LandEscape Art Review // Special Issue // Summer 2015 by LandEscape

LandEscape A r t

R e v i e w

Anniversary Edition

Endgame, 2016 six channel digital video installation at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery

Land

E scape

SUMMARY

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

C o n t e m p o r a r y

A r t

R e v i e w

Zinka Bejtic

Boris Eldagsen

Caroline Monnet

Tracey Snelling

Lien-Cheng Wang

Carla Forte

United Kingdom

Germany

Canada

USA

Taiwan

United Kingdom/USA

I am a firm believer that I can only speak about the things I know. My own personal reality is always intrinsically weaved into my work. Personal experience is a stepping-stone in creating the work I do. I wanted the main character to be beautiful, eccentric and likable. I remember thinking that my grandmother was the most amazing and exciting woman. Only later I realized her eccentricity was hiding something deeper. She was hurt and displaced. Memories also feed imagination in my opinion. The authenticity of the story comes from a direct experience, but the fiction behind it allows for further possibilities in storytelling. The film tells the story of Roberta who left her native reserve to follow her husband in a suburban area in hopes of a better life.

My works involve the use of interactive devices with sound performances. Devices often utilize a volume approach to achieve a specific physical erception, while images in the sound performances are generated real-time to materialize corresponding forms. In recent years, I have been committed to the seamless combination of images and sounds created through computer algorithms. In my work, I want to convert the Internet data—the 1s and 0s—into the CD-ROM drives’ physical ejection and retraction, thus making the activity of logging on to the Internet both visible and audible. Audience stands in front of a wall linked by CDROM drives, they get sensation as if placing bodies in the data stream. It gives audience in a grand informational torrent materialized by a collective of actions.

My primary intent is to communicate my personal and social concerns, transforming them into a magical realm where anything becomes possible. Images, dialogues, silences and movement join to create a visual equilibrium, speaking for themselves. Within my cinematographic work, movement is a key element for narrative and visual development; achieving a frame in motion from the image. Beyond an unorthodox narrative and aesthetic, my work focuses on experimenting new visual sensations through conflict: reflecting a world of emotions that can be both very near reality and on the side of the nonexistent, creating a parallel universe in which the palpable and the desired become possible at the same time.

My work is based on a wide scope of modalities ranging from design, photography, experimental film to video art. I am engaged in time-based visual communication and subjects of my work often explore dichotomies between inside and outside, the polished and rough, the physical and emotional, distant and passionate.Through experiments in video and sound, I search for new ways to study conceptual forms common for nonnarrative formats. In photography and design, I build on simple and surreal ambiances that serve as a platform for provoking visual narratives.

Eldagsen only works at night, with minimal equipment, an in-camera approach and without digital manipulation. Like a moth, he roams the streets searching for light, practicing what he has termed Inverse Street Photography: instead of exploring stories, a place or a person, he hijacks and transforms what he sees in front of his camera to become a symbol for the timeless workings of the mind. Eldagsen also stages images with models to create a portrait of the Collective Unconscious. To develop ideas and impulses for the shoot, he maps the overlapping areas of his and his model’s unconscious. Then he follows the dynamics of the shoot to move deeper down the rabbit hole.

Special Issue

Land

SUMMARY

E scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Tracey Snelling

lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Caroline Monnet

lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Zinka Bejtic

lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Charlotte Seegers

lives and works in Toronto, Canada

Carla Forte

lives and works in Utrecht, the Netherlands

Kosmas Giannoutakis 74 Edan Gorlicki

Nara Walker

Kosmas Giannoutakis

The Netherlands

United Kingdom

Greece/United Kingdom

The philosophy and beliefs surrounding Edan’s artistic approach are based on searching the self within its surroundings. Inspired yet confronted by the world around him, Edan finds artistic comfort within the search for belonging and connecting. What better way to explore life then through movement and researching the body within the space around it? Edan’s work always explores psychological and emotional realms. He believes that through personal experience he can use his work as a mirror for both his audience and himself. In the past Edan has made stage works on numerous subjects such as hierarchy, sexuality, fantasy, stress, addictions, belonging and perceptions amongst others. Every work of Edan has been a personal and touching transparency of what we all as humans go through on a daily basis.

With experience in observational and experimental forms of filmmaking, I merge visual arts with anthropology for conducting and communicating my research in a critical and creative way. I believe that anthropology is not only about contextualizing one’s behavior in his culture but it has also the ability to dislodge our fixed ways of seeing the word and the visual is a powerful way of subverting them. I produced Immediate Response - a hybrid documentary film exploring the quest of selfdefinition and immediate pleasure from an unusual angle. Blending ethnographic research together with everyday life processing imagery, Immediate Response attempts to capture a world of shifting values.

Game, as social extension of brain activity, and Play, as associated complex behavior, are concepts fundamentally related with every creative process. Perception and creation of Art are creative complex processes with an intrinsic gaming nature, well hidden in the subconscious. The focus of my artistic research, is to raise the mind's gaming nature to the level of conscious awareness by creating artworks, which are performative art games. Using sound as the main communicating medium, my engaged performers interact with dynamic audiovisual systems by developing listening virtuosity and acting adaptability.

lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Boris Eldagsen

lives and works in Berlin, Germany

102

Edan Gorlicki lives and works in London, United Kingdom

114

Pako Quijada lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Special thanks to Haylee Lenkey, Martin Gantman , Krzysztof Kaczmar, Joshua White, Nicolas Vionnet, Genevieve Favre Petroff, Sandra Hunter, MyLoan Dinh, John Moran, Marya Vyrra, Gemma Pepper, Michael Nelson, Hannah Hiaseen and Scarlett Bowman, Yelena York Tonoyan, Miya Ando, Martin Gantman , Krzysztof Kaczmar and Robyn Ellenbogen.

Special Issue

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Tracey Snelling Lives and works in Sacramento, California, USA

An artist's statement

hrough the use of sculpture, photography, video, and installation, Tracey Snelling gives her impression of a place, its people and their experience. Often, the cinematic image stands in for real life as it plays out behind windows in the buildings, sometimes creating a sense of mystery, other times stressing the mundane.

Snelling has shown work in museums such as Gemeentemuseum Helmond, the Netherlands; Shanghai Zendai MOMA, China; The Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany; El Museo de Arte de Banco de la Republica, Bogota; and Stenersen Museet, Oslo. She has had solo exhibitions throughout the US as well as in China, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and London, and has been awarded residencies in Beijing and Shanghai. Her large-scale installation Woman on the Run was originally commissioned by Selfridges, London during Frieze 2008, and has traveled to Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; 21c Museum, Louisville;

Frist, Nashville; SECCA, Winston-Salem; and the Virginia MOCA, Virginia Beach. Her first short film "Nothing" premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2012, and showed at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Circuito Off in Venice, and the AC Institute in New York. Snelling recently had solo exhibitions at Aeroplastics Contemporary in Brussels, Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, and Krupic Kersting in Cologne. Her most recent installation was commissioned for an exhibit at the Negev Museum in Israel. Snelling recently had solo exhibitions at Aeroplastics Contemporary in Brussels and Krupic Kersting in Cologne. Her recent commissions include and installation for exhibit at the Negev Museum in Israel and a sculptural commission for the Historical Museum of Frankfurt. Snelling's newest film The Stranger will be showing at the Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisboa in Portugal, and her work will be in forthcoming exhibits in Germany, Brussels, the Netherlands, and the US.

film still from Nothing, 2012 short film, 15:00, with Elizabeth Guest as Jane

Land

scape

Tracey Snelling

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

LandEscape meets

Tracey Snelling An interview by Melissa C. Hilborn, curator and by Barbara Scott, curator landescape@europe.com

Naturalistic and moving in its simplicity, Nothing is psychologically penetrating film by Tracey Snelling. Via a succession of static shots, we come to see Jane's emotional and physical detachment from the world. Nothing relies on domestic routines and simple gestures: the first time we watched it, we immediately thought of Chantal Akermanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce: Tracey's elegant use of temps mort gives the viewer a strong sense of emptiness, rather than the manipulative approach of Hollywood productions. What mostly impressed us of Snelling's work is the way her careful gaze on contemporary age unveils the creative role of the spectator, discovering unsuspected but ubiquitous connections between art producing and the audience. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her multifaceted artistic production. Hello Tracey and welcome to LandEscape: multidisciplinarity is a crucial aspect of your art practice and you seem to be in an incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between video, sculpture and photography: while crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you ever happened to realize that a synergy between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?

Yes, sometimes I feel that showing a subject and/or idea in multiple physical

manifestations can be the most comprehensive, ideal way to get an idea across. For example: the film Nothing stands on its own. Yet, my ideal installment of the film would have the film projected to fill a large wall in the space, still photographs that I took on location of the film hung on a different wall, and installations of motel room beds, nightstands, and dimly lit lamps spaced unevenly throughout the space, so that the viewers could lay on the bed and watch the film. This added installation and participation dimension lets the viewers become part of the film, and allows them the opportunity to imagine they are guests at the motel. We would like to focus on your artistic production beginning from Nothing: an extremely interesting work that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to visit https://vimeo.com/40554380 in order to get a wider idea of it. In the meanwhile, want to take a closer look at the genesis of this interesting project: in particular, how did you come up with the idea for Nothing?

