović (Slovenia), Frans Huisman (Netherlands), Lynn Marie Kirby (USA), and Libby Page (UK).

For this second book (2021), I interviewed Guilherme Bergamini (Brazil), Patricia Borges (Brazil), Toine Horvers (Netherlands), Jieyuan Huang (China), and Ioana Niculescu-Aron (Romania).

The topic of this second book (2021) is the Open Call.— A particular phenomenon in the visual arts. For several years more and more open calls for artists are popping up. Some with excellent opportunities offering artists a working-budget, 5

subsidy, or other forms of compensation. On the other end of the spectrum, some are asking artists to pay an application fee to apply for the open call or to send in images. Which can be up to $ 150 per image. This number may go up in the future. And then there are open calls that range somewhere in the middle of these two opposites.

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For Artists Interviews #2 The Open Call, I placed an open call for contemporary artists who wanted to be interviewed for this book. This open call for contemporary artists was free to enter— there was no entry fee asked to pay. Neither no money was being offered. To agree with these conditions I asked the interviewed artists to sign a Permission to Publish Form.

A total of 60 applications came in. Of which I made a selection of 6 artists.—Since I expected that maybe one artist could or would not participate for one reason or the other. Which indeed happened.

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With Artists-Interviews, I prefer in-depth interviews that matter and/or are interesting to as well the reader and the interviewed artist. I intend to make all artists’ work come across the best it can. Therefore, I looked carefully into each artist’s artworks, working methods, possible collaborations, etcetera.

And if available I checked previous interviews, and or books via their website, Instagram, YouTube, and/or other platforms that showcased their work. Also, I asked the artists themselves to send me links to their work, biography, and/or other digital 6

material that they wanted me to see or read.

My questions in these interviews are transparently projecting my ideas, feelings, and intuition that I got when reading the artists’ artworks. Hence my long winding questions. It might well be that I am off here and there. Hopefully, in this case, the artists felt free to correct me if I was. And additionally, talked about what is important to them and in their work.

Regarding possible linguistic style mistakes, it has been decided already in the first book to let them stay in. This way it reflects that we are a diverse collection of international people of different nationalities. Which might even give the interviews more color and makes them less homogeneous—which I hope you agree is a good thing in the arts.

In July 2020 (book 1) and April 2021 (book 2), we had an Online Book Launch Party where readers and art lovers could e-meet the artists. These videos can be found on YouTube. The book-series Artists Interviews are accessible for free on Issu.

And are available on my website as pdf, and as an e-book and paperback via Amazon.

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A visual overview of all the 25 artists in the series and the book style can be found on Instagram@artbooks_5_artists_interviews.

Enjoy!

Kim Engelen 7

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GUIILHERME BERGAMINI --▶ PATRICIA BORGES TOINE HORVERS JIEYUAN HUANG IOANA NICULESCU-ARON

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Guilherme Bergamini 1 --▶ You have studied journalism and have been working with photography for 20+ years. In your email signature, I saw that you call yourself Repórter Fotográfico (a photo reporter or photojournalist). Instead of for example visual artist, or photographer, or journalist. Do you see yourself more like an autonomous artist who is journaling via photography? Or possibly you want to stress the political or critical aspect of your work?

And/or On the front page of your web page, you currently post daily the statistics of the COVID-19 deaths: “Stay at home, this is not a grippe! Total Covid-19 deaths in Brazil as of…over 180.000.”

Is this also a form of reporting for you? Or expressing anxiety?

In your current project “Fiquem em casa, não é uma gripezinha!” (Stay at home, it’s not a little flue!)—Which seems to matter in your art too. Yes? You had a test where sarsCov-2 was detected. And now that we are unfortunately in the second wave, does COVID19 affect your work in a way that the work itself is changing? Maybe before you were strictly photographing. And now you implement the act of drawing into your work? And involve your daughter Malu in your work.

And/or You started to work on “Educação para todos” (Education for all) in 2004. That is now some 24 years ago. Are you still working on it? When is a work of art or a certain theme for you finished?

Do you see your work as an (ongoing) investigation? Something that you check up on from time to time? Can you tell us more 9

about this particular kind of working system? Does the printing of your photographs add additional meaning to your works? For example Desconstrução (Deconstruction). Or your series Rio Amazonas (Amazon river). See question 5. These series were digital photographs that you printed with mineral pigment on cotton paper. And now with the COVID. Do you make the effort to print your photographs? Or is it (because of Covid) all digital now anyway?

I’m graduated in Journalism. I have always admired the area, especially for the photographic reports. Currently, I consider myself a visual artist influenced by the profession of photo reporter. I found in Journalism an opportune space for my art, so I can tell my visual stories, which is my greatest pleasure and guides my projects.

With the pandemic and social isolation, there were significant changes in my life routine. Some new works were emerging.

“Stay at home, it’s not a tiny flu”, “The trip of my dreams”, “+ 7 days” and my third independent publication, the photobook “White Card/Carta Branca”, were some of the works done.

These works were the results of a restlessness, or better said, an anxiety that encompassed everything that was around me.

The fact that I got COVID19 and didn’t get any sequels was a big relief. From the moment the fright passed, I felt freer, even in social isolation. What touched me most in my work was the photobook White Card/Carta Branca, a construction process in which I could have more time, think about every detail, change my routine and dedicate myself entirely to this work.

I consider the graphic design and the photographs to be a visual metaphor for the last four years of Brazilian politics.

The result of a coup d’etat, based on an impeachment 10

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process, alleging tax breaks in his administration and which was later proved to be false. The discontent of a significant part of the Brazilian population and the perverse game of politics generated an ideological division between Left and Right, a social shock in which the greatest inconsequence was the election of the current president. A prejudiced, racist personality, in which his family considered traditional Brazilian is linked to cases of corruption. Defending torturers and decorating militia medals. Its negativism and inconsequential attitudes turned Brazil into the second country in the world in terms of deaths by COVID-19 and one of the last, by statistics, to vaccinate its population. They are not numbers, they are lives of Brazilians who are dead and abandoned by the irresponsibility of a head of state.

Before social isolation, my routine was to go to work, pick up my daughter from school, get home, cook, leaving little time for me to dedicate myself to her. In this sudden change, schools closed, we had to reinvent ourselves, making leisure a creative moment. A 5 year old daughter with intense energy and indoors 24 hours a day, there are many possibilities.

I proposed to select her drawings made from 2 to 5 years old. Between games and projects, I developed two works collectively with Malu.

In the interview published in the British Journal of Photography there was a little confusion saying that the work “Education for All” took many years of research, but it was relatively the fastest work I have ever produced. I photographed a public school that was closed for renovation.

This reform took four years to complete due to political problems. “Education for All” was the series that gave me greater international visibility. I received awards in Germany, Lithuania, Spain (Bilbao and Madrid) and Mexico.

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I participated in 43 group exhibitions in 15 countries and was able to publish it in 87 Brazilian and foreign media outlets.

With the series, I published my second photobook, signing the graphic design, cover and publishing.

My longest-lasting job is the “Sands Inventory/Inventário das Areias”, a documentation about the urbanization process around Fazenda das Areias, owned by my grandparents, who have passed away, where I experienced part of my childhood and adult life. The farm is located in the city of Sete Lagoas, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. I have been developing this work for 14 years.

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My works are printed when I hold exhibitions and trade with clients and art galleries. I have a habit of printing many photos in 10cm x 15cm format. This habit ended up becoming my working method. I paste all the photos on my house walls and on the floor and start the editing process that can take days or months. The result is a more discerning and cohesive series.

In this pandemic period, the internet brings several possibilities for my creative process, breaking physical barriers and making it possible to publish my works in vehicles of communication from places that I found unattainable.

2 You deal amongst others with social inequality in your work. How do you feel about the current open calls for artists? Is it all positive (since all can apply). Or not at all (since certain opportunities are only accessible for those who pay to play)? When did you start doing open calls for artists? How many applications, in general, do you do? And does the act of doing applications influence your work? Do you adjust your ideas/work towards the topic of the open call? Or do you look for open calls where your work would fit? You enjoy many awards and praise for your art. Amongst others from the British Journal Photography. I read that you were selected from no less than 2377 submissions from 92 countries. Which could reveal a lot about you, your work, and your work stamina, and perhaps even your world-view. Your politically-charged photo-essay “Education for All” won the popular vote. Can there be made a link in art 15

& education—between the artists’ open calls and for example art (self) publishing on platforms such as Instagram? In comparison to the more public systems and self-education? Within broken systems is the internet perhaps a blessing? A new chance for the underdog? The less privileged? Does overpopulation and in art over-education play a part in our new changing (educational) systems?

In the last six years I started to change the way of organizing and disseminating all my work. In October 2014 I had the fantastic news that I was going to be a father and a girl! The first years of caring for a baby require willingness, delivery and, above all, a sudden change in routine.

This experience of dedication and spending more time at home allowed me to open my drawers, “HDs”, and look more closely at other jobs that were relatively ready, needing little to be finished. In my internet searches, for hours and days, I put together a document containing information from festivals, contests, magazines, books and many other possibilities around the world to present my work. I always follow the curatorial line that I believe for the notices I send.

In my 24 years of photographic production I have published 33 works on my website, with different themes and techniques.

There are several possibilities that I have to participate in notices and publications. I participated in several notices that have already lost count. I find it a very promising and productive experience. I deal with people and ideas of the most varied, many pleasing me and others questioning me, a universe of possibilities and learnings.

You, for example, were a great opportunity. I thought your proposal to publish works and interviews with 25 artists 16

from around the world was fantastic. Your questions are very coherent, very well formulated, the result of a research process in which you analyze them one by one. This is very beautiful and well done.

“The Education for All” series award in Germany was a unique opportunity. Competing with hundreds of works of weight, impeccable quality and surprising authors. Having won first place in the popular vote was a game changer for me. They published an interview with me in the oldest publication dedicated to the photographic language, British Journal of Photography since 1854. The internet is a virtual open-air museum.

Social networks are a great opportunity for research, dissemination and the possibility for us to meet people. In a few clicks I get in touch with artists I would never have imagined, such ease. We have everything in this virtual showcase. My advice is to have criteria and guidance to not get lost and fall into banalities.

3 You are interrogating social and political issues. What in particular do you like to highlight with your work? For example, “Inventário das Areias” (Sands Inventory) another long-term project. Where you photographed the urbanization process in its surroundings and the changes that have occurred in the last 13 years. You seem to take things close to home, as I for example read that your grandfather lived in prison for the last ten years of his life? Like with “Education for All”—I assume here because you have a four-year-old daughter Malu? And this project was made possible since your family has an estate? So, in a way you are critical of the very source (country, family) where you come from? Is this correct? Did you suffer social inequality and injustice yourself? Or how come you have or developed this 17

empathic ability? Or is this your trained journalist background?

Would you like to tell us more about this? Maybe it is not correct to ask you about time and perhaps the feeling of nostalgia? Since you wrote that Brazil is going through its political insanity.

Which reflexed in your projects. Such as the “Amazon rainforest deforestation”, “Feminicídio” (Femicide), “Lixão do Roger” (Roger’s dump), and many more. But I remember from living in Berlin for several years and exploring its past. That some Germans have a certain nostalgia for their East Germany. Not necessarily because it was great. But because it was their home.

Their youth. Their past. Does this resonate with you?

I had the privilege and the opportunity to have a family that provided education and conditions for me to become who I am today. I graduated, I conquered my job and with my efforts, I manage to have a condition worthy of life. Since I know myself as people I have been extremely uncomfortable with social inequality in my country and in the world. My

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ideal world is that everyone has the same opportunities that I had, but the reality is different. My works, for the most part, move between memory and social political criticism.

“Sands Inventory/Inventário das Areias” is my longest work, a documentation about the urbanization process in the surroundings and at Fazenda das Areias, a property that my grandfather acquired in the 60’s. Since my childhood, I have had contact with the farm, which refers to memorable moments that were part of my childhood, adolescence and adult life. My grandparents, at the end of their lives, went to live there and died there. My grandfather had multiple sclerosis and was imprisoned for 12 years in a bed. My grandmother had Alzaimer and her end was no different.

They provided me with many opportunities that I am forever grateful for.

The farm is for sale and, in the meantime, I continue with this work. I set up a black and white photo lab in a room on the

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farm that was my refuge for some years from the metropolis that I currently live in, Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, the third largest city in Brazil. Many of my works were developed there. My first book “Four generations” was made there. My daughter’s first experiences in contact with nature was also there. Fazenda das Areias gave me a lot of my memories, experiences and experiences.

“Education for All” is my work that stood out the most for its power and critical social policy on Brazilian public education.

A country marked by social inequality and poor income distribution. The only solution is education, which, by the way, goes through tragic moments in current government management.

I transit between these two worlds. Currently, my reality is different. I built a family and I am faced with a new way of seeing my surroundings. I’m not just another one, but responsible for all my actions and projects that I propose to do. I am a grain of sand in this world, but I intend as a life goal to leave my grain.

4 I read one sentence in one of your interviews that touched me: “Traveling is one of the best actions we can do, dedicate and invest. Knowing new places and people are of extreme emotional importance, it is good for the soul.” Could it be that your natureseries is somehow related to this? Since I get the impression that in your work you don’t show the actual anxiety you are dealing with. But use some sort of vehicle. A successful and/or useful visual metaphor. Did you make the series for the exhibition “Earth in Focus”? Of which you were chosen from 700 applicants from all over the world. Would you like to talk a bit more about “Fotograma” (frame)—your photographs of leaves? Are they particular leaves?

Particular trees? Or particular selections? Or taken from particular journeys? Or does it relate to memory? Childhood memories?

Of collecting leaves? Which makes it also a time vessel. Perhaps bridging time in which you could comment on environmental changes?

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Absolutely sure. Traveling is essential, feeding the soul and making room for the new. Contact with nature is a breather for me, a necessity. All your experience, in some way, will influence your work. From the beginning, around 1996, when I started to photograph, I used to exercise in my travels to observe the movement of clouds and how the sun reacted. Light and shadow, essential for making a photograph. The Fotograma series consists of leaves collected from the savanna (cerrado) biome, predominant in the Fazenda das Areias region, a place of inspiration and creation of many of my works. There, I have a black and white photo lab, which is currently disabled. Doing some experiments with photographic paper and chemicals, developer and fixer, I came to this Fotograma series. They are “fingerprints” of leaves from the savanna (cerrado) vegetation, the second largest Brazilian biome, second only to the Amazon biome, which comprises an area where the largest tropical forest in the world is found.

“Earth in Focus” consists of leaves from the same biome, produced in the digital process and not the analog one anymore.

In a period of eight months, on the weekends when I was at the farm, I would always leave at 16:10, covering several hectares, in search of the backlight at the moment when the sun will approach the horizon. In the last minutes of sunlight, golden light shapes each leaf, transforming it into visual poetry. Having this series on display at the place where the greatest rock concert in history took place, a symbolic landmark of a generation, was a dazzling opportunity.

I consider it a responsibility for each artist to work on the theme of nature in its most diverse possibilities. Without nature there is no life on Earth and if we don’t take care of it properly we are doomed to extinction.

What is happening to the Amazon Forest and the Pantanal is an environmental crime on a global scale. If deforestation and burning do not stop, the next generations will suffer the consequences that will be tragic.

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5 Elements in space: Books in a closet. Dolls on a table. A photograph on the street. A traffic sign. Selected objects on a green table. Or a leaf in a hand. Books, like paper money or playing cards going from hand to hand. Is your project with the leaves connected with your money-project? Are to you some natural or emotional objects more important or worth preserving? Although financially worthless or even invisible to the mass. How do you see this in comparison to some fake graphic objects made from valuable objects (like “real” paper money)? And even this again seems connected with your “Education for All” project. Are your projects all connected in that way? Political. Critical. Making the observer aware. Or showing that what makes you anxious and sharing it?

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I saw 7 photographs of your series “Rio Amazones” in Positive Magazine. The 7 images showcase the same vista—a soccer field in the Amazon River. On about 1/3 of the image is the horizon. The field can only be used when the tide is low. Just below the horizon, with the left pole not in the middle but slightly above it. Here the elements in the space are the soccer poles. Each image representing something spectacular. The blue-tinted woods just above the horizon. The children making a back jump of the soccer poles.

The cloudy skies and grey colored water. Or the sun reflecting on the water making it more yellow than grey-green. Here and there white little waves. And towards the night clear, a quiet, almost Yves Klein (International Klein Blue) colored blue sky. With a slightly eerie water surface. Each image representing a unique color of blue which gives the image a different feel. What did you do? I imagine you were there a whole day. With your camera on a tripod. First carefully placing the camera. And then shoot in these unique images. But each image is so unique. The last image showing a ship and the soccer player playing in the mud. Did you go there several times? If yes. How did you get the camera placed so perfectly? One can reflect why the poles are in the water. Or did the people place the poles there on purpose? If yes, why? Or did over time the water swallowed the land? Was this soccer field not part of the tide of the Amazon river? Did the river move elsewhere because further on people manipulated the natural way of the water? Your spot seems to be carefully chosen. How did you find this location? Do

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you do research? How does it work? Or are these images perhaps manipulated? What can you tell us about your technique? To me, this work seems so calm. Reflective. Beautiful. But also, a bit distant or even detached. Making you an observer of a scenery of which you are not part. This discrepancy is very interesting to me.

You asked me how I found the place where I did the series. I am very observant and attentive everywhere I go. And I like to admire a place when I find some peculiarity. I spend hours entertained in one place. This active observation is part of my creative process.

“Amazonas River” was a work that I carried out in 2007, in the city of Macapá, in the state of Amapá, which is the only state capital bathed by the Amazon River, with its 6,868 kilometers of extension. In this place, the Amazon River is only 150 kilometers from its mouth, receiving the influence of the tide. The two goalposts transform an eccentric football field, with the ball, the mud and the players. An immensity of water and stunning nature.

I positioned a tripod for about 5 hours and watched the tide go down. The colors that emerged are beautiful, particular beauties of the Northern region of Brazil.

Every day of the year it rains in Macapá, and it can be heavy or light rain, which depends on the season. These abrupt mundanes in the region’s climate provide a fantastic color palette like those presented in the Amazon River series.

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I lived from 6 to 14 years old in Monte Dourado, in the state of Pará, on the banks of the Jari River, a tributary of the Amazon River. Every weekend I went with my parents and my brother to a river club called “Ponte Maria”. I built a passion for water that I carry for life. Having lived in an Amazon region for 8 years was a unique opportunity. I am grateful to my parents for allowing me to visit incredible places. As an engineer, my father lived in twenty-four different cities. I accompanied only four of them, but on my school or work holidays, I would visit him and take the opportunity to explore the place. It was an opportunity to go hunting for new stories and new projects. ◀

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GUIILHERME BERGAMINI PATRICIA BORGES --▶ TOINE HORVERS JIEYUAN HUANG IOANA NICULESCU-ARON

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Patricia Borges 1 --▶ You create installations and compose three-dimensional mysterious art objects. Recognizable and yet estranged.

“MEDEA” (2019) consists of extremely good-looking long hair. It is coming out of a roll of paper like two long brown ponytails. There are two placements of the rolled paper with the hair coming out from both sides. One on a longish-wooden similar colored pedestal. And one lying on the ground. To me, it is representing a young female. We can see black and white photographic prints. And they are bound together by a metal radiator clip? In the photos, I can see some sort of gate. When reading the artist’s description, I see it is a tracing paper, which is wrapped around a glass tube. By reading this to me it becomes more about home and fragility. A female bound at home?

Could it be about domestic violence? Or about this woman’s fragile mind? Only locked in at home feeling safe? Is the roll of tracing paper perhaps representing a straight-jacket? Or the opposite, protecting the glass tube from breaking? The materials are of quality. The setting is of quality. All seems flawless. But inside there is a breakable glass tube. You write the titles of the artworks in capitals. They become emphasized. Medea was a sorceress, daughter of Aeetes king of Colchis, who helped Jason to obtain the Golden Fleece and then married him. When Jason deserted her for Creusa, the daughter of King Creon of Corinth, she took revenge by killing Creon, Creusa, and her children, and fled to Athens. Is there a relation with Medea? With the play? Or betrayal? With feeling a queen? Feeling wicked? Since also one of your series is called “NO CREO EN LAS BRUJAS / CALDOS” (2020). In English: I don’t believe in witches. Do you want to express the feeling of being bound at home? Like “The Architect & the Housewife” (1999) a text by artist Frances Stark about the roles that gender acts out in contemporary art practice.

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And/or Glass matter enrolled in the image. Which could become like a monocular. I believe you live near the beach? I can imagine you looking outside over the sea with your monocular. What are you hoping to find? Your background lies also in cinematography.

Where one feels a form of empowering or safety behind the camera. But one is not necessarily safe behind the recording lens.

Or at home. Or maybe the opposite. Wanting to leave. What is over the horizon? “Camera” is of origin a girl’s name. What are the strange objects she, Camera, you, want to capture? Or are those not objects but the impermanence of life itself? Which could be the fear of being at home? The fear of missing out or even losing life? Like Medea? She wanted to keep him. But she lost him. Like time is slipping through our hands.