I've been fascinated by motels, desert, and travel since I was young, so when I began to write my ideas for a film, I naturally leaned towards this setting. A few films that, in hindsight, influenced this work include Badlands, written and directed by Terrance Malick; Paris, Texas, written by LM Kit Carson and Sam Shepard and directed by Wim Wenders; Wild at Heart written and

Tracey Snelling (photo by Rebecca Brown George)

Land

scape

Tracey Snelling

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

directed by David Lynch; and See the Sea written and directed by Francois Ozon, among other films. I was interested in presenting the desert as a character in the film, with quiet shots of large expanses of the landscape. I wanted to capture the feeling of the desert, of a small rundown town and being lost. I was most interested in presenting the exact moment when someone goes from denial or ennui, and being stuck in a situation without the energy to act, to the point of action and change. How does this come about? What causes the actual propulsion? I could have easily presented this using a male or female character, but I chose a woman, perhaps because I am a woman. Nothing features an unconventional narrative structure. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s your writing process like?

I had the rough story idea in my head, so I sat down and wrote it out on three sheets of paper in an hour or so. I still have the papers somewhere here... I wrote a description of the feeling and mood, and what one would see-waking up in the trailer, Jane driving, the hum of the air conditioner in the motel room, the heat causing everything to move so slow, the three motel rooms, the drive and gas station stop. I don't remember if the title came first or the the title came while writing the story, but I wanted the film to follow the meaning of the title. While things actually happen in the film, it's a very slow, methodical timeline, where seemingly nothing happens. Form following function. On another level, Jane's life at the beginning of the film is really nothing--she goes through the motions of life and does the bare minimum. Her decision in life is to make as few decisions as possible. She's stuck. Influenced by the sometimes quiet and contemplative scenes in the films listed above, I wanted the film to trudge along,

Tracey Snelling

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

film still from Nothing, 2012 short film, 15:00, with Elizabeth Guest as Jane

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

film still from Nothing, 2012 short film, 15:00, with Elizabeth Guest as Jane

Tracey Snelling

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

feeling like the heat of the desert was weighing it down. It's so hot that even the film can barely move! And the end, or the anticlimax after the climax, is an example of the mundanity of everyday life. In Hollywood, The movie ends when the hero rides off into the sunset. In my film, my heroine needs to stop to fill up her gas tank. This type of anticlimax is often found in French and other European films, or in some of the great American films from the 1970's. I find this a much more thought provoking ending, which echoes the continuity of life, going from dramatic events to the general, everyday acts that everyone must do. Another interesting aside is that I had originally written the character of Jane to be a much harder, tougher, worn-down young woman: someone who is much older than they really are from rough life experiences. But while casting, this one actress, Elizabeth Guest, was so captivating and engrossing. We weren't able to look away from her. She had something that was so interesting, but she also had an innocence and listlessness. After seeing her, I realized that my character Jane would have to change to a more lost, less hardened character. The film elevates to another level because of Guest's talent and the contrast between not being able to look away from Jane, and Jane being so passive and almost invisible. Nothing is elegantly shot. Did you rehearse a lot with the shots you prepared in advance?

I initially had ideas of what the shots would be in my head, wrote them down, and sketched out a few. Many of the ideas were worked out during a location scouting trip that the cinematographer Todd Banhazl, the producer Idan Levin, and myself made down to Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree. All three of us had input on what would be interesting and could add to the film. We also came up with new ideas at this time on some shots, and added or changed some shots during the actual shooting. We shot the film over

ICUL CTION C o n t e m p o r a r y

A r t

R e v i e w

Summer 2015

Tracey Snelling

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

three days, did the initial editing in four days, and I worked with the sound editor for a few days over the internet while I was in Greece for an exhibition. The entire film was made in a month, from scouting and casting to color correction and completion, in order to reach a deadline. It was intense, but also interesting to see what can be done in one month. Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impacted on us and on which we would like to spend some words is entitled Stranger: your insightful investigation about the concepts of belonging and identity as well as the ambiance created by your careful juxtaposition between audio and video has reminded us the concept of non lieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc AugĂŠ. What has mostly impacted on us is the way you have been capable of providing the viewers of an Ariadne's Thread, inviting them to challenge the common way we relate ourselves with the outside world in order to extract personal interpretations... By the way, I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need in a way to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?

When making The Stranger, I collaborated with the producer of Nothing, Idan Levin. We directed the film and both acted as cinematographer. I wrote the two poems that alternate during the film. One poem is about being alone, and is narrated in English and Spanish, and subtitled in Arabic And Hebrew. The other poem, which echoes the first poem line for line, is about us all being similar and at times, all being one, and is narrated in Arabic and Hebrew and subtitled in English and Spanish. The

multiple layers of the poems, their meanings, the languages and the relations between the locations of these languages (both border places--the US and Mexico; Israel and Gaza Strip), in addition to the visuals and ambient audio, give multiple clues and associations that are layered and must be extracted by the viewer, making a kind of Adrian's thread. When editing the film and figuring out the placement of poems, narration and subtitles, we worked as both mathematicians and detectives--on one hand following a formula or structure that we came up with to piece the film together; the other aspect was figuring out which scenes went best with the lines from the poem, and how these scenes interacted together. The many layers of the film, poems, narration, subtitles, and sounds make The Stranger a film that asks to be viewed multiple times, in order to pick up on the different nuances. The concept of non lieu is an interesting one, and I find these places to be of more interest that notable locations. When traveling, I always try to find a local grocery store and corner shop. One can tell a lot about a particular culture from the grocery store, what's on the shelves, what people are buying, and who is shopping there. What these non places do is to bring together groups of people from the place. The people and their characters become more important than the location or building. By presenting these places in The Stranger, the idea of being nowhere and everywhere, and of the global world being smaller and more similar than one might initially think, is emphasized. By definition video is rhythm and movement, gesture and continuity. In your videos you create time based works that induce the viewers to abandon themselves to free associations, looking at time in

Land

scape

Tracey Snelling

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

spatial terms and I daresay, rethinking the concept of time in such a static way: this seems to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. How do you conceive the rhythm of your works?

Time is so relative. In film it can be used to present one minute of time happening in various ways, a lifetime happening in an hour, time being long and lasting seemingly forever, or time being so quick and then it's over. For Nothing, the tempo was so important, and was part of my original idea from the conception of the film. For most of the film, time drags on and the day seems to last forever. Then, upon Jane's realization that she is stuck in a dead-end life and must get out, the pace picks up quickly, and the sound follows. Once there has been the dramatic climax and and is free, driving on the road, things slow down to a regular pace as she stops to get gas. Regular, everyday life enters the picture and the mundanity of the many unexciting life tasks brings the time back to an undramatic, more contemplative pace. In The Stranger, the pace is not as slow, but there is a point at which the pace picks up and then returns to a more regular timing. This is done through length of clips and sound. The general pace is methodical and constant, with the exception of the faster section. The Stranger's relation to time should be timeless in a way, as the film is addressing universal ideas of belonging and loneliness. The idea of time and pace in my sculptures is interesting to think about. They function as capturing my idea of a place or culture. In many of my sculptures, the videos loop the same scenes, such as a woman unloading her groceries in a kitchen or a

couple having sex or sleeping in a bedroom. In these cases, the pace of a sculpture stays the same, and reinforces the idea of the dayto-day banality of life. Other times the video in a piece might go from day to night, quiet and slow to loud. In this case the sculpture both has a pace on one hand and is timeless on the other,

Tracey Snelling

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Loukoum

depending if you are viewing it more from a

Underground Film Festival and at the Circuito Off in Venice. So before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of

static view or a viewing the sculpture in the round. Over your career you have showcased your works in several occasions around the world including exhibitions at the Oakland

Land

scape

Tracey Snelling

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

your decision-making process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?

possible, and to follow my vision. I've been showing my art for many years and I'm used to the second act of it being presented and

I try not to think of an audience when I'm making my work, whether it be film, sculpture, or photo. I want the work to be as pure as

viewed by others (after the first act of creation). Sitting in a dark theater at a film

Tracey Snelling

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

audience. It's a new and sometimes uncomfortable feeling for me to sit with an audience in a dark room and watch my film. The one time I do focus more on the viewer while creating is in an installation. I often want my installations to immerse the viewer, and for this reason I take many considerations towards the viewer, such as lights, placement, flow of the space, and sound. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Tracey. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

Presently, I'm working on a large scale installation called One Thousand Shacks. Addressing the immense issue of extreme global poverty, the installation will be a 5 meter high x 3 meter wide wall of small scale shacks and favelas, with lights, video and sound. I will be presenting part of the sculpture and speaking about it at a conference on poverty in New York this fall, and the installation will possibly show at Art Basel Miami or Frieze NY. I am partnering up with an organization that builds houses in poverty stricken areas, and will donate part of the proceeds from the sales to this cause. I would like to start exploring the presentation and installation of my work in unusual outdoor spaces, such as a lake or a freeway underpass. I like the idea of coming across unexpected experiences. I'm also in the beginning stages of developing an idea for a feature length film with my collaborator on The Stranger, Idan Levin.

festival watching my film with an audience has been a completely different experience. When a film or video is shown in a museum or art space, viewers can wander in and out as they choose. At a film festival, short films are viewed in sequence in one sitting, and it's a captured

An interview by Melissa C. Hilborn, curator and by Barbara Scott, curator landescape@europe.com

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

C aroline Monnet Lives and works in Outaouais, Québec

An artist's statement

elf-taught multidisciplinary artist from Outaouais, Québec, Monnet uses cinema, painting, sculpture and installation to demonstrate a keen interest in communicating complex ideas around Indigenous identity and bicultural living through the examination of cultural histories. Her work is often minimalistic while emotionally charged and speaks to the beautifully intricate limbo of indigenous peoples today. Monnet has made a signature for working with industrial materials, combining the vocabulary of popular and traditional visualcultures with the tropes of modernist abstraction to create unique hybrid forms. Monnet is

always in the stage on experimentation and invention, both for herself and for the work. Monnet has exhibited in Canada and internationally in such venues as the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and Haus der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin) for the Rencontres Internationales, Toronto International Film Festival, Aesthetica (UK), Cannes Film Festival (not short on talent), Smithsonian Institute (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art and Arsenal (Montréal). Monnet lives in Montréal where she is the artist in residence at Arsenal Contemporary Art Gallery.