Hey Kim! Thanks for the questions and for this incredible amount of time you spent looking at the artworks and thinking about them.

I start saying I don’t have a pre-conceived shape of the artwork beforehand (and when I do have, it changes during the process of making the work). I play with the elements and build something at the end—either an object, an installation, a video, a text or a series of photographs. I guess this pursue of construction is an heritage of my background in Architecture.

But the subversion of the project is my artistic self.

Beginning with MEDEA: I had that series of photographs with gates, fences, windows and doors. A few subjects are repeatedly photographed, stored and revisited for years.

Artists collect everything, right? From images to ideas to materials. We keep getting back to the same obsessions.

Looking at this collection of architectural elements made me reflect about the concept of being safe at home. (It was a 29

pre-pandemic world, ok?). When we lock ourselves inside we assume the danger will be kept out and we have the perception of being safe. In the end, we think it is natural to be closed and separated from others. I will always speak from my point of view as a woman, it is an additional layer, but not my main subject. Instinctively and in an unintended manner, I feel that my works are extensions of the female, the domestic. They are not self portraits, but above all a reflection on the place and space the mind chose to inhabit.

You ask about the title. I named the work MEDEA after some weeks looking at it. First I guess it was because it reminded me of the play I saw at the Edinburgh Festival where the actress amazed me with her strength on stage, her visceral passion, that incredible presence rolling on the floor, lots of emotions imprisoned on her body. The Medea myth talks about the archetype of the witch, an independent woman, invaded by great passions and with a great capacity for decision. At the time that this character was created, she represented the complete opposite of what a “model woman” should be, perhaps for this reason it has aroused my interest. I returned to this work a year later, you are correct, when cooking my I DON’T BELIEVE IN WITCHES, BUT THERE ARE. 2 STOIC (2019), some of the same materials. Tracing paper, glass, and wood, and something organic. In this case eyelashes.

Or at least hinting at something from the body of a human. How many of them do we lose? They are ours. Yet, we also lose them.

Do they show finitude? You filed them up like Cd’s on a Cdrack. Or like skyscrapers. Where in each architecturally designed cubicle a human lives. Who looks outside their window. Like everyone else. We attribute to eyelashes wishes and sometimes when being intimate we transform them together in butterflies.

Transformed from a worm-like body into a fragile beautiful 30

being, able to fly away. Some of us put makeup on them. And you the artist use them to create another wondrous installation.

Like the tooth fairy for kids. When they lose a tooth, they can make a wish. When we (adults) lose an eyelash, we blow it away through our fingers and we can make a wish. Like time slipping through those same fingers. You write in your artist statement: Would it be possible to create a technical image that is not a flat record of the past? Maybe that is why some people have a strong urge to pro-create? Where the child becomes a sort of copy of them. We can look in the eyes of that child and somehow feel that we live? Like you, I also don’t have children; my art is my children. I see that for your art, you are the perfect mother. You are interested in producing impermanent images that change over time, which become something else. You sort of let go of the power and surrender. You allow the image to grow, mature, fly off, and finally, perish. I wonder if you mean with this works title “STOIC” the abbreviation Stack-Oriented Interactive Compiler, the programming language? Or the philosophy? Or do you perhaps want to be a stoic, one that can endure pain without shedding a tear? Maintaining nobly your mascara in check?

There is also a relation between MEDEA and STOIC. They were built almost simultaneously and using similar materials.

I tend to work on several pieces at once, when I can’t solve a problem (or create enough problems) in one artwork I move to another piece and get back to it later. In STOIC you can see the architectural element again printed on tracing paper formerly used for architectural plans and technical drawings.

But, instead of the openings that I photographed for MEDEA, on STOIC I use images of deteriorated buildings. At the same time that I feel uncomfortable looking at decay I am attracted to it. I guess when I used eyelashes to compose the object I related the painting that runs down the façade to mascara in the rain. The secret element is also present here: each sharp glass blade between the eyelashes is about to fall. But the 31

ensemble remains undaunted and sober on the wall, hence stoic.

3 You made the choice, at one point in your art career to work with reoccurring materials. I wonder why you did this. And can you tell us some more about the workings of these materials?

For example, your tracing paper. It is not the carbon paper we know which we use to copy handwritten letters or bills. Correct?

Since I see that your paper is quite thick. And you create on them or with them photographic prints? Is it the technique of using a tinner and then tracing the original photo on a new chosen paper? And do you create your materials yourself? Or are these prefabricated materials that you implement in your work? For example, in “168 BPM” (2018) you use glass test tubes. Or, for example, the use of glass in “FLAT” (2019). It is not a flat piece of glass. It looks like a glass slope. I read that you used layers of glass (liquid sand) to construct a reflected topography of the marine coast. What is this liquid sand? And how about the translucency of both materials? Although your work focuses conceptually around the image, matter, and time. I feel that the technique and/or your particular use of materials play a huge role in your signature. Can you tell us some more? How this came about?

In MEDEA for example: I find buying human hair on the internet one of the craziest things ever. How that happened?

I wonder about the process. Someone had her hair cut probably very far from Brazil—this hair was washed, dyed, trimmed, packed, stored, shipped to me. It belonged to someone who probably needed to sell it, I don’t know. I feel strange when I buy it. I wouldn’t want to sell my own hair, so I use it with respect. I wished to build a poetic fiction, something beautiful to make it worth it.

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This delicate and feminine element made me print the photographs on tracing paper, a light and translucent material once used for technical drawings of those same architectural elements I photographed. When I roll the photographs around a glass tube I wish to protect this fragile component yes, but at the same time I create an interior life for this being I am building, a secret inner resistance to the outer pressure exerted by the metal clasp. This clamp only fits for closure , it’s a one way adjustment. I cannot remove pressure. There is a certain amount of force that will deform the paper body and still preserve the glass inside. In addition, I like to think of the glass tube as a little secret, something hidden to the eyes but that I know it’s there. I also learned during this process how resistant a strand of hair is.

4 “PERO QUE LAS HAY, LAS HAY / CRACAS” In English: But there are, there are / cracas. This is a mixed media project you started in 2020 and which is ongoing. You call it edition 1.

It consists of paraffin, glass, spices, human hair, brass. An exciting almost a bit sinister mix of contrasts: gold and soot. Paraffin and glass. Spices and human hair. And some brass. The qualities of these materials bring up so many different sorts of references.

Cracas, sounds like cracks. Then the title would become, But there are, there are / cracks. Or is it a city? I had to look up cracas. And it appears to be some sort of seafood: Barnacles.

Again maybe the reference to the sea? To some exotic species living inside the sea. Biological, living, yet a food, a commodity.

Better off hidden in the sea. With the shell, which proves not really a form of protection. Am I correct? Please correct me if I am wrong.

With every “cracas” you made a unique creature in itself.

Translucent. Whitish. With things sticking out here and there.

And within some gold like rings hidden, visible but out of touch.

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Maybe they become like pieces of jewelry somehow. The works are somehow mysterious. What is this thing? The childless exploration sense is being aroused. I want to touch it. Feel if it is hard or soft. Stroke the surface’s smoothness. I want to softly pull the strings. They look like antennas or rare hard feelers. What are those? I want to pick the gold. Smell the spices. There are ones with some pink in them. And there are some with caviar-like hard little beads. A process has transformed the surface of the object in some sort of skin-like fusion. It has a sort of gel-like opacity transparency.

Somehow also the golden rings are appearing to be eyes. Or did you add the spice, as in a way you as an artist, resembling a cook, prepared and baked this art s/piece for us? If they are indeed a sort of “artified” barnacles, then you made them clean and white and ornamented them. Or maybe not? Since I read that there

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are around 1,000 barnacle species currently known. So maybe you choose this particular one? But maybe this work also talks about travel? When we travel, we discover new things. Travel and art make us explore in so many interesting ways. Let us be a little bit a child again and be amazed by the newness that we experience. Home, travel, protection. Maybe I am completely off. Would you like to tell us some more about them? I think also the process of how you made them is interesting to hear about.

During the pandemic period, working and living in the same place for months, I had to develop a vocabulary going through my own drawers, revisiting and incorporating things that I have kept or set aside.

I call the project I DON’T BELIEVE IN WITCHES, BUT THERE ARE. Which is an old Galician say that became universal: “No creo en las brujas, pero que las hay, las hay”. There is no belief in witches, there is no suspension of unbelief, there is rather a suspension of credulity which, however, is confronted with the fact that they exist even though we do not believe in them, witches. Existence that, in itself, is configured as a real witchcraft.

I like the musical alliteration of the expression ‘que las hay, las hay’ that contrasts with the definitive sentence that its meaning carries. It sounds like a spell.

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On phase 1 (‘I don’t believe in witches’) I experiment with organic materials: paraffin, human hair, spices, bones, stones and plants.

To them I add metals and glass. I use the kitchen stove to bake my work. It has something of magic or alchemical in this process.

When I build those planar objects I see a latency that resembles analog photography, where the image emerges from the invisible.

Things are not build as such, they are negative forms, it is a reverse process of image construction. I move the hot elements inside the mold and I cannot see through the volume because the clear paraffin becomes opaque as it solidifies; the final image will only be visible upon unmolding in the next day—what takes me again to photographic development time. The exercise of patience.

I called it CALDOS but I couldn’t’t translate the word. ‘Caldo’ would be a hot liquid, a sort of broth, soup or mixture, but also a

magic potion from the witch’s cauldron.

On phase 2 (‘But there are, there are’) I melt the previous works, once again attracted by the alchemical process of physical transformation and the randomness at the amalgam of elements.

They return to the oven one by one. I try to make it obey me.

Then in its disobedience, it forms things I like. It is also about losing control. The shapes emerge here interweaving my own intention and the memory from its previous life. I didn’t place the golden rings as eyes, they placed themselves in that position and we imagine them as eyes I guess. The same way we look and ‘see’ marine beings. You saw antennas where there are just acupuncture needles, a pink dot where there is just a medicine pill. I really like when you question my choice of words. I called them CRACAS because once more I couldn’t accurately translate it. I was always fascinated by the idea of spells being cast by expressions, phrases, words. The invocation of the demiurgical power of language. A definition of what poetry is. I imagine when we name a work, when we give it a title, we emphasize an unquestionable quality for the author, something way more rational than poetic. ‘Craca’ refers to the heavily accumulated matter, to its rough texture, something ribbed, ridged. Also to something alive, in constant mutation. In the programmed disappearance of everything, each of these unique objects will probably become something else in a new melting cycle. Even if I don’t recast them again the colors will continue to change as the plants and seasonings I used will continue to age under the wax. At their digital display we loose an essential aura of these works: their scent.

5 You have so many other amazing photographs and artworks.

But I think it is important if you could talk a bit about your works “INSOMNIA” (2020) and “DISAPPEARING ACT” (2020). You started both in 2020 and they are ongoing during the pandemic. I think it is important. 1. Because this is currently happening in the world. And many of us are still in lock-down or quarantine. The pandemic affects us all in some way or the other. And you as an artist implement it in your work. And 2. It somehow feels really important in your work. Since I think there are many interfaces

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in your work that relate to the pandemic somehow. Self-created homes (architecture), the effect on us (mentally and thus then bodily). And while living alone, maybe one feels even more invisible and vulnerable? But possibly like a magician somehow it and you change our perspectives on objects or happenings. But possibly the title also refers to the literal disappearance of people? The tragic nondiscriminatory thinning process by nature? Your works all have this white shine. White is so important it seems in your work. In this case, maybe hinting at the laboratory or the hospital. Supposedly to be clean. A place to get well. Maybe something clinical? I see latex gloves, fruits, mushrooms. The fruit that withers away. The mushrooms perhaps comparing people with a fungus? The latex gloves perhaps as an ode to the many nurses? The photographs are printed on latex? Or photographed through a latex plate? Like perhaps comparing it with the protective shields, they have in front of their face? These works have this particular elusiveness that your artworks have. Something noble too. Familiar yet unknown. You give us enough to feel surprised but also give us something recognizable.

However, transformed or not. The end is always known. Where will your research on the ephemeral of matter take you? What are you currently interested in?

I agree we must talk about the pandemic and how it affects our creative process. We are experiencing unprecedented ways of living but also how we work and how we display the works have changed. Some artists got really focused on work during the confinement period and produced a lot, others felt to be stuck.

Without quotidian distractions I spent most of my time in 2020 thinking, learning and creating. I realized how privileged I am and I feel very grateful. I believe every contemporary work of art is intrinsically political—even without being pamphletary— because we live in community and above all because together we respond to the events of our time. Exchanging ideas with other artists is extremely rewarding and mind winding, it is resistance and empowerment. We responded promptly as we went online building international artistic webs, digitalizing the works, exploring technology as a production tool but also as a way to show our art broadly without barriers. Your book project is one example. I perceived the world as one due to the spread of the

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disease and the same time Global acquired a new meaning to me: we connect, we communicate. Similarities bring us together—we are facing the same problems—but the differences teach valuable lessons.

INSOMNIA and DISAPPEARING ACT have a quiet and meditative feeling that might seem escapist and detached from our tragic times. The aesthetic result of my work—being a photographic series, a video, an installation or an object—is the result of my questions. I guess there is an introspective quality on my works. When I lower the colors, when I use banal objects and quotidian matter, I talk about privacy, an inner life. At these times when everything seems publicly exposed I feel an urge to quietly look inside. My quest is the individual. But I produce in order to exchange, not for myself. Being physically confined intensified the domestic discourse in my works. But an exercise like this one that your book proposes, that we take a step back and look the work from outside, is extremely enriching. When we make the works we don’t know why we do it, it is a matter of fulfilling the urge of visual construction, of sight translation. It has a lot to do with traveling I think. About the strangeness of being somewhere new, a language you don’t understand, to make oneself understood, being curious, feeling afraid and vulnerable. It takes a lot of courage to be an artist. But we feel we’re not alone. Or that, alone is good, I don’t know. Isolation and loneliness have been always present in all that whiteness you asked me about. It just resonated with the subjective terms we are living in due to pandemic.

My inquietude in what regards our physical existence, our ephemeral and material presence has manifested in many works in the past and will continue to drive my research.

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What led me to DISAPPEARING ACT series was a perception that we humans were subtracted from the city, from our physical environment. We lost the touch, we don’t lay hands on anything any longer, we don’t touch others, we start wearing latex mittens.

A membrane isolates the matter, and suddenly we loose the feeling of touching. At the same time, living indoors for months, our perception of time is altered—I felt it became blurred, cloudy.

The sensation that we must isolate in order to preserve life made

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me record perishable elements as they arrived home. When covering them with latex they sweat, just like our hands inside the gloves. That made me think about still life photographs and paintings, where the apples and oranges are really dead and seem very much alive (but this another story).

INSOMNIA series followed, also shot digitally at home during the pandemic. It was a color investigation, a dilution of the landscape. I needed a refuge, needed to build one other place.

Differently from other works where I construct something to photograph, INSOMNIA was an index, a time record. In opposition to the movement of the day when we look outside, here I photograph the light that enters my apartment at night.

I look inside, to the interior, the surfaces hit by street lighting.

I wanted to tell what I do when I stay awake at night. Nothing, I do nothing. I think with open eyes—seeing these colors at the white walls. There are three different kinds of light bulbs on the lampposts outside my window, they have different temperatures and they paint the walls. The images inhabit that place between the sleep and the dream. ◀

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GUIILHERME BERGAMINI PATRICIA BORGES TOINE HORVERS --▶ JIEYUAN HUANG IOANA NICULESCU-ARON

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Toine Horvers 1 --▶ We know each other from the time I was living in Rotterdam. And when you were running Suburban video lounge.

Upstairs was a trendy coffee bar “Urban Expresso bar” run by your wife Jo and in the basement a sort of underground fantastic art video lounge with programming. Currently, it is “Suburban Foundation” where you create in-house publications.

Since I have known you, I saw that your work has made a shift. From open and underground to perhaps a more clean, critical, and more focused art. Maybe even one could say high ranking art. Yes? And if so, how has this development taken place? It seems you have gained something. But maybe also lost something in this process. As this happens mostly with certain shifts. Do you know what I mean? Would you like to talk a bit more about this?

Firstly: I think that all art is open, underground, critical, conceptual and focused at the same time. As an artist I am not conscious of all this: I do what I do. So, I am not aware of the shifts in my work or of gaining or losing: ‘success?’ said the artist, ‘never heard of it’. But before I started my recent book moving - writing, I listed all my works since 1979 which gave me a view on developments: Starting with bodily movements, I began in 1990 making written drawings, composed of data about movements/processes. By means of observing and translating such processes, the visual/material aspect of writing diminished and the aspect of (describing-) language gradually took over, resulting in a series of books of which moving - writing is the most recent example. In the meantime, I continued performing, combining bodily movement with language/speech.

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2 I am looking at a study by you called “Passers By” (2004). The figures are created by text descriptions of the passersby. I can’t read all of the descriptions. Some are in Dutch: klein donker hoofd (small dark head). Some in English: Short leg left. Short leg right-side. I see many legs. But also, other descriptions: Blank (Caucasian), pruts (tinker). Maybe they are also descriptions of how they move. It is a beautiful drawing with a catchy title.

Although one could describe them as text scribblings, the drawing is quite marvelous, minimalistic, and yet emotional and crafty. Classic also somehow. Somehow perfect. There is quite some white space around the figures. As if they are caught in space. How do you make these kinds of drawings? And how do these drawings fit into your profession as a (mainly) performance artist?

On the website of Kentler Gallery I saw this photo of you sitting, where you seem to be working on your studies. It is a beautiful peekaboo of an artist in action. Looking more closely, the drawings and some photos were also hanging on the wall. So, it could also be a small exhibition space where you were sitting and mutually also working. But I think not. The setting was not quite “feng shui”. You were sitting with the back to the opening/ entrance of the space. Maybe as a sort of “Come see over my shoulder”. Or come “See my work, but not me. I like to stay out of it. Although I am here”. I don’t think it was a performance.

The atmosphere was different. Perhaps it was a mis-en-scene?

The pencils on your table are neatly lined up. A pencil sharpener was fastened to the table. Some papers are ready as well. Your leather square school bag standing on the floor, next to the table. Like an orderly art professor. The photo almost looked too perfect. Was it indeed set up? Reflecting your way of working?

Observing? Ordering? Making lists? Describing? Maybe I can even go further. That you see your art practice as (your) work?

Making art is a job. A profession. You have your space, you come 46

Photograph by: Tale of a Tub

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in, you work. And then you clock out? Or maybe you “trapped” the visitors while they were looking at some (other) exhibited work of you. And then you “caught” these passersby’s? As a form of participatory performance? What makes your performances different from doing them in an exhibition space (with an art audience)? Or doing them in a subway? Or did you capture the audience in your mind in the subway? And then in the art space, you drew them?

My performance works are based on my fascination for movement: time / space. This was also the ground for my ‘written’ drawings.

After my art-studies I decided to stop drawing and concentrate on performance. My performances brought me back to drawing for a while but did not let me me use my 19th century aesthetic drawing skills.

The ‘passers-by-drawings started with series of photographs (slides) of people who pass along the entrance of our apartment block, which images I later projected on paper in the studio and described in simple words with pencils on the appropriate spot, size and direction.

During a residency at Kentler’s Drawing Space in NY I made a passers-by drawing on a wall of the gallery space.

Because of the location along a busy street and next to a bus stop, I decided to concentrate on the passers-by that I could see through the glass entrance doors.

On the glass doors I made a horizontal line on eye level. And I did the same on the wall next to the glass doors. Instead of taking photo’s I trained myself in capturing an image during the one second in which I could see the person passing by.

From my memory I wrote the words for eye-catching elements 48

onto the wall with lead pencil, trying to keep the same proportions with the help of the eye-level line.

On the wall gradually a sort of vibrating cloud appeared in which human figures were still recognizable.

In the last days of my residency at Kentler I decided to write my observations for each passing person on tipp-it papers and stick them to the wall in a time-line.

On the photo you see me sitting at the table, writing my observations on the tipp-it papers, but you cannot see that I am directed to the glass doors.

The photo was taken while I was at work, I don’t remember it being taken.

Along with this project I made notations about movements of travelers in the subway. Each day I traveled between Manhattan and Brooklyn. I later performed those descriptions with various voices.

Photograph by: Florence Neal 49

3 You recently finished a huge undertaking. You created your book (in English and Dutch) with no less than 120 selected works. It is called “moving—writing”. The book consists of: 1. Translations of your works in space and time. And 2. Related texts by others.

The first word I think is important—moving. Since it stands for the movement performances- and installations you do since 1979. How does this observing situations and movements affect you as a human being? Are you continuously self-aware?—Of how you move, stand, sit, talk? Since this I see as your strength in your work. I can imagine it comes with a difficulty too? You started writing as a possible form in which your performance could live on. Which is a lovely, and also a poetic form of documenting your mostly ephemeral works. The discourse on if performance should be visually documented is not new. And yet with your book, you contribute. As with descriptions of performance art as a way of conserving ephemeral works of art.