Caroline Monnet

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

Caroline Monnet

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

LandEscape meets

Caroline Monnet An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Barbara Scott, curator landescape@europe.com

Multidisciplinary artist Caroline Monnet work accomplishes the difficult task of providing the viewers of an Ariadne's thread that unveils the hidden but ubiquitous relationships between oral histories, ancient life ways, and generational legacy. Her evocative storytelling urges the viewers to investigate about the relation between reality and the way we perceive it: capturing the ephemeral nature of experience, she materializes it into a coherent and permanent unity. One of the most convincing aspect of Monnet's practice is the way she creates an area of intellectual interplay between perception and memory, that invites the viewers to explore unstability in the contemporary age. We are very pleased to introduce our readers to her refined artistic production. Hello Caroline and welcome to LandEscape: ranging from painting, sculpture and installation to film and video, multidisciplinary is a crucial feature of your work, that shows an incessant search of an organic symbiosis between a variety of viewpoints you convey into a consistent unity. Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for producing your works? In particular, have you ever happened to realize that such synergy is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?

The way I produce my work depends on the

Caroline Monnet

project itself. I usually donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t approach a film the same ways I approach a sculpture let say. But I agree that there is always a form of personal interaction with the work. I am interested in creating works that have meaning and evoke feelings. This is why most often I research intensively before I actually start making the work. It is part of the process and acts as the foundations of the works. I became a multidisciplinary artist out of necessity really, because film and video was just not enough for me to express certain ideas

Caroline Monnet

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

and concepts. I believe it is the idea that dictates the medium chosen, not the other way around. I explore whatever medium best serves my expressive needs. Each medium is a world in itself and has great potential for storytelling. It is also quiet liberating to explore different mediums, different avenues of my own personality and to truly embrace the history that comes with a particular medium. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s almost a way of educating myself in terms of techniques while striving to choose the perfect medium for the perfect story. Lately

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been working at making concrete sculptures. They explore ideas of monument, architecture and minimalism. I try to challenge this industrial material to bring poetry and synergy. My interests do not necessarily vary from one medium to the next. I believe each works influence each other and constitute a larger plunge into the thematic I have been exploring since the beginning of my art production. As an artist you are basically self-taught, however you hold a B.A in Communications

Land

scape

Caroline Monnet

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

and Sociology that you received from the University of Ottawa and the University of Granada. How did these experiences inform your evolution as an artist? Do they influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works?

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s true that I studied Sociology and Communications. I think it is difficult to know what you really want to do in life when you are asked at 17. I have always been interested in art, in people and society in general. Because I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t come from an artistic family and I did not have artist friends as a teenager, I never really thought I could make a career doing art. It is only later, in my early twenties that I started seeing things differently and knew I wanted to work in film and visual arts. However, I believe my sociology background has had a huge influence in the work I do. I think it is nice to arrive to the art world from a different angle. My interest in society and in people is engraved in the work I do still today. Art for me is a powerful tool for education and empowerment. I still believe the artist or the filmmaker has somewhat of a responsibility in our society. The artist expresses a point of view on the world and can therefore help in sparking debates, sharing ideas and challenge our own ways of organizing our communities. Making art is a constant study of the world, others and myself within that. In the end, it is not so different from any sociological endeavors. I became a filmmaker without really expecting it. I had studied sociology and communications and worked briefly for the National Broadcasting Corporation as well as a documentary television series. I made my first film IkwĂŠ in 2009. I was living in Winnipeg at that time and came across a small grant opportunity to direct and produce my first film. It completely changed my life as I had finally found something that I was passionate about. Filmmaking to me is a way of encompassing all forms of art. It speaks to performance, music, painting, photography and sound. It is collaborative, creative and challenging. As a self-taught filmmaker, I think I just try to do my own thing. I don't encompass myself into a style or a box. Because I have no formal

Caroline Monnet

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Caroline Monnet

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

training, I tend to follow my instincts and figure things as I go. Each film for me is a new challenge, a new opportunity to get better and refine my own style. Concepts and story often dictate the style of the film but I believe each film is filled with the same sensibilities, vulnerability and esthetic. As I grow as filmmakers, so do the films. I am more ambitious now than I was five years ago, but it’s because I am always up for new challenges in creating narratives. I also believe that my dual practice in visual arts has a huge influence in the way I envision my films. I would start to focus on your artistic production beginning from Gephyrophobia, an interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What mostly appeals to me of this work is the way you blend a minimalistic gaze on urban spaces and a suggestive composition: I find truly engaging the way you subvert our perceptual parameters and I have to confess that it suddenly forced me to relate myself to your works in a different way. Would you walk our readers through the genesis of this interesting work? What was your initial inspiration and how did you develop it? Gephyrophobia is an experimental film, shot on a bolex 16mm that was commissioned by the WNDX festival of moving image in Winnipeg (Canada). At first, it was supposed to be a silent film, but when the images came back from the lab, there was no way they could remain without a soundtrack. I truly believe that sound is crucial in creating a mood and therefore an experience. With Gephyrophobia, I was asked to capture the pulse of the city of Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada, in a way that resembled the first experimental documentaries of the 1930’s. This is why I approached the project as a kind of city symphony. The incredible Frères Lumières composed the soundtrack. This was our first collaboration and

Land

scape

Caroline Monnet

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

they have been composing most of my films since then. I love how they captured the essence of what I was trying to do with sound. On one end, the more government run city of Ottawa, more square, desolate, and on the other end the more catholic lower class driven reality that exist on the other side of the river. They played with multiple layers of instruments, which fits perfectly with the minimalist black and white look of the film. The film might be minimalist and elegant in form, but encapsulates layers of meaning that you have to understand for yourself. Another interesting project of yours that has particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words is entitled Portrait Of An Indigenous Woman, that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/113858061. As most of your works, this piece is open to various interpretations: in particular, your exploration of indigenous identity allows you to capture from small gestures a peculiar beauty and communicates me a process of deconstruction and recontextualization both on a formal and on a semantic level. What is it specifically about indigenous identity, which fascinates you and makes you want to center your artistic style around it?

For me, Identity is an endless topic. It is all around us and often the most interesting thing in the world. My earlier work was narrated from a first person perspective and identity was at the center of the work. More recently, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve moved away from a personal specific identity obsession, but the work is still grounded in documentary foundations to evoke different realities. With Portrait of An Indigenous Woman, I wanted to portray the reality of being an Indigenous woman from various perspectives. Too often as indigenous woman, we are put in categories. I wanted to challenge these perceptions by letting a group of women speak for themselves themselves. The project started in December 2014 during a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. We have already examinated the way your work investigates about social issues from

Caroline Monnet

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Caroline Monnet

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

an identitarian aspect: in Roberta, that I have to admit is one of my favorite work of yours, you focus on the osmosis between social conformism and the intimate sphere: but rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize the desire to enabling us to establish direct relations. While conceiving Art could be considered an abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the concepts you explore. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indispensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience? I am a firm believer that I can only speak about the things I know. My own personal reality is always intrinsically weaved into my work. Personal experience is a stepping-stone in creating the work I do. Roberta is a fiction film, but it is also based on the memories I have of my grandmother when I used to spend time with her during the holidays. I wanted the main character (Roberta) to be beautiful, eccentric and likable. I remember thinking that my grandmother was the most amazing and exciting woman. Only later I realized her eccentricity was hiding something deeper. She was hurt and displaced. Memories also feed imagination in my opinion. The authenticity of the story comes from a direct experience, but the fiction behind it allows for further possibilities in storytelling. The film tells the story of Roberta who left her native reserve to follow her husband in a suburban area in hopes of a better life. There she finds herself alone, far from her family and friends, and turns to amphetamines to cure her boredom. I used humor in order to talk about a dramatic subject and to make fun of a conformist lifestyle. My character is an indigenous character, but any woman of that age could probably identify with her. This helps in braking conventions and stereotypes. By showing this reality, I believe Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve created a

Land

scape

Caroline Monnet

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

new story in the world of indigenous cinema. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Caroline. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Presently, I am artist in residence at the ARSENAL gallery of contemporary art in Montréal. It’s a great space showcasing amazing artists. I feel very lucky to be there and have the chance to be part of it. I have been producing sculptures that revolve around personal materiality. These works are somewhere between architecture, installation and sculpture.

On the filmmaking level, I am developing a few new projects, including my first feature film, in collaboration with Daniel Watchorn. I don’t want to talk too much about it as it is still in the very first stages of development, but promises to be challenging and exciting ride. Once again, I feel like this project will aim at challenging preconceptions of indigenous realities while trying to establish understanding between different communities. I hope my work can continue to sustain itself and evolve as much as it has been evolving in the last recent years. I am always on the look out for new opportunities and I hope I can start reaching bigger audiences with both my film and visual art practice.

Zinka Bejtic My work is based on a wide scope of modalities ranging from design, photography, experimental film to video art. I am engaged in timebased visual communication and subjects of my work often explore dichotomies between inside and outside, the polished and rough, the physical and emotional, distant and passionate. Through experiments in video and sound, I search for new ways to study conceptual forms common for non-narrative formats. In photography and design, I build on simple and surreal ambiances that serve as a platform for provoking visual narratives. Besides being a practicing artist, I also teach at the College of Architecture Art and Design, American University of Sharjah.