Since writing is indeed like you write based on an imaginative power. Yet you come from this background working with/as a time-based artist. Or was Suburban video lounge a side love?

Or you developed this through this? If I understand your works correctly, they involve movements. And yet you choose to write them down. Not videotape/record them. Performance is a life situation for you? Only to be experienced life as a performance?

Correct? Can you tell us more about this? Since writing itself also involves movements. Also, in a certain strict way. Since we have our letters, alphabet, language. And does the idea of distance (the proximity) to the works and/or being as precise as possible matter?

And/or Precise pieces of descriptions. Which makes the image pure, stripped, exact, conceptual. Although a bit distant. Yet open. In 50

themselves quirky contrasts. You seem to want to be as honest as possible. With all excess (and distraction?) gone. Finding the core. The essence. It makes me think of the final works of Allan Kaprow’s. Where he is one-on-one with his visitors. And letting them perceive his action. Of course, it has to be white. Black letters on white paper. Grey/black drawings on white-ish paper.

Everything matters. The just off-white paper. Or the gray skies in the Rotterdam harbor. Crude but honest. Harsh, yet big-hearted.

The objects of observation are/were situations or processes of the world around me, it was never about my own physical positions/movements (as I mentioned in your question no 2).

But recently (2018) I started observing and analyzing mine and my love Jo’s positions in bed after we awoke in the morning. I later wrote my observations down, which resulted in the book ‘liggen / lying’ including 46 of those descriptions.

During those observations I was extremely aware of our bodies’ relation, tension, size and weight.

Suburban video lounge was indeed a side-project. Jo started the Urban Espresso Bar in 2001 with the idea that in the basement there would be a space for art. After a start with installation-art we found out that the space was perfect for projecting light; slides, films.

Till that time I had no interest in film at all, in my opinion film was flat and only suggesting space and time in order to pull me into a story, without referring to the medium itself (I think that an art piece, beside a thousand things, also should refer to the medium itself, in other words; show that they are art works, artificial/ritual) But after starting with some videoworks that friends had given me I became more aware of film as a performative, conceptual and experimental medium.

I became interested and learned about a, for me, new medium.

I am very thankful for meeting the work of artists like yourself, who in fact did not fit in any traditional medium.

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The second part of your question is about the relation - or opposition between moving/performing and writing.

Yes, movement as time/space sculpture is very different from the imagination that arises from words.

In my opinion movements cannot be represented/recalled/ captured by photographs, film/video or sound-recordings.

As I write on the back cover of my book “moving - writing”: ‘Except by re-performing them, movements can only survive in a persons imagination, through memory or through the medium which is ostensibly the furthest away from the actual experience of space and time: language, telling, translating’.

This was an important reason for my book.

And although I never saw myself as a poet, writer and arthistorian Jan Siesling said about the descriptions for my book: ‘for Toine it was not a big step from performance to poetry’.

Yes, I think that if I make the descriptions/translations of the works as precise as possible, it will create a distance by which at the same time the work can come very near.

In relation to this preciseness I think about the expression ‘being honest’ that you use. Honesty is such a human thing.

My works transfer me into area’s that I would not call human, they are something else, away from human feelings, autonomous entities.

4 In the 80’s you worked with sound and participation in your performances. You moved towards descriptions. For example in “Soundscape” (2010), you describe on paper the sounds that you hear coming from your fountain pen. You write the descriptions again and again while speaking them out loud in the tempo of the writing. So, there is still sound but more and more your work seems to become still. Time, space, text descriptions, awareness. These things seem to matter in your work. Time as 53

something fleeting. But with the text descriptions, you can catch something ephemeral. Like “Clouds Live” (2003) On a sheet of paper you describe the movements of the clouds. Which to me is meditative, touching, it contains a certain admiration and as well lovely ridiculousness. Clouds never to appear again as to be the same. To me, it seems almost impossible to describe shapes.

Or to perform movements. Since whatever medium, it has its limit. Or maybe this is the idea? To become aware also of our limits in our language. Of our body? Or is it in this case not to be exact in the description? But just to be present? To become still.

To become aware. To follow the changes the clouds make? Their position, their form, their color. To follow their direction. And all this from y/our own position. With our own form. With our own color. To let us see or become aware of our own direction.

Like mindfulness meditation. But then not to be the passive mountain. But to be the complicated life form—human. Again, contradictive distance; the clouds, and yet so close. Since it is the air that we breathe.

Yes, I moved to observing and describing, but the text results also became sounds by pronouncing, speaking, saying them, calling them out loud in performances. So it was still about time (life performance) and space (in space, not on stage).

Speaking a text in the tempo of the writing also creates another experience of voice and speaking (anyway, I think that was also a reason why it fascinated me) About the clouds: describing the movements of the clouds is in a way a meditative thing, but also not, because I have to be very concentrated to be able to find words for it.

In 2003 I described the clouds as a drawing, writing in the appropriate shape, colour and direction.

Now (2020 - 2021) I try to describe them as pure text, which is more difficult: I have to develop a sort of vocabulary (a morphology) in order to capture the shapes, the movements/ 54

changes.

I agree with all your suggestions about the reason why I should do this. I ask myself the same questions: why do I try to find words for things that seem impossible to describe?

Yes, it is performance, possibly trying to deal with the limits of our language. It is about imagination: how far can I reduce my language and still tell the story? Also I like to free the language about the clouds from human poetic and technical interpretations and metaphors.

But whatever reason I can think of; I have to do it. After all art is a ritual thing for me.

5 Can you tell us about more about the audience? While thinking about your work, I remembered my P.I.T. performance in Rotterdam at Le sud (2011). I did a project on immigration.

And with a small crowd in the studio of Gilbert van Drunen, we listened together to a tracklist of an eclectic mix of songs on immigration. For those who wanted, I had printed the lyrics to follow what the songs were about. You also visited. I was quite satisfied after the almost 1,5-hour performance (the length of that particular tracklist). Since to me, the action had succeeded.

There was a comfortable connection, a coming together, a sharing of music. An action that created a certain awareness for, in this case, a particular topic—The effect of immigration.

Afterwards you came straight to me to describe what you saw and what you thought of it. I think I should mention it here.

Since I think it might actually reveal what is important to you, and what your focus is in your art. You gave me a crystal clear and critical perception. 1. You described how I stood. You told for example that, I had my hands in my pockets. That I was leaning at times over the table. 2. You made me aware of my body and postures in the space. 3. And with this leading the 55

Photograph by: Jo McCambridge focus on the performer, as the central figure. Or perhaps even the impeccable entertainer? Your work is about descriptions, awareness, the body/bodies, what we see, what we perceive.

Please tell us a bit more about how to understand the last point in regards of your work. The performer versus the audience.

To put this question next to the super extreme and super awesome performance by Tehching Hsieh. He had spent a year without having anything to do with art “One Year Performance” 1985–1986 Which he followed by a work called “Thirteen Year Plan (No Art Piece)” (1986–1999). Where he made art for 13 years, which would never be shown. In what way do you need “evidence” of your work. And how important is it that we can see/perceive your art? How does the audience matter in your work? Do your performances need a (live) audience? Do you need to perform for/with an (art) audience? I am now thinking 56

of your book as well (where your mind is present and less your body). And your recorded performances “Panoramas” (2012).

These were precise descriptions in a circle of 360 degrees around your ax. Or your, in real life 2009 performance “naam?”

(Name?), where you read descriptions of people in the city in a neighborhood snack bar in Rotterdam.

Audience: this is an interesting and delicate question. It touches an essential element in my work.

For many years I told myself that audience was the last thing I thought about when developing a work; this fitted in my concept of the autonomy of the work.

It was a shock to realize that in fact I always had an audience looking over my shoulder.

When working on a movement in the studio, when raising my voice, even when writing a sentence; there is always an audience somewhere hidden in my mind. (Also now when I write this, I am half conscious of a possible reader) Still I think that I don’t consider an audience with regard to the practical aspect of the work: a proposed work has to be realized, audience or not. (Over the years it happened that I performed a work without even one visitor) I think this is important for explaining what I see as an important difference between my works (real time/real space) and the performing arts (stage/artificial light etc.)

I don’t really remember the situation of your performance that you refer to in your question. I remember being talking to you, while you were standing behind a beamer, and it was exiting because I had only seen you before in your video performances. That I made remarks on your ‘performance’ is probably a sign that I found your work worth to react on.

When I am performing, I am only aware of my body’s position insofar as the movement I perform requires it, which is most of the time about my position in space (how wide is the 57

circle I am walking now?) and time (are the contraction and expansion of the circle symmetrical in time?) So it is always related to me as the ‘sculpture’, not to me as a person. ◀

Photograph: Theun Okkerse 58

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GUIILHERME BERGAMINI PATRICIA BORGES TOINE HORVERS JIEYUAN HUANG --▶ IOANA NICULESCU-ARON

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Jieyuan Huang 1 --▶ “Jungle Box” (2017) is an installation of 25 Chinese food lunch-boxes placed evenly in the space. They are positioned in the corner. With perfect lighting, a clean floor, a clean wall.

Light is coming out of the boxes. In the text accompanied by the work I read: The artist explores the cultural misalignment of Asian immigrants in German culture through the example of Asian fast-food boxes. Jungle Box is a mischievous appropriation of China Box. The Chinese artist is living in Germany and is following an MA at the University of Arts Berlin. I too have lived in Berlin for 7 years. And have lived in China for 2 years. The Berlin Wall has only fallen since 1989. And it is still relatively new for German people to deal with foreigners. As it is also for the majority of Chinese people in China. Many people don’t know more than what they have seen on TV. Is this the light?

Which represents this often false generated stereotype? You have placed miniature screens inside the boxes. Perhaps “feeding” us, the viewer, a different menu? Your menu? Do you want to alter the general stereotype? Or do you want to show your fantasies?

Could the light also be representing the surprise? The hope? The change? Times are always in flux. More and more people will have to deal with people from different nationalities. I love this work since it addressed something that should be addressed.

The background of this work actually involves the issue of population mobility left over from the Berlin Wall. This is a geopolitical population mobility issue that seems to transcend labor issues. Vietnamese immigrants from the far East came to East Germany and East Berlin through socialist bonds.