Zinka Bejtic Visual Artist & Filmmaker Assistant Professor of Art and Design College of Architecture Art and Design American University of Sharjah Marsh pastel 24â&#x20AC;?x18

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

LandEscape meets

Zinca Bejtic An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryder, curator landescape@europe.com

Highly refined and moving in its baroque but at the same time communicative concreteness, If I Don't is a compelling work by cross-disciplinary artist and director Zinka Bejtic. While walking the viewers through an unconventional exploration of the idea of the escape from the 'safety box', she accomplishes the difficult task of establishing an effective balance between aesthetics and socio-political criticism, to create an area in which emotional dimension and perceptual reality coexist as a coherent unity. Bejtic's elegant juxtaposition between temps mort and rapid movements leads the viewer to the liminal area in which memory and perceptual processes find an unexpected point of convergence. What mostly impressed of Bejtic's work is the way her provoking reflection about contemporary age unveils the creative role of the spectator, discovering unsuspected but ubiquitous connections between art producing and the audience. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her multifaceted artistic production. Hello Zinka and welcome to ART Habens: to start this interview, we would like to pose a question about your background. In particular, after earning your Master of Arts in Visual Communication from the International University of Sarajevo you soon started to work as an editor for documentaries and short films, and most of them were shot in your native Bosnia and Herzegovina. Notoriously, short film making allows the producer to work with a level of

freedom that is hard to reach in feature film: how did this experience impact on your evolution as an artist and the way you currently relate yourself to art making?

The interest in the non-narrative film was shaped mostly by the possibilities of selfexpression due to lack of limitations usually imposed by commercial or narrative format. I became fascinated with the form itself and explorations of visual elements in avant-garde film movement. The surrealist approach is something that I was able to draw from when creating my projects and it seems to be a creative act of effort to free and liberate all of the aspects of imagination. There are so many new techniques that have excelled with the digital age phenomenon and I am very interested in these specific approaches and how they apply in expriemental films today. Some of the most interesting and unique charactersย in music and fashion that explore the similar concepts are Leigh Bowery, Isabella Blow, Bjรถrk and Lady Gaga. They can also still be found across contemporary catwalks as demonstrated by designers Gareth Pugh, Philip Treacy, Viktor & Rolf, Comme des Garรงons and many others. In regards to the fashion film and surrealist legacy, many fashion brands utilize the surrealistic concept in a dream-like state to boost the collection. Your practice is marked with a deep multidisciplinary feature: ranging from photography and design to experimental film and video art, your approach shows a successful attempt to go beyond any dichotomy between conceptualism and a nonnarrative approach: while crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you

Christopher Reid photo by Kimberly Brandt brandtphotos.com

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

A still from If I Don't, 2011 Fashion Association MODIKO 22

Zinca Bejtic

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

ever happened to realize that a synergy between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?

Being educated within different disciplines of design and film, I had the opportunity to experiment with processes that involved graphics, moving images and sound. These approaches enabled me to expand and excel in different areas such as photography, video, film and visual communication. Living in the day and age when moving image is everywhere the static visual experience rarely comply with the expectations of the viewer who now want to be engaged and stimulated through images and sounds, they want the full experience of immersive interaction. That is why the concept of art film today has an artistic but also commercial value. It is the format that encompasses the visual communication, photography, music video, commercial, advertising film, promotional video etc. We would like to focus on your artistic production beginning from If I Don't: an extremely interesting work that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to visit https://vimeo.com/37048599 in order to get a wider idea of it. In the meanwhile, we would like to take a closer look at the genesis of this interesting project: in particular, how did you come up with the idea for it?

If I don’t was a project done for the fashion association Modiko from Sarajevo, in cooperation with the British Council. I was assigned a group of four different designers Amna Kunovac Zekic, Jasna Hadzimehmedovic Bekric, Ata Omerbasic and Milan Senic and my task was to create a concept for the film that would provide a platform for four different outfits to be represented in one single film. At the time, we’ve had a great pleasure of meeting prominent British fashion filmmakers Kathryn Ferguson, Elisha Smith – Leverock and fashion designer David Saunders of brand DavidDavid and the opportunity to collaborate with them in a three-day workshop. Even though fashion film

format is mostly non-narrative, my idea was to include a simple storyline that still was in a way abstract and very much open to the interpretation. The film asks a question how does what we put on alter our personalities? As the ideals of beauty change, the concept of empowerment through fashion remains strong as it suggests self-expression and identifies the idea of beauty as the tool for conceptualization of positive self-image rather than a simple interpretation of clothes Metamorphosis through fashion indicates that power is in the hands of the subject and not the observer. In the film, four different personalities emerge out of the single character. This type of expression suggests the choice, freedom, strength, power and control, attributes that signify beauty in the modern society. Fashion takes on the symbolic and aesthetic role and communicates on different levels offering a glimpse of the lifestyle, personality and character, making the very idea of beauty that much more intriguing and more complex to interpret. We were filming in Sarajevo national theatre warehouse, a set that helped us create a contemporary and mystical world. It was great working with the fashion designers and lot of fun on the set. Later, I continued to work with Milan Senic who was behind styling and fashion design for Split, my most recent film. The idea was to create a surreal environment that would visually suggest the fantasy, dream or escapism of some kind. Contrasts of many sorts are evident in my work and I think it’s the idea of juxtaposition of unexpected elements that creates tension, necessary to engage the audience. Since this format relies heavily on the aesthetics of the screen rather than the storyline and the narrative, it’s important to give it tension and advance the aesthetic appeal in such way. There is a suggestive aspect of the horror genre implied through the technical conventions of the film. The sound was an important element through which the sense of uneasiness was introduced. I wanted it to seem mysterious and unexpected, I wanted the fear of the unknown to be the main protagonist. The film begins with that in mind and ends with a

Land

scape

Zinca Bejtic

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

realization that it is imaginary. This notion led to the title that poses a question “If I don’t”. We always think about what if I do something, but I think it’s more important to think about the opposite. What if I don’t? As you have remarked, your video/sound installation Fragments questions the challenges of women artists: in particular, we have highly appreciated the way the image of a mother-artist goes beyond the dichotomy between being creative and taking care about their own family. By subverting such stereotyped imagery about femininity you highlight a way out from the unstable contemporary sensibility... Many artists from the contemporary scene, as Judy Chicago or more recently Jennifer Linton, use to include socio-political criticism in their works. It is not unusual that an artist, rather than urging the viewer to take a personal position on a subject, tries to convey his personal take about the major issues that affect contemporary age. Do you consider that your works are political in this way or do you seek to maintain a neutral approach? And in particular, what could be in your opinion the role that an artist could play in the contemporary society?

In this project I question the socially constructed paths – marriage and motherhood and their effects on women artists. For women, it’s generally a battle to be recognized in a field that requires discipline and determination, which is generally speaking dominated by men. Statistics say that 80% of students in art schools are girls however; galleries and museums worldwide represent 80% of male artists. What happens to the girls? And more importantly – why? Women struggle to maintain their identity as artists while raising children and attending to their families. This gets especially difficult because of the socially accepted stand that once you are a mother you no longer have the right to put yourself first.

I would like my project to start a conversation and raise awareness of this issue so that perception changes. I’ve been teaching for a long time in North America, Europe and now here. Most of my students have been girls. I look at them, their passion and enthusiasm about art

Zinca Bejtic

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

A still from Carry On, 2012 Premiered at MTV Adria 2012

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Zinca Bejtic

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

and I want them to believe that what they are learning and what they love to do will remain their choice. I would like them to accept that their dream to become a designer, filmmaker, artist should not disappear the moment they start a family and become mothers. One should not exclude the other. On the contrary. It’s great how they can and should complement each other. But in order for that to happen, the social perception needs to change.

There are so many things that can be done so that mothers who are artists are encouraged to continue making artwork and what is even more important be accepted within the artistic community. Having childcare in museums and galleries, shifting the opening of cultural events to weekends, establishing a network of artists/parents who would offer workshops and provide resources for mothers-artists etc. The project is a video installation in which I have juxtaposed images representing my creative work and my daughter’s footage calling ‘mommy’. By combining her physical form with abstract visuals the discrepancy between the two worlds becomes more obvious and it further accentuates the bridge between the physical and imaginative sensibility. The artistic forms are simple but visually provoking and mesmerizing with almost a hypnotic effect, which causes the interruptions to be even more pronounced. The transitions between the segments are followed by strategic sound design to further emphasize the fragmentation. As the video progresses, the juxtaposition of the images becomes more intense to simulate the feelings of confusion, interruptions, distress and frustration. The sound provides a platform for this emotional journey as we shift from dense, chaotic rhythm to a mellow and playful ending that remains open-ended and unanswered. By definition video is rhythm and movement, gesture and continuity. In your videos you create time-based works that induce the viewers to abandon themselves to free associations, looking at time in spatial terms and I daresay, rethinking the concept of time in

Land

scape

Zinca Bejtic

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

such a static way: this seems to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more temporal form. How do you conceive the rhythm of your works?

I give the same importance to both, aural and visual rhythm. When developing concepts for art films or videos, I first depict the mood and the message and then work to develop a temporary track that would serve as a guideline for visual inspiration and development of the rhythm. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the back and forth process that sometimes becomes very complex and as the director/editor, you have to find a balance and decide how to integrate both towards the end. Sound, for me, is a very important component. I teach my students that no matter how great the visuals are, if the sound is not done right, the entire experience is questioned. The mood, the emotional aspect or the sensation in general is greatly influenced by sound. Your experimental approach often challenges the relationship between image and sound, which is highlighted especially in your video art piece entitled Days pass us by and we don't even know it. How would you describe the way your process blends connotative elements from sound and image?

I like to explore the problematic of modern society through visualization of simple storylines where most of the action is open for interpretation. I like to suggest and not show things literally. I place a lot of focus on the visual expression, graphic elements not only through abstract imagery but also laws of the frame and mise-enscene, visual contrast, colors and movement. Subjects of my work often explore dichotomies between inside and outside, polished and rough, physical and emotional. The relationship between image and sound is an integral part in understanding the experimental expression. As an artist I no longer seek to depict or describe the reality but instead inquire within my own inner reality. New perspectives arise and influence all artistic fields and various avant-garde movements characterized by different aesthetic foundations, but encompassed by their common struggle against tradition and taste for novelty,

Zinca Bejtic

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

A still from If I Don't, 2011 Fashion Association MODIKO

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

A still from If I Don't, 2011 Fashion Association MODIKO

Zinca Bejtic

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

experimental and individual freedom. The entire experience of immersing yourself into this art form comes from the mood or emotional impact created by this synergy of visual and aural elements. The attention is directed to the medium itself with techniques involving cutting o or designing extravagant sound and the effects are usually made to provide a more abstract point of view or more symbolic interpretation. Your deconstructive exploration of the dichotomies between inside and outside in Split seems to highlight the elusive but ubiquitous connection between conscious and subconscious levels and urges the viewers to get involved in the variety of feelings and ideas you convey in your pieces. While addressing the viewers to relate themselves with your work in such a temporal way, your work shows an effective combination between experience and imagination. German sculptor and photographer Thomas Demand once stated that: "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". What is your opinion about this? And in particular, I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indispensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

Well, I have to say that I do not draw from personal experiences when deciding on the topics of my projects. I am more interested in ideas that allow a specific demographic group to connect and re-think. I very much appreciate the simplicity in form and complexity in meaning. Art film rejects the mainstream conventions and explores the medium itself, it is personal and I like the fact that my films can be interpreted on many different levels, depending on social or cultural aspect of the person watching. Surrealism is a significant source of inspiration for me. Many fashion films today have drawn upon the conventions of the movement and contrary to what many believe are not just a commercial advertisement but represent a form of art. As fashion itself, it stands on its own as a representation of the designerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vision of beauty and his/her inspiration. Certain fashion films are triumphs of experimental film with directorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; work

Land

scape

Zinca Bejtic

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

resembling the work and style of Luis Bunuel. One of the earliest fashion films created was a British film Ceremonial Hat in 1948 for artist Eileen Agar. The film consists of close-ups and medium shots of a decorative hat. The models of fish, lobster, tiger fish, prawns and seashells are attached to it. Additionally, several feathers are attached to the hat. The male voice is heard in the narration. In this voice over he says that surrealist artist Eileen Agar has designed the hat. Different shots of the woman walking down the street follow, together with the reaction shots from the crowds she’s passing. The aesthetic quality of even the early experimental / fashion films is evident and these films represent an extension of the style concept, another way to experience clothing, fashion or a brand. You have also produced an interesting music video entitled Carry On, that has been performed by Maja Nurkich and that has been premiered at MTV Adria 2012. Over your career you have showcased your works in several occasions and besides being a practicing artist, you also gained a wide experience as a teacher: you currently hold the position of assistant professor of art and design at the College of Architecture Art and Design at the American University of Sharjah, so we would like to ask how does teaching informs the way you nowadays relate yourself to art making: have you ever happened to draw inspiration from the idea of your students?

I think I am inspired every day and this is why I continue to teach. I’ve been fortunate enough to have two careers that I love and care about deeply. I am amazed at how talented and ambitious the students are today. How fast they learn and pick up information, new trends and techniques. I love spending time with my students and watching them get that ‘a-ha’ moment, seeing the spark in their eyes and excitement when they become consumed by the project. I recognize myself in them, remember those wonderful moments when you forget to eat, drink or sleep because you’re so engaged in your work, when you know that you’re creating something that will push your personal boundaries and take you to the new creative level. It’s great for me to be able to do my own work but at the same time to also have an opportunity to open the doors for someone else, show them the way. Teaching methodologies today and undergo-

Zinca Bejtic

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

A still from Carry On, 2012 Premiered at MTV Adria 2012

Zinca Bejtic

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

ing significant changes. As educators, we have to adapt to, not only new and constantly changing technologies, but to new pacing and different mindsets. Students learn much faster today, they are generally speaking more technically up to speed and more innovative. They don’t take things for granted but instead challenge everything, which is a step forward from the type of linear education my generation used to have. And even though everything is accessible online and you can teach yourself just about anything if you want, still, I think the idea of someone standing in front of them not so much to teach them or feed them information but inspire them is very important. In today’s busy world, children often lack real role models. I am not implying that I should be one, but more often then not, I feel that I am. And that gives me a great responsibility as I spend time with them, shaping their minds and helping them pave the way into the future. In my opinion, educating someone means feeding them with passion and information to keep the excitement and positive energy. Everyone will be good at doing what they love. Finding what that is represents the hardest thing for most people. I feel very honored and privileged to have that opportunity and I sincerely enjoy being able to share my skills and my knowledge with students. And there’s nothing more wonderful than being blown away by an amazing project they created because I was able to inspire them. One of the hallmarks of your works is the capability to establish direct relation with the audience, deleting any conventional barrier between the idea you explore and who receipt and consequently elaborate them. So before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?

I make films for myself. That is the privilege I enjoy because it’s something I am not asked to do but I do it purely out of passion for the purpose of self-expression. Company, particular budget or any other requirements do not impact the topics,

Land

scape

Zinca Bejtic

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

conventions and production techniques but represent a pure artistic creation. In my projects I deal with topics that many people can relate to and therefore are drawn to explore them. They might not like them but they will understand their message. I believe the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Being a designer I put a great emphasis on aesthetic of the form itself and I am also interested in the idea of female beauty and how it is interpreted in the media nowadays. As the ideals of beauty change, the idea of empowerment through fashion remains strong as it suggests self-expression and identifies the concept of beauty as the tool for creation of positive self-image rather than a simple interpretation of clothes. Fashion accentuates a narcissistic approach to the idea of beautiful. It is superficial and harmless compared to the idea of a body image created by the media and beauty industry. If true beauty lies in attitude and self-expression, than fashion liberates and nurtures the confidence and flair. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a formula that has been refined to optimum effect â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to make one stand out, be noticed and be unique. As bare body is subject to a more intimate interpretation that lies in the eye of the beholder, fashion communicates on different levels offering a glimpse of the lifestyle, personality and character, making the concept of beauty that much more intriguing and more complex to interpret. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Zinka. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

Thank you for this opportunity. It has been my pleasure. Well, I am always super busy with teaching and that is still my main priority but I am also engaged with several films and video installation projects that still aim to reconfigure realistic elements and create a new form of reality that will hopefully assign value to the viewing experience and challenge the status quo. An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryder, curator landescape@europe.com

Zinca Bejtic

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

A still from Carry On, 2012 Premiered at MTV Adria 2012

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Charlotte Seegers Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel

An artist's statement

Immediate Response is a hybrid documentary film project standing at the crossroad between art and anthropology. It includes a 20

minutes film “Immediate response”, and a 5000 words essay “Sex and Self” unveiling the role of sexuality in the constitution of the self. The film portrays James’ disinhibited narrative together with footage documenting various aspects of London’s daily life. James is a student escort. He went into prostitution to finance his studies. Sharing his experience in his everyday London, he reveals striking insights about the role of sexuality in our individualized society, bringing the film to explore the quest of self-definition from an unusual angle. James’ view on immediate pleasure in our modern time is an eye opener: everything we want, we want it now no matter the means. The film takes a voice as the main subject guiding a poetic imagery to let the story emerge and cohere. The intimate narration is the result of conversations led for a year between James and the filmmaker. His narrative works as a mirror effect on the filmmaker’s own understanding of self-

realization and sexuality. Hours of interviews are cut down into a script of 20 minutes and juxtaposed against the filmmaker’s observations around London. It composes an imagery lying in accordance and discordance with the text, sometimes emphasing the contrast between what is said and what is seen. With inspiration from the free camera of Dziga Vertov, documentaries of Gary Tarn, and Carolee Shneemann, the film gives rise to an unusual vision of everyday London life. Immediate Response comes with an anthropological essay. From a range of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jeffrey Weeks, Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman, Sex and Self: an immediate Response draws James narrative into the relationship we create between sex and the “truth of our being” and sex and intimacy. James’ atypical profile reveals a sexuality engaged as a consumerist project. Caught between the desire to relate but the fear of enclosure it might bring, James finds an immediate response to his quest for self-definition throughout the use of sexuality. Blending ethnographic research together with everyday life processing imagery, Immediate Response attempts to capture a world of shifting values.

Charlotte Seegers

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

LandEscape meets

Charlotte Seegers An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Barbara Scott, curator landescape@europe.com

Hello Charlotte, and welcome to LandEscape to start this interview, would you like to tell our readers something about your background? You have a solid formal training and hold an MA in visual anthropology from Goldsmiths University and a BA in anthropology from Bordeaux II, France. How have these experiences influenced your evolution as an artists and how do they impact on the way you currently conceive and produce your works?