However, with the end of the Cold War and the merger of East Germany and West Germany, the Vietnamese workers who chose to stay in fact lost their identity continuity. Following the interesting interpretation you provided, what this 61

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“cultural recipe” tries to show in “Jungle Box” (2017) is how this identity dislocation problem is concretely presented in the German environment. The China Box is not a self-generated mixed diet example of Vietnamese immigrants. It is a mixture of Western food culture and Eastern culture Stereotype, but the problem is that it is Vietnamese immigrants who choose to cater to this phenomenon in Germany. In fact, the list of “cultural recipes” is still very long: sushi boxes, wonton boxes, fried rice boxes...just like a group can choose labels that are not the same group based on survival and career. Examples in Germany are also other Countries or regions have reflected. This is also the epitome of the current international population and cultural flow, but the example of Vietnamese immigrants mixes geography, labor issues, etc. Hidden in the current superficial internationalization is a complex background from history and politics. The images I use in my works are not from historical archives, but a simpler combination of jungle images and human figures, so what I am trying to present is an essential background state that transcends specific time. It goes beyond geography and politics to bring back the original image of the jungle.

This is not found in German daily society. We cannot see a thorough display of the problems from Asia in the Western environment. Stereotype and culture and barriers are still obscured. With the real background color. So, what I am trying to show is the potential problems underlying the current frequent cross-cultural communication.

2 With “Reassembling Painting - Black Box” (2019) you created your own world. With a particular atmosphere. Quite a dramatic image. It has the sand color Western-movies kind of feel to it.

Desolate and within it a grayish barn. However, you mixed it up with ruins. And with contemporary iron storehouse racks with objects on them. With striking colorful floating balls on them.

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All is sort of placed in a, deserted island-like, layer of water in ebb.

The title might indicate that you want to change wrongs? I wonder if there is a sort of anxiety or discontent or maybe even anger? Or possibly you feel full of frustration since you think you can’t change it? Possibly you want to show us, that it will be over one day? In a sort of doom scenario? Give us the day-after kind of feeling? Is it an attack on the world at large? All humans? Life as we know it? You deconstruct paintings. Perhaps the frustration is mostly towards the (authorities of) the Art field? Or the market forces? Do you see it indeed all gloomy? Or is there hope? Do you want to tell us more about the core of your anger or anxiety?

To what exactly it is focused?

Change will come. It is already happening. And also, the internet, technology, and such. I think the next book Book #3 will be about Instagram Artists. Artists seem to be taking their power (back). Control their own destiny. Their own sales. Their

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own visibility. Perhaps yet in a “small” bubble. Yet, completely autonomous. As I heard Danish performance artist Tue Greenfort once say in a lecture “Power to the Artists”. Do you feel you have this power too?

The topic of this book #2 “The Open Call” shows that those who place the call, need the artists. Without artists, there is no art. I like this. It shows respect. Yet, there are also those, who base their business model on utilizing artists. Since there are so many artists. They ask for money from artists, the makers. But I think new injections, like the open call, Instagram, and artists like yourself could be the ones who indeed have the power to overturn the classic and, now also this new system, where artists let them be squeezed like sponges. Since you are born in this flipping/turning point. I am curious, to what exactly you as a young artist repel? What aspect?

In fact, until 2017, my practice focused on painting, and I still involve painting in my thinking. Because I increasingly shifted the center of practice to digital media, in this process, especially at the beginning, I felt a sense of fracture, which prompted me to think about how to think about painting from another angle. It seems that the end of painting has not really come, and the digital revolution has not substantially changed it. Although many artists are trying to use more digital technology to intervene in the process of painting, there is always a gap between painting and digital media in the digital environment. The essence of this problem is the incomplete integration of human and technology, and the opacity of computer algorithms. What frustrates me is an imaginary situation, except that all parts including paintings have been digitally changed (as related objects placed on various shelves), it is a situation in which artists are replaced by algorithms, and the algorithms are opaque, like the black box I arranged in the middle of this wasteland. Therefore, the reorganization 65

of painting is a reflection of this situation for me. It is full of a sense of ruin, because painting is indeed facing an urgent problem in this situation.

Although I feel that with the help of the Internet, more and more self-media, Open Call and other internationalized information have become a norm, but I feel that the

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competition has also put artists under risks of higher pressure.

I have also benefited from many Open Calls and got more opportunities. I believe that such a working method can ease the problem of resource allocation to a certain extent, but at the same time I find that it is sometimes difficult to carry out in-depth and synchronous work. In addition, the actual effects of personal promotion in social networks like Instagram or

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Facebook are worthy of reflection. While gaining a kind of personal self-media freedom, artists also give their content to platforms and companies. So, we are always subject to another constraint while getting convenience. Maybe we need a truly decentralized medium.

3 In “Reassembling Painting - Black Box” (2019) you start with showing (random chosen?) paintings on the MoMa website. It made me curious, and I typed in in the search field “black box”.

Do you want this interactivity or referencing? Some results I got from the MoMa website were: Tetsumi Kudo’s “Black Box” (1970), Ben Vautier’s “Prototype for Black Box (Boîte noire)” (1962), Walid Raad’s “My neck is thinner than a hair: Engines” (1996-2001) And others.

More drawings, paintings, in color, in black and white, handwriting, and VR. A delectable mix. A “Balloon Dog” by Jef Koons, from where the real and the virtual get interspersed some more. A Barbara Kruger “I shop therefore I am” (1987), which seems totally out of place. Or is that a clear reference/ critique on internet shopping behavior? Or even art in general as a commodity? The diversity you show is great. You show a messy artist’s working space. And then these shiny quasi perfect art end-products. Vaults with magazines stuffed full of art. Where to go with all this art? And it is piling up. You show these kinds of storage racks again in the video (and also your other projects).

Amazon also passes by (another reference to online shopping) and many other references displayed on about 10 racks. Is this work specifically for an art audience?

You choose nontraditional formats for your videos. For example, format 32:9, for ultrawide monitors as an alternative to dual 16:9 monitors. I assume for more immersive experiences, not only while playing videogames? Are you playing with fields?

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Referencing to art field, and relating its workings to gaming? Or to the painting canvas? Or painting concerning new media? You create an open image viewing field in the image. What does this mean for you? Can you talk more about this concept? And also, how for you the real (what is real?) connects with the virtual world?

Although the words of MoMa are covered by mosaics, the audience can still vaguely see the original words.

This is my intention. In my previous video works, I often misappropriated patterns from commercial brands, but at the same time I will obfuscate the logo, and I try to create a de-identified context, so that the content can be temporarily separated. At the beginning of “Reassembling Painting-Black Box” (2019), two search interfaces were introduced. The reason why I chose MoMa’s search interface is because I found that MoMa’s online database is relatively representative, so I randomly Used MoMa’s pages about painting.

Indeed, this work involves some images from art history.

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They are placed between CG images, so they are more like an interspersed relationship. In the video, I did not use text to prompt the relationship between these images and the CG scene, but hoped to generate the relationship through the correspondence of the picture elements. They are not a complete analysis of painting, but an interception of examples of painting itself and other elements, which do involve commerce, logistics and storage other than painting. I hope this work can be accepted by more public audiences, although it is a challenge.

In my thinking, the frame of the image and the frame of the screen are two different dimensions, and seamless images may also be restricted by limited images. When planning the picture, I try to balance the relationship between the picture and the image.

In my thesis, I associate viewing images with viewing paintings.

Two screens are like diptych. In addition to displaying more content, it also brings more visual impact to viewers. The realm of open images can be seen in Jeffrey Shaw’s work, and in VR we get a comprehensive answer. It itself is an abstract viewing space, which may extend in real space and virtual space.

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4 In your art you deal with the consumption of images in digital media. Is this the reason why you, password-protect your online artworks? Or is it a way for you to control who gets to see your work? Or the other way around to deprive the world of privileges?

In this case to see and experience art? Or does it comment on our viewing behavior? I am thinking of an early electronic song called “Greed” (Dave Clarke Mix) by Laurent Garnier (2000). From the album Unreasonable Behaviour. “On the fast track of the net, I take all I can…” That track was amazingly futuristic for its time, and like techno, it is now feeding itself from its roots, and the music has been said to change fast. Like possibly what you talk about in your current/latest work “Image Field – Intro” (2020). Is greed perhaps a certain element of what you are talking about? We take and take and take. Yet also as a contrast, in general we artists share and share and share. Do you want to make us (who?) aware of this? Or does it have another function? Since if one wants it would be relatively easy to rip your videos or any video available on the web. It seems you

want to make a point. Maybe show our helplessness in it all, our false control? Since technical abilities will progress more and more. For us biological beings we are at a technical disadvantage. Which you maybe show in your work “(Ro)bird’s-Eye View” (2019)?

The circulation of images involves issues of platformization and institutionalization. Until recently, I thought of a decentralized direction. Showing videos on a video hosting platform is a way of compromise. It cannot control the target group, because users of the platform come from different fields, and artists are also subject to the platform, including content review, algorithmbased recommendation features, and so on. Security is another issue. The technical threshold and cost of stealing videos on the video platform is almost zero. If there is no password control, artists will almost place video works in an unsecured environment. We should promote a way of video art display that can effectively protect the copyright of artists while being open source. The art industry is not aware of the problem of the mechanism of art circulation in the digital field, and is content to be parasitic on existing technologies and platforms, and artists cannot comprehensively get a more suitable way to display. What makes people worry is that content platforms are increasingly clearly establishing a kind of platformism, and it is the algorithm on the platform that determines the artists’ internal display.

What I tried to explore in “(Ro)bird’s-Eye View” (2019) is the relationship between visual technology and the human eye.

Although it is not within the scope of the issues discussed above, it also reflects that we must speed up Thinking about the ecology of art, because there is often a delay in reflection on technology.

5 You talk also in your work about the connection of technical extras (to sum it up). And connections types. You use Atari(-like) sounds and early Macintosh startup sounds. Is the biological old, redundant?

Or is there possibly some melancholy with the old non-technical, non-virtual world? You were born in a time where you have not experienced this. Are you curious about it? Or the opposite and want to speed things up? Faster, smarter, more logical, more mobile?

January 1, 1983, has been noted as the birth of the internet. You

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were born on October 17, 1992, the year when the first smartphone was introduced. And the first text message was sent. How do you deal with the “old” analog (behind) world? It was also the same year in which the Dunbar number of 150 was suggested. A cognitive limit, to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. Can you talk about this concerning your work “Hidden Flow-Cement Plant” (2020). In where you think about things that are destroyed at the physical level and then are rebuilt at the virtual level. Where image avatars for example move through the demolished Heidelberg Cement Plant in Germany.

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In “Oasis screen” (2020) you think about sustainable mobile screens.