Hi Dario, thank you for inviting me to discuss my work. I think it is important to mention that I come from this solid anthropological background and decided to add the visual art into the discipline, not the other way around. I don’t really consider myself as an artist. I would rather say that an experimental approach in film allows me to go outside rigid canons of conventional filmmaking and conduct my ethnographic research in critical and creative way. Since I discovered anthropology, I became passionate about this discipline for a particular aspect of it. What interested me the most, is that in revealing cultural aspects of ways of acting, thinking and feelings, anthropology “denormalises” the commonness, it subverts conventional ways of thinking. It is this “dislocating” effect that I am looking for when conducting my research. And I suppose that this quest for subversion and dislocation

enables me to embrace a more artistic approach in the way I conceive and produce my work. My current life situation also influences my hybrid approach and especially the choice of my subjects. I come from France and came to London five years ago. The reality is that despite this MA, to make a living I am working as a waitress and invigilator in galleries, alternating with freelance researcher jobs for art exhibition and video-maker from time to time. The people I meet and the life I lead influence the choice of my subjects and the way I conduct my work. I don’t see myself belonging to the academic or art world. Like many people I suppose, I consider myself inbetween these social, professional and cultural circles - and I use it. I like to play in the interstices, put them in relation, juxtapose, coordinate, dis-coordinate them, showing other point of references. Multidisciplinarity is a crucial feature of your work, that reveals an incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between art and anthropology: before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for producing your works? In particular, have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?

In my case, I suppose the symbiosis is obvious. I have an abstract and intellectual background and I feel the need to find a practical tool and a medium to conduct and communicate my research. Without it, I feel

Land

scape

Charlotte Seegers

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

that my research isn’t complete and can’t reach a wider audience, outside the academic word. Writing is an interesting medium, but I find more suitable the complexity of the visual: playing with expectations behind images and the unexpected structures of the society. In my practice, multidisciplinarity is inherent to the process of the making itself. Dealing with human experience and the making of films, I am inevitably dealing with different types of knowledge to express some concepts. But I also believe that art and social sciences complement each other. Diversity, fusion of approaches and point of views, is fundamental and fruitful to innovate and make us attentive to the intricacy and complexity of one’s reality. For me, art resolves the ethical and political concerns of anthropology . It gives the tools to develop a well informed and creative research, taking into account the aesthetic, experience of human life but also anthropology’s ability to subvert. To say a few words about the process of my work, I would say that I use ethnographic fieldwork to situate my inquiry; often using singular stories, unheard voices and drawing them in the structural world we inhabit. For the choice of the aesthetic and the type of language I want to use, there is no clear methodology. I think about representational issues, the relationship between the subject and my understanding, trying to grasp what I want to subvert, almost like attempting to portray the actual experience of the ethnography itself. For Immediate Response, I was much influenced by the descriptive and poetic aesthetic of Gary Tarn, Carol Sheeman with Fuses, and the hyperrealist and anti-illusionist aesthetic of Chantal Akerman’s films - I don’t hesitate to take examples from diverse disciplines, film genres, for me they are all worth getting inspired from. I really enjoy the research phase of the work but I am aware of this huge gap between theory and practice, all of your thoughts can be reformulated in the making, so better not to be stuck in this phase of the process.

Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from your Immediate response, an interesting work that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to our readers to visit https://vimeo.com/user23341191 in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production...

Charlotte Seegers

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

In the meanwhile, would you like to tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?

Immediate response was first a project about student prostitution; it became more

orientated towards sexual addiction at the end. My Inspiration came from a lucky meeting I suppose. I was interested, and I am still are, about taboo and shame around sexuality. Â&#x20AC; I was a student at the time, working as a

Land

scape

Charlotte Seegers

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

waitress and keeping in mind what my teacher once said: “Why are you working of the side? Here people don’t work”. Student prostitution was everywhere in magazines, films, drama for mainstream media. Obviously the economical issue probed by them seemed to me a bit naïve, I was curious to know what

was behind that, so I started to interview independent student escorts in London, just to find out who they were. What I found interesting is that some students were proud of being sex workers and of belonging to the Sex Worker Open University with badges and all of that. I thought that, it might represent

Charlotte Seegers

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

a glimpse of feminist revolution, new values, new relationships models and innovative ideas. I led few interviews but I didn’t manage to grasp them fully. All seemed too constructed, not genuine at all. But, to be honest, I didn’t

try too hard to get to know them because I had met the protagonist of my film already, a man. I hadn’t even thought about a man at first. I was soon fascinated by his honesty, his stories and the way he himself did a retrospective on them. I was also fascinated by his dual character, student, in a relationship for years, straight and male prostitute. Sometimes he saw me as his counselor but most of the time he attempted to destabilise me, I think, with graphic and exciting stories, trying sometimes to convince me to work with him, while keeping a reserved attitude somehow. This situation made me think about a film I had watched months before, which had inspired me I think, Elles, from the Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska. This film is a fiction drama about student prostitution in Paris; the lens is progressively turned toward the first character of the story, Juliette Binoche, who plays a feminist journalist. She first appears as a coherent and confident woman, intelligent, independent, following a healthy diet, working from home in her apartment with balcony in Paris. But soon she encounters these two student escorts. They begin to tell their stories, explain their point of views, and in doing so they challenge her own understanding of sexuality. She soon realizes that she is the one trapped in her own conventional, sexist and bourgeois sexual norms. I found this film great, well done, and I really enjoyed this mirror effect that you also get in ethnography. I thought it was a clever way to pass on this dislocating effect to the audience. I remember James asking me at the end of each interview: “Why you don’t do it? Is it wrong?” I decided to make a film about our dialogues and especially the part I could relate the most due to my personal experience: sex and self realization. Our conversations led me in this direction: the relationship we create between sex and self in our consumerist and individualist society. A society which stresses us to maximize our chance of self realization, where settlement and failure is not an option, and where desires need to be fulfilled

Land

scape

Charlotte Seegers

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

immediately, almost before we happen to know them. James alludes to this anxiety and the immediate character of his pursuit. I thought that it was a great issue I myself experience combining psychological, social, cultural issues along with physical needs and pleasures. Filling holes in his self-identity with the gratification he would get from sex: a good and tangible metaphor. I wanted to tell his story but I couldn’t portray his face to keep his anonymity. My teachers told me to leave it to a radio program, but I wanted to turn this obstacle into its advantage. I thought that actually not portraying his face was the key of my film, I didn’t want people to exteriorize him: to give him a face, a shape, even a name, but I wanted them to identify to him, like I did. So I took the challenge. When I first happened to get to know Immediate response I tried to relate all the visual information to a single meaning. But I soon realized that I had to fit into the visual rhythm suggested by the work, forgetting my need for a univocal understanding of its content: in your videos, rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize the desire to enabling us to establish direct relations... Would you say that it's more of an intuitive or a systematic process?

Well, I didn’t really think about it when I made it but I think it is systematic, because of the type of films I get my inspiration from and probably because of my scientific background. I prefer to open the viewer to an issue rather than give him a univocal understanding of it, and I appreciate films featuring complex and multifaceted characters with conflicting motivation and internal conflicts. We all are full of contradictions and I like the viewer to identify with the character, even if such character first appears alien to him. There is a reason behind the idea of juxtaposing collective imagery and James narrative- to emphasize the identification and let the viewer enter in direct relation with him, to make his own sense of it.

While many contemporary artists as Michael Light and Edward Burtynsky use to convey in an explicit way sociopolitical messages in their works, you seem to maintain a more neutral, almost scientific approach: rather, and you seem to invite the viewers to a personal investigation about the themes you

Charlotte Seegers

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

touch on. Maybe that the following assumption is stretching the point a little bit, but I think that Immediate response reveals the connection between different cultural spheres which describes such a real-time aesthetic ethnography: you seem to be drawn to the structured worlds we inhabit and how

they produce a self-defining context for our lives and experience... do you agree with this analysys? Moreover, what could be in your opinon the role that Art could play in sociopolitical questions?

Thank you, I am very happy with this reception

Land

scape

Charlotte Seegers

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

of my work. This is what I attempted to do I suppose, but I wouldn’t say that my work is neutral. I am proposing to look at an issue through a particular spectrum; an issue embedded in one, amongst many, selfdefining contexts. I understand why you say a

“neutral” and “scientific approach”. I try to be as “objective” as possible because I find a work more interesting when it leaves room for the viewers to make their own interpretations. But my work is totally subjective. I would say, it is more “honest” than neutral (it is the word used by the

Charlotte Seegers

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

have never really been comfortable with activism because of the nihilist deconstructive turn of the discipline, I suppose. But in the actual social and political context, I try to move away from this attitude because I think we need to be engaged more than ever. Here art can help to bring life to our curiosity and make us attentive to some issues, give other point of references. Some choose to convey an explicit sociopolitical message, some use sensationalist strategy. To my personal taste, I don’t think a sensationalist language is that much effective. On the contrary, it dismisses the ability of the viewers to make their own investigations, their self-critiques, which nowadays is indispensable in our current socio-political environment. We need to regain our ability to make our own mind. Art is also a good way to highlight an issue when the access is restricted because of power relations and ideologies and there is a certain pleasure at playing around “the rules of constraining places” (as said De-Certeau) - like when I turned the anonymity obstacle into its advantage in Immediate Response. Your aesthetic style is heavily influenced by a straight, realistic approach and I have appreciated the way you question the ephemeral nature of perception that raises a question on the role of the viewers' viewpoint, forcing us to going beyond the common way we perceive not only the outside world, but our inner dimension... I'm personally convinced that some information are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the society we inhabit, so we need to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?

protagonist of my film after watching it). “Honest” when I try, as you said, to share my experience of the ethnographic process embedded in our own social and cultural frameworks which define him, me and us. As regards art and sociopolitical questions, I

This question makes me think about Detournement strategies and surrealist attempts to disrupt inscribed images. I believe, like you, that there are encrypted messages, and some artists find a certain pleasure at reversing and displacing them. But when you say, “revealing an inner nature”, I am skeptical about it.

Land

scape

Charlotte Seegers

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

I think it would be too ambitious to attempt to decipher “our inner nature”, to distill some essential elements of truth. I don’t think we have the tools and abilities to do that. However, what an artist can do, one of his roles if he wishesso , is probably to overthrow our aesthetic and cultural representations, trying to get to this fundamental questions, which is: how is reality constructed, rather than transparently representing it; asking ourselves, how are we made?; how are we becoming who we are? Which gaze subjects us?

its stereotypes of “girls in high heals and fish nets diving into cars”,... I had many things in mind while doing it. Addressing to someone or something actually drives my creative process. Speaking about the reception of my film, It’s great that my film has been awarded at Goldsmiths University but knowing the subject, its sort of ironic as well. I find that interesting. Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts, Charlotte. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

I guess this vision of art is strongly influenced by my readings about the relationship between surrealism and ethnography. Art and anthropology here had this common role of disenchanting, demystifying our artificial and constructed collective imaginary: playing with perceptions and showing how exotic our constitution of reality is.

At the moment I am working on a collective film (Kaleido film collective) gathering visual anthropologists sharing similar views. I am also doing my best to make a living as a video-maker and as a researcher for art exhibitions giving story-lines and contents for exhibitions.

Before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?

What I would like to do now is to develop my hybrid filmmaking practice. I have much to learn in order to combine art and anthropology. I am now thinking about diverse topics with my film collective, which make sense to us in our everyday. I am also looking for a film project in Morocco. Also, I come from this anthropological background and I think it is very present in the way I conceive and produce my work. I want to work in collaboration with visuals artists and filmmakers to explore wider and innovative possibilities to communicate and conduct my research. I think there is a lot to do here and huge space for creativity.

Yes, it does influences my decision-making process. It is actually very difficult for me to start a creative process without having clues about the audience. I think about the audience while producing and conducting my work. For example, Immediate Response was made at university and I had a clear vision of what I wanted to subvert, the conventional categorizations I wanted to address: the academic world and the gap between theory and practice, rigid canons of documentary films, but also British selective university system, western obsession with self realization, the word “ambition”, this amalgam between sex and relationship, prostitution and

An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Barbara Scott, curator landescape@europe.com

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Carla Forte Lives and works in Dallas, USA

An artist's statement

y primary intent as a Filmmaker is to communicate my personal and social concerns, transforming them into a magical realm where anything becomes possible. Images, dialogues, silences, colors and movement join to create a visual equilibrium, speaking for themselves. Within my cinematographic work, movement is a key element for narrative and visual development; achieving a frame in motion from the image. Beyond an unorthodox narrative and aesthetic, my work focuses on experimenting new visual sensations through conflict: reflecting a world of emotions that can be both very near reality and on the side of the nonexistent, creating a parallel universe in which the palpable and the desired become possible at the same time. Throughout my career, I have discovered the need to incorporate into my images and scripts messages that promote social consciousness. As a humanist, I am passionate about the idea of being part of the change; it is for that reason that within my artistic

production, I find it valid and valuable to present social issues, along with fictional stories, that the spectator can identify with as a human being, but that also present a new realm of sensations that we can be a part of.

Carla Forte

Carla Forte is a performer, writer and director. She has performed in and directed Video- Art works like Interrupta, Imaginarium Life, Assassins for One Night, among others featured at important venues and festivals such as: 20th Cucalorus Film Festival 27th Festival (2014); Les Instants VidĂŠo Italy (2014); Pool 14 Internationale TanzFilmPlattform Berlin; 21st Quinzena de Danca de Almada, Portugal (2013); La Biennale di Venezia Marathon of the Unexpected (2012); NonVerbal Theatre Festival San Vicente, Croatia (2009).; Adrienne Arsht Center, Miami (2009); A Desert for Dancing, MĂŠxico (2007). Her cinematographic work includes the documentary The Holders Official Selection 32th Miami International Film Festival; Short films Imaginarium and Reset, selected for Cannes Film Festival's Court Metrage - Short Film Corner in 2012 and 2013, respectively; as well as the feature Urban Stories, Winner of Best Script, Best Cinematography and Best Feature at Bootleg Film Festival, Toronto (2012); and Honorable Mention at both Los Angeles Movies Awards (2011) and Lucerne International Film Festival, Switzerland (2012).

Marsh pastel 24â&#x20AC;?x18

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

LandEscape meets

Carla Forte An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryder, curator landescape@europe.com

My primary intent as a Filmmaker is to communicate my personal and social concerns, transforming them into a magical realm where anything becomes possible. Images, dialogues, silences, colors and movement join to create a visual equilibrium, speaking for themselves. Within my cinematographic work, movement is a key element for narrative and visual development; achieving a frame in motion from the image. Beyond an unorthodox narrative and aesthetic, my work focuses on experimenting new visual sensations through conflict: reflecting a world of emotions that can be both very near reality and on the side of the nonexistent, creating a parallel universe in which the palpable and the desired become possible at the same time. Throughout my career, I have discovered the need to incorporate into my images and scripts messages that promote social consciousness. As a humanist, I am passionate about the idea of being part of the change; it is for that reason that within my artistic production, I find it valid and valuable to present social issues, along with fictional stories, that the spectator can identify with as a human being, but that also present a new realm of sensations that we can be a part of.

Danca de Almada, Portugal (2013); La Biennale di Venezia Marathon of the Unexpected (2012); Non-Verbal Theatre Festival San Vicente, Croatia (2009).; Adrienne Arsht Center, Miami (2009); A Desert for Dancing, MĂŠxico (2007). Her cinematographic work includes the documentary The Holders Official Selection 32th Miami International Film Festival; Short films Imaginarium and Reset, selected for Cannes Film Festival's Court Metrage - Short Film Corner in 2012 and 2013, respectively; as well as the feature Urban Stories, Winner of Best Script, Best Cinematography and Best Feature at Bootleg Film Festival, Toronto (2012); and Honorable Mention at both Los Angeles Movies Awards (2011) and Lucerne International Film Festival, Switzerland (2012). Carla Forte's work explores the notions of the Time and Experience: by translating direct experience into a parallel dimension, her refined filmmaking gives birth to a magical realm where subtle but effective bonds with everyday reality. From the first time we have got to know her works we have been impressed with the stunning way she conceives cinema as an anthropological tool to explore the incommunicable. While Interrupta overtly plays with the unheimlich nature of gestural movements, it also discusses the notion that images tend to exist in continuum, residing somewhere in memory, whereas sound tends to evoke the present moment. It is with a real pleasure that I would like to introduce our readers to her stimulating works. Hello Carla, and welcome to LandEscape: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? Are

Christopher Reid photo by Kimberly Brandt brandtphotos.com

Land

scape

Carla Forte

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

there any particular experiences that has influenced you as an artist and on the way you currently produce your works?

First of all I would like to say that I'm thankful for the opportunity to be part of LandEscape and to share with every one of you my artistic work and my essence as a human being. I was born and raised in the city of Caracas, Venezuela. There I attended the Instituto Universitario de Danza (Dance Institute), and specialized in movement, composition, performance and improvisation. In 2005, Alexey Tarรกn (Guggenheim Fellow 2007) and I founded Bistoury Physical Theatre, a multidisciplinary company based in the city of Miami, for which I am currently Executive Producer and Film Director. When I began to work with Director Alexey Tarรกn in Caracas in 2004, I realized that during the creative process dance was only a point of departure for composition. Later I discovered that besides performing, I also had a tremendous interest for directing and expressing my feelings through art. Since I was very young, my passion for cinema was very strong, and my older brother Vicente Forte (a visual artist and writer) became one of my greatest influences by teaching me to love this art form from an experimental and independent perspective. During my childhood there was always some video camera documenting our family moments, birthdays, graduations, trips, etc, and either my brother or my mother would always be in charge of directing the filming. Despite the fact that these were very informal family documentations, it later became something serious for me and I am sure that it was had a great influence on my incursion into film directing later. Upon my arrival to the United States in 2007, I had the opportunity to formally develop my first cinematographic works, some in collaboration with Alexey Tarรกn, and some others co-directed by my brother Vicente, the rest of them written and directed by me, all of them bearing some important relationship to movement, even when

Carla Forte

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Carla Forte

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

this element may not be so evident in a few of the works. Filmmaking became a personal means of expression and I have not stopped since; I am still a performer, but when it comes to directing I prefer to stay behind the camera. Throughout the development of my projects, my own life experiences have also been largely influential, specially those involving my nuclear family: separation, lack of communication, memories. In Latin America, families tend to be very close and I remember mine as particularly intense in this regard: it didn't matter what we went through, good or bad, we would continue to be a dismembered but very close family, united through bonds that would never break. To see my family become diluted over the years due to exhaustion was a very crude experience and I remember that since a very young age I promised myself to reunite them once again. My work deals with â&#x20AC;&#x153;in-communicationâ&#x20AC;? (or lack of communication), about that invisible thread thread that binds us to a common life despite and beyond our differences. Echoes that harbor secrets that can only be heard in silence. Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?

Initially, in order to get the work going on any particular project, there must exist some kind of motivating concern or interest for something, someone, some theme to be developed. From that point ideas and stories are born, always connected to my own experiences. The need to create and to say something is an essential point of departure and it doesn't matter how difficult it might be to achieve it, I have to do it.