Freedom for technology. From the standpoint of technology. Mobile images. But not necessarily free to mine. Free to experience but not to mindlessly consume? Can you talk a bit more about this mix of sustainability and flexibility? And/or the survival of images in harsh environments? Again, I get the feeling you are preparing for doomsday. Or possibly not, and preparing to move to Mars. To expand? Would you like to create an image oasis, where technology like babies can continue to survive or mature? Perhaps we saw this idea starting to take root in your “Hidden Flow-Cement Plant” (2020) where at one point you show the inside of the cement plant.

And the images are thriving. Like a beautiful underground river.

Like a hidden jewel. Like images can exist everywhere. Is that the light again? The shimmering of hope? Which can be anywhere, in a Chinese food lunchbox or a demolished Heidelberg Cement Plant.

Your current (latest?) project “Image Field – Intro” (2020) deals with image reproduction technologies. What to think of it? Who is the author? The same question pops up again in the art discourse. Is it still important? What do you think? I am a little bit intimated by the video. As if a new era is launching. It can operate independently in an un-powered environment. Again this duality, since yes, I also want an Oasis screen. Like in the movie “Her’ (2013). Where a man falls in love with his computer. Which is an intelligent, self-aware, and self-learning operating system. Utopia or dystopia? What will it do with and to us humans? Backups to be used for image and archive re-excavation. If humans choose to destroy buildings (or at one point themselves). They would still exist in the digital space. Or they already are as avatars?

From the perspective of my growth environment, analog devices such as film cameras and tapes have gradually disappeared.

At the beginning, digitization represented a kind of advanced productivity, and I myself experienced the convenience brought by digitization. Until recent years, I have gradually paid attention to the negative effects of digitalization. However, I did not have an idea to revive outdated technology. Instead, I thought about the relationship between analog and digital, and how they can transform and coexist in an image. In the system. I hope not only to produce a new substitution relationship, but a new and better understanding of images, which can accommodate analog, digital, and virtual media. Therefore, my work is based more on a compatible conception and travels through the media of different eras. In “Hidden Flow-Cement Plant” (2020), in the historical documents published by Heidelberg Cement Company, the original image from analog photography was presented in the first digital version. I combined it with virtual technology to reconstruct it. I juxtapose them in the environment, just as the architecture gets the cycle of images, so my work also tries to

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advance in the cycle of images.

At the beginning, the focus of my thinking in “Oasiscreen” (2020) was the mobility of the medium, which is the bottom layer of the image, but then I discovered that digital media is inevitably restricted by electricity. Therefore, when considering the mobility and sustainability of digital media, I am also considering the distribution of resources behind this structure. Some regions often lack conditions for the circulation of digital images.

Therefore, this work does involve thinking about the environment outside the industrial society. I’m glad you mentioned light again, I think this is a very interesting clue. Artificial light is a modern product, and the light emitted by the screen is also based on the production structure of human society. Therefore, we may have a new understanding of the production of light. It can be separated from the electricity production structure, but Based on a sustainable mobile point of view. I hope that the light generated by such a model can provide a more organic way of generating media art. This way also invisibly mirrors the scope of the environment you mentioned. In the conception, it can and is suitable to exist in harsh environments.

“Image Field-Intro” (2020) is an introduction, or introduction, of my preliminary work on Image Field. In the different sub-projects of Image Field, there are thoughts on different dimensions of the image. At the same time, Image Field also has a virtual entity in the virtual space. Image Field is more like a system in which I work and it requires cooperation from others, so the system will have its day beyond my individual capabilities. In “Image FieldIntro” (2020), I simulated a brief sci-fi journey into Image Field.

As a narrator, I also appeared in it as a virtual image. So, this is just a prediction for the time being. Perhaps one day, it can run independently and continuously transform images into project fragments one by one, forming a truly independent Image Field, which involves more technologies such as AI and IoT. At present, I hope to continue to promote this project within my ability. After all, this stage is just the beginning. ◀ 74

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GUIILHERME BERGAMINI PATRICIA BORGES TOINE HORVERS JIEYUAN HUANG IOANA NICULESCU-ARON --▶

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Ioana Niculescu-Aron 1 --▶ You are a young, smart, and active artist, a recent mother, and a Ph.D. student. You studied in three countries under various scholarships, you create books, you have created a magazine about the Romanian art scene. You have an active blog, social media, and now a new website. And you are doing open calls.

You seem to have your own things going on, like your magazine and book projects. And at the same time, you are connected to the more classic art system, working with a gallery and now pursuing your Ph.D. Do you think that maybe the recalls to (your) older works has perhaps something to do with connecting the let’s say new art field construction with the more classic art setup? And/or is it more driven from a political or even monetary aspect, more from the idea of having the possibility to do it, and thus taking this opportunity? For example, female artists from all over the world have the chance to get a high degree and so they take it. Since in the art education field the shift has been already made from mostly male art students to mostly female art students. I compare this with my previous traveling and living abroad. I have/had the opportunity so I had to grab it. How do you see this?

And/or You write on your website: “I take my inspiration from personal emotions, and then build an entire world surrounding each emotion.” You give the audience bits of information to create a certain atmosphere and to create your own world. What kind of world is this? Or preferably?

The recalls to my older works are like a recap. I never actually 77

finished a chapter. I only opened gates, very many gates, and then continuously tried to build connections between them, to find answers, to use these questions in my favor and get to a deeper understanding of myself. Even if sometimes I move forward, for a let’s say ‘new chapter’, that doesn’t mean that I am done with the ones before. It means that I will soon use the experience of creating something totally new, to improve the old ones. My art is based on a few main ideas that I commute, by doing different combinations. The fact that I have started playing with installation art or many other fields that are not necessarily directly connected with painting (which is my base layer). It is rather an organic process, which then becomes a plan to connect new art field construction with the more classic art setup. My installation ideas come continuously to my mind. Very often I write down projects, because I do not have time for that many, but I am sure that step by step, in time, I will.

Regarding my Ph.D. and your question about the education field in art, I have more answers to give you, all truthful.

On one hand I am doing a Ph.D. program because I find it very helpful. Remaining connected with people from the University (in this case art teachers) and frequently talking with them about topics that concern me in matters of art, forces me to look at my practice in a more analytical way. Very constructive! On the other hand, even if in many countries of the world the shift has been already made from mostly male art students to a more balanced percentage, at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, in the Painting department, there is still no female teacher. It is a man’s world in which I have the ambition to one day earn a seat at the table, but I will not be able to do it without the Ph.D. degree.

My art is about life. I start from personal emotions and think of universal concerns. I love focusing on one specific moment 78

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that I re-imagine again and again. By reconstructing that moment, I split it into multiple fragments. Each of these fragments is formed with an equal quantity of ‘life ingredient’, as they refer to a moment of life. I add elements, deform perspectives, change colors, do all these artistic ‘effects’ to show the flavor of life, the very essence that I find so beautiful in our everydayness, an image that I think I, as an artist, am responsible to share with the world.

But life is everything, it is something huge, that I find difficult to describe with words, and even with art. That is why I take it step by step and refer to only one fragment at once. I am not trying to compete with life by creating a parallel one.

The point is to transmit one simple message: that today, more than ever, we, as artists can use life as the special ingredient of our art. We have plenty of tools that can help us, such as 3D printing, virtual reality etc.

I give people bits of information because I work with bits.

My art is like a snowball that collects more and more snow particles while it rolls down on its way. Each day new emotions get incorporated into the snowball and bring it closer to the final destiny: the mirrored, complete complexity of life.

2 In your blog “Residency in Motherhood 92 DAYS” in where you talk about photography in your artistic approach from painting to life. You call the idea that art is life itself your calling.

Was it different for you before? Did this happen because of your shift from painting to photographing (in this project)? Or do you consider yourself a painter still? And do you mean it on an individual level, in your art? And is it real life? Or can it be a copied life? Or an imagined life? Your life? In what way can we see this calling? Seeing your work “3D HOTEL” or “Alter Ego” is being an artist a sort of alter ego for you? Or do you want 81

to take it to a higher level? Do you want to become a changemaker? Your art, you call it a live tissue. I would add a life issue.

It is happening, it is expanding, progressing, and yet building on the previous. I have to think of the art by David Hammons visually speaking. With his wide range of materials, sometimes combining different objects he finds or collects and assembles together. Since you use all sorts of colorful materials in a makedo style. As in a contrast, it does not look minimalist or design.

You use daily use materials and found fabrics. Like artisan products—handmade. I would say even a bit of seemingly messy mixed media artworks, feathers, collage, painting, hanging or standing from the wall, interactive installation, plastic transparent colorful papers, performance with self-made clothes, and such. Possibly representing different situations, experiences.

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For example, “The Red Book” is placed in the hay.

Which shows painted colors of red, green, purple, and purple handwritten text with pieces of garment and weed from the sea area. As if taking a certain emotion and a particular atmosphere from the shelf. Like memories in our mind triggered by a certain smell or environment or texture. As often with our sentiments, we perceive them as personal, but they are emotions felt and perceived by many. This experiential or perhaps even existential aspect, can you tell us more about this?

I wrote down this manifesto ‘Art is life itself ’ in 2015, when I did my first photography series, called “Étant Donnés, Stealing Life from Today”. What I did then, was to get Duchamp’s woman out of the famous door, behind which he placed her. Instead of her laying down on the field, holding a gas lamp, the woman in my photographic series is alive. I captured the movement, the gestures, the breath, and I felt like I was holding God in my arms, because in that very moment, I started believing that what I was just doing was extremely right. There is no wrong and right in the arts field, but still… This is the world I chose to describe with the way I felt then.

It is quite a challenge to question today an idea that I embraced more than 5 years ago and never doubted since.

“Art is art and life is life, but to live life artistically; that is the art of life” was Peter Altenberg saying.

I have read many similar sayings, but this is not what I was talking about. Rather than this, I had in mind the fact that technology, today, helps us collect moments in a way that was not possible 50 years ago.

Not only through performance art, but also through 83

all other mediums, the artist becomes more transparent every day, which determines that, whether he likes it or not, he knows it or not, he becomes his art—and what is left to do for him is to dig inside himself and express it. It is true that this theory works for every artist from every moment in history. The extra element brought by today’s world is the dexterity of people to show themselves in any circumstances—which became more present because of social media platforms.

On the other hand, it is also about capturing the beauty of everydayness. Painters have always done this, but I kind of prefer to keep painting as a way to release emotions and free myself. If I try to literally paint a moment of life, I feel captive. That is why, even if I am a painter, I also use photography. Art can remind people ‘how good it can be to just sit on a chair quietly and look out the window’, as Marina Abramoviç mentioned once.

The same as the pixie dust brings magic for our children, I encourage reborning by embracing those parts of ourselves that we feel less comfortable to share. I needed an alter ego to bring back the originary me: an image for which I used feathers, hay, leather etc. Here come the common points between my art and David Hammons, such as loving the shape of some specific objects and exhibiting costumes, that you have remarked so well.

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3 Documentation of documentation. Does this feel correct for you?

In and with your art. Of art. Of life. What is art? What contains art, what contains life? I see this in your work. The frame of the border is the canvas. But inside the canvas are often also frames. Then you often create boxes for your paintings. Or like the cage on stage. Now maybe even your Ph.D. could be seen like this—another confined space. But in fact, testing these borders. And looking for freedom.

Yes? Yes! You are right with everything that you’ve just put into words so beautifully. I would only add the word SUBTILITY. This is the thing I intuitively play with. I create thin borders and connections between different artworks of mine from different phases of my life.

The Red Book that you mentioned in the previous question, can be interpreted as a recap of my last few years of work. I made the abstract of each important series and then reproduced it in a small size and made it part of this book, just as Duchamp did with his famous boxes. This is only one example of how I ‘create frames’ and then test them, as you just said. The connection with Duchamp is not random. There is always this fight inside me between being free and keeping myself captive, between spontaneity which comes from the need to express myself (here is where the old painter hides) and the fact that I delight myself with playing games, making associations without giving any clues, thinking. This duality of mine makes me often feel unconfident.

But then, the artwork is ready, and all the confusion is gone.

“How do you know that you are an artist? To know if you are an artist or not you do not have to question. It is like breathing. You have to breathe, otherwise you just die, so you breathe. If you wake up in the morning and you have this urge to create, you are an artist. But you are not a great artist. To be a great artist, there are different types of rules. The real artists always change their territories, and they go to the lands that they have never been.

And in the unknown territory you risk, and you can fail. And it is this READINESS TO FAIL that makes all the difference. When 85

you become routine—that is the end of everything.” I selected this paragraph from a video with Marina Abramoviç made by Louisiana Channel. She also talks about a teacher of hers that advised her once to switch immediately to the other hand, if she would get to draw perfectly with one hand, even with her eyes closed.

That is exactly what I felt I must do after I left Milan, or shortly after returning home. I used to paint a lot and I became so good at it, and it was all going so easily. I immediately wanted to try something else. And I launched into video art projects for a while, and then objects. Since then, I just could not stop extending my fields continuously. Recently though, I found myself in the opposite position—wondering where has the painter gone? Why am I doing all these, if my tool that I was handling so well was painting? Why does what I do not seem complete to me? Why am I not satisfied?

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4 The title “3D Hotel” maybe in conjunction with your different use of mediums seems to show that you shift or expand borders. Borders of all types. Self-created ones, profession orientated ones. Societies ones. Maybe looking to go outside of the (by oneself or society or

even art field) created cages. Like the 3D hotel performance where you are standing in an open cage-like structure. Where you seem to be communicating with people outside of the cage. Who is talking to whom? Who is influencing who? At the end of the performance, you walk outside of the cage and go up a round stairway. Besides physically moving to a different plane, you are symbolically going to another level (of consciousness). One could also see it as if you are walking off the theater stage. So then the cage is a structure you can place in any space. Like a mobile theater. Yet the structure is also open. As if giving the audience the possibility to come into your space. I see this also in the use of your different mediums. And while using these different mediums challenging these borders too. Like hanging your paintings om mutually the ceiling as om the wall. Like a Salvador Dali dripping watch. And his women with many drawers containing meaning. Like your “Figurines de Cire” (Wax Figurines).

Like a window in a frame. Playing with reality or existing realtity?

And in that regard, I felt you were also playing with me (in this case the interviewer). You sent me a video in which you are giving an art talk held at Chaosmos Space in Athens, Greece. In the art talk, you show a video of a performance you did the day before. And ask the audience to ask you questions. In a way, you are hugely pushing the border of performance. And again communicating with … (someone) outside of the border. Do you know what I mean? Can you tell us a bit more about this? Using a cage is like you capture something. You capture yourself in this self-made structure. And presenting it to look at it. But in your performance, you are not locked up like a bird. You created the cage. And the cage is open.

And you communicate with people outside of the cage. Perhaps the cage can be seen also as a seemingly safe position to receive communication from? To receive the influences? Where those recorded voices imaginary dialogues? Or desired ones? You call it a 3D hotel. So the title seems to communicate a transformation period. A temporary place where you stay. A point between A and B. Not a home. But an artificial home-like space. The color full costume hanging over the black painted iron of the cage. Is like the colorful feathers of a bird. You stripped yourself of them. You take off the “look at me” part. Or the “I want to be admired” part it seems. Which could be seen as another transformation. The video

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itself (the art talk) is called “From Painting to Life”. Another sort of transformation. As your own journey of the woman becoming a mother. So first you paint and then it becomes life? Are you thinking, feeling, growing through painting and so painting makes you understand life? You don’t like categorizations. It is not dance; it is not theater; it is not visual arts. So perhaps you are stripping all away what it is not? Like a sculptress to then show her sculpture?

Or maybe with it, you are questioning again what is theater, what is dance, what is visual art? Or simply said all is art. Life is art.

Perhaps we can say you are an image-maker? And that image can be anything. No need to label it. Is this correct?

Each human being creates a cage for himself. The other people can only see what we let them to. We are free to leave this cage behind, as I did at the end of the performance, but most of the time, we decide to live with it. It makes us feel more comfortable, less vulnerable. It is like we are saving ourselves by hiding behind a virtual glass piece that sometimes is blurred, some other times, transparent, depending on how much we decide to share.

This cage-like structure is a recall to the “Windows” series (the departure point for the “3D HOTEL” project). Inspired by the show-window idea, I was painting an imaginary layer of glass between the inside and the outside of the hotel room. The ambiguity created in those compositions talks about blending the self-reflection’s image with the passers by from the street, like a glass of mirrored thoughts, of absorption and energy transmissions.

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This clarifies more the fact that my performance, “From Painting to Life”, is not about influencing or being influenced, talking or listening, but rather about blending, consenting. I share my most personal emotions by letting my cage fall apart in front of the viewers. I have written a text, split it randomly and then give it to different people to interpret it. Having their voices in the background makes my moment universal. It is not about myself, Ioana Niculescu-Aron anymore, but about all the people that at some point can choose to let go of their self-made cages and become free.

The work “Mind has no Sex”, that I have done later, in the same

year, in collaboration with the philosopher Gabriel Vacariu, is a multimedia installation with three self-portraits, inspired by the common ID pictures. Each of them is a different version of myself—fictional images built from three major fundamental phases, explained by Vacariu’s philosophy: the ordinary human being (that worries about daily problems), a person trying to understand philosophical aspects of the human condition, and nature itself - the eternal beginning.

This explains why, my alter ego (me wearing the costume of the middle phase of this metamorphosis), at the end of the performance, steps onto a higher level, the level of consciousness, where the body is not needed anymore: it is the transcendental world of ideas. But even so, the structure that you called cage, has been indeed thought to be carried from one stage to another.

“From Painting to Life” is rather a manifesto, than a performance.

My plan is to introduce this short moment as a commercial on real theatre stages, at conferences, at music concerts etc. Shouting out loud about visual arts to people that have this appetite for culture, clarifies that I refuse to be a niche and to limit myself to art galleries and art museums. The world is very connected today.

Why would visual arts stay in its territory, instead of connecting as well with other art fields?

What determines us to let the cage fall apart, is explained by the mother project, “3D HOTEL”, a temporary home (as you mentioned). It is a short-term stay, where we care less about the appearances, as no one knows us. The fact that “the room” has guested thousands of people before, is also important. As you very well noticed, the way I work is by handling an infinity of drawers that take different forms in each project. Some recent examples are: “Figurines de Cire”, “Luxia”, “The Yellow Book”.

I am an image-maker and there is no need to label it. I love it! In most of the cases I first paint because this is what I do best, and it is the tool my hand picks even when I want to make a short note.

But then, I dig into that painting, take elements in and out, make it breathe by placing it in relation with other elements. Because this is what life is all about: connections between elements. Isn’t it?

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5 “Facing the Other Me” is another painting where you look not only for the border of painting but also yourself as an individual.

The self that is influenced by the habits, preferences, and values of parents, and social norms. Looking for freedom by touching the borders. You wrote in your portfolio: The structure on which all the artworks I make are based is the essence of my life.” The bits that are or can be (understood) are universal? The search for liberation (in a universal world). And making different elements coexist like a huge puzzle. Perhaps like a painting you seem to want to have or expose the ability to stretch. Can you comment?

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Life creates emotions. Living life, taking good and bad decisions, makes us who we are today and who we are about to become.

The way people live, all their mistakes and misunderstandings are things that I see beauty in. I savor watching people’s lives, in the same way I like watching my own. These are the roots of my inspiration, of my existing as an artist. My life is a tool that I use to talk about universal concerns based on human needs, emotions, and self-understanding. I talk about evolution and the future, concerns that are connected to my project called Incomplete Keyboard, which I see rather like a search for liberation, an analysis of how the world moves. People started to mix languages years ago. I only accelerated the process by creating a new one and possibilities for it to become an image. As you very well observed, “Incomplete Keyboard” and “3D HOTEL” are different pieces from an even bigger puzzle.

Becoming aware of our weaknesses liberates us.“Facing the Other Me” is a painting that talks about taking ownership. It is me, as the ordinary human-being contemplating about a different possible self of mine (the final phase of the metamorphosis from “Mind has no Sex”). It is me, choosing to remain a small human being, and thinking from time to time of the world of ideas, to which I do not have total access from this body made of flesh.

So yes, my art is about seeking freedom, but also about managing to live beautifully with what we already have : routine, borders, and canons. It seems that I want to have them both, that I am not able to pick only one, and I do not blame myself for this. I think it is human. ◀

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COLOPHON 5 ARTISTS INTERVIEWS The Open Call #2 Interviews with: Guilherme Bergamini (BR) Patricia Borges (BR) Toine Horvers (NL) Jieyuan Huang (CN) Ioana Niculescu-Aron (RO) All images courtesy of the artists © Kim Engelen, March 2021 ISBN 9798714886768

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ART _ISTS INTERVIEWS

5 Artists Interviews #2 The Open Call The Open Call is the 2nd book of the 5 Artists Interviews series.

Contemporary artist Kim Engelen (Netherlands) interviewed five artists: Guilherme Bergamini (Brazil), Patricia Borges (Brazil), Toine Horvers (Netherlands), Jieyuan Huang (China), and Ioana Niculescu-Aron (Romania).

5 Artists Interviews is a five-year book-project by Kim Engelen.

Each book in the series holds interviews with five contemporary artists. The interview itself contains five questions.