Land

scape

Carla Forte

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Before beginning to shoot, I first make the project conceptually possible in my mind; I do not limit myself creatively and anything that might seem impossible I just transform into something simpler. I prepare a script or a schematic outline of the scenes; not many takes are done because time is short, since these are low budget (or zero budget) productions. Shooting can take up to twelve days, in the case of a full feature, or just a few hours or a couple of days in the case of a short film. However, my last project, a documentary named The Holders, took 4 years of production, involving an intense and arduous process of research and investigative work undertaken by Alexey Tarรกn (as Producer and Director of Photography) and myself at the facilities of the Miami-Dade County Animal Services shelter, a place where dogs and cats are dropped off and abandoned daily in our city and eventually killed off when they have surpassed the maximum length of stay in the wait for a home. I make special reference to this work because despite the fact that it was a project for which initially there was no money at all, nor the best equipment for documenting, we did have an immense will and determination to make it happen and to tell the story. As a vegan and activist for animal rights I was resolved to make this film, which ultimately in 2015 was named Official Selection for the 32th Miami International Film Festival. Now let's focus on your artistic production: we would start from Interrupta, an extremely interesting work that our readers have already started to admire in the introductory pages of this article: and wewould suggest to our readers to visit your website directly at https://vimeo.com/61962211 in order to get a wider idea of it. In the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?

Interrupta talks about family. In general, families are held together by strong bonds, by common experience, daily life, the passage of time that makes us age together. The family

Carla Forte

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Carla Forte

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

thus exists while at the same time all of us are independent beings, unique individuals capable of supporting ourselves. Every family has its own distinctive seal, its marks; we grow up and take on our own paths, carrying a certain past and history. For this project, I decided to work with my mother, my father and my brother because it would serve as a reunion for us. Getting together for a few hours to experience each other individually and as a nuclear family was an integral part of the visual experiment. Dancing was the point of departure for the story, because I think that each individual has a unique and very particular way of moving, and because at the same time there are memories that recur in the body and make us dance or act in a certain way. For the development of each scene, each one of us had to choose an element or object to interact with or at least to be kept in the frame during the shooting of the scene. This element was to be something that really identified us as human beings, something that made part of our daily lives. This element or object acted as a means to show that even if we are alone we will resort to something, whether out of necessity or routine. Interrupta portrays each individual separately in this common home, and although none of the scenes are shared collectively by the family, the memories become one. Interrupta is based on a poem I wrote, and to each of the performers I gave a fragment of the poem to be read as part of the scenes. Every excerpt was written and assigned according to the particular individual. Nothing was done randomly. It is a common poem that explains who we are and where we are going. I remember a lot of laughter and mockery during the shooting process, typical for a Latino family full of humor. However, my older brother cried upon seeing the end-result, because behind this entire story there is something that reminds us that we are not eternal and that the space we once occupied will also be empty. We definitely love the way with which, by heightening the tension between reality and

Land

scape

Carla Forte

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

perception of it, Interrupta establishes a refined visual equilibrium between still images and movement, as well as between dialogue and silences, exploring the concept of emerging language and direct experience... so we would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

My stories are definitely a reflection of who I am and every element I employ has been influenced by some experience. I use the camera in movement in many of my works because dance is always present Our eyes are in constant movement; we look anywhere without much thought; we arrive at any unexpected situation. We are always moving, even when we sleep. Life occurs in a sequence shot that does not stop. I think silences are important moments that give any situation or routine a break, a rest. There is a lot of noise in our surroundings; we are affected daily by external factors that make us react to their stimuli, which constantly confirms and reminds us that we are not alone and that we are surrounded by situations that we cannot control by ourselves. The use of black and white is fundamental in many of works because a second after I have written this line I have already been past, while the use of color revives any experience because nothing dies in the attempt. I have never experimented with creating any work that is disconnected from my life or my experiences. However, I'm not closed to the possibility of directing scripts or proposals by other artists. Nevertheless, I am sure that in order to do this I would immerse myself in their experience, I would try to live it in some way and feel it as mine as I need in order to be able to tell the story. Another interesting work of yours that that we have selected is entitled Staring at the Ceiling: what has mostly impressed me of it is the way you alter individuals'experiences of space and time through fragmentation, which urges us to

Carla Forte

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Carla Forte

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

explore the boundaries between identity and the perception of the Self. As a result, you investigate about common gestures through a new perspective, creating -like in Sergej Parajanov's films- what you once defined a parallel universe in which the palpable and the desired become possible at the same time... Can you introduce our readers to this fundamental concept?

Staring at the Ceiling is a work based on a poem by my brother Vicente, which was later turned into lyrics by my friend and Miami-based music composer Omar Roque. It is a very individualistic story and I would dare say it's even egotistical. We have all stared at the ceiling. Thinking of something while our gaze is fixed makes it appear simple; however, the mind is capable of traveling to any other place or situation. This work is a tribute to the ability that we all have to transplant ourselves to that ideal place or memory. I still see my father often travel for hours while sitting on his chair. It seems as if he is simple quiet and introspective, but beyond that simple description I know that my father embarks on to the adventures of his own stories in his mind. Thoughts become fragments because we cannot live our mental experiences in the â&#x20AC;&#x153;realâ&#x20AC;? world. We skip from one place to another and we turn the mind into a fictional realm in which we can make any thought reality. Nonetheless, this realm does not exclude suffering, because regardless of where we are our memories and conflicts spring up naturally. Staring at the Ceiling is a voyage through physical stillness and mental desires. It explores the capacity to travel in our own thoughts and live in a parallel world that distances us from reality; it is an escape from routine and monotony of daily life to free ourselves from society and yet remain enslaved by our own desires. In Staring at the Ceiling you have developed a highly individualistic visual language, which gives birth to a deep interplay between directness and distance. A fundamental

Land

scape

Carla Forte

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

element of your shooting style is no doubt the recurrent use of refined, central composition. Why did you chose the anamorphic format?

The amorphous format was chosen with the intent of creating a sense of enclosure, of feeling trapped in our own thoughts; a notion that no matter how free, we are always bound by our own social and personal constraints. Each and every one of us holds a unique world of our own that is constantly trying to please its whims and desires. I think it's difficult to know other people because in a sense we never get to know ourselves fully. Many of the comments that I have heard from people after seeing this work have to do do with them feeling afraid when they are watching it, or that they experienced a feeling of anxiety. In a way, I do narrate about a very intimate world that holds a dark side of my desires and thoughts. There seems to be a sense of narrative in your works and I find that your filmmaking is rich of references: in particular, I can recognize a subtle Raul Ruiz's touch in your films. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work?

I am a constant flux of influences because every day, when I go out to the street, I find myself surrounded by strange people that always leave something within me: sounds, situations, a wholeness that helps me carry on with my day to day. I believe many of my influences derive from seeing my father cry, chasing after the dog who runs astray in the streets, the homeless person asking for money at the corner with the traffic light, the neighbor's folkloric music, my aunt's uproarious laughter, my mother singing, the lack of communication between people. All of these moments become one more scene in one of my stories. However, I must say that there are many artists I admire and that

certainly their works have created important marks in my life. Among them are Alexey Tarรกn, Lars von Trier, Bela Tarr, Jim Jarmusch, Jan Fabre, Reinaldo Arenas, Fernando Pessoa, Steven Soderbergh, Francis Ford Coppola, among others. You are the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Bistoury Physical Theater and Film: I think that interdisciplinary collaboration is today an ever growing force in Art and that that most exciting things happen when creative minds from different

Carla Forte

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project: could you tell us something about your experiences in this sense? By the way, the artist Peter Tabor once said that "collaboration is working together with another to create something as a synthesis of two practices, that alone one could not": what's your point about this? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between several artists?

I am co-founder of Bistoury Physical Theatre and Film and currently Executive Director and

Film Director of the company. I have worked as collaborator in the choreographic works of co-founder Alexey Tarรกn, integrating film as an important component for the development of his works. Every creative process thrusts us into a new world where not only dance and film join. Bistoury is a research and experimental space in which local artists collaborate. We have had the pleasure of working with visual artists, musics, dancers, actors, poets, singers, among others, making every process and experience truly magical.

Land

scape

Carla Forte

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

I find collaborative creation to be an extremely interesting process because it involves getting to know others and allowing others to get to know you in a very personal way, â&#x20AC;&#x153;viscerallyâ&#x20AC;? as my brother would say. I think that in order to achieve a good collaborative work there must be profound research and immersion, artists must believe in one another, egos must be put aside and the artists must plunge together into a shared world. I am forever grateful for the participation of collaborators in my work, because I consider

them an essential key for the process as well as the final outcome of the project. Over your career your works have been extensively exhibited in several occasions, both in America and Europe, and I think it's important to mention that you recently received a Honorable Mention at both Los Angeles Movies Awards and Lucerne International Film Festival... It goes without saying that feedbacks and especially awards are capable of supporting an artist: I was just wondering if an award -or just the expectation

Carla Forte

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

cease to be who we are to become an infinity of tastes and approaches and likely end up doing nothing, It's inevitable to think of the audience during the creative process because we too are audience for others, and later they will be the ones to issue their opinions, to dissect, to laugh or cry, to reject or embrace the work, those who decide whether to applaud or to get up from their seats and leave. That entire wave of emotions that I hope to arouse when I present my work is underlaid by fears, insecurities and expectations, but what holds me standing firm is knowing that my work is a true reflection of what I am. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Carla. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

I am currently working as collaborating film director and performer in Alexey Tarรกn's most recent project, named TRIBE, a work that tells, through physical theater, stories of homeless people who live in the streets of the city of Miami (https://vimeo.com/116922384). This project is extended through artistic residency in Barranquilla, Colombia, for the development of a video dance, thanks to the exchange program of the National Performance Network US, along with the Red de Artistas del Caribe (Caribbean Artists Network) in Colombia .

of positive feedback- could even influence the process of an artist... By the way, how much important is for you the feedback of your audience? I sometimes wonder if it could ever exist a genuine relationship between business and Art...

I believe that feedback is vital. However, the point of departure for each of my works has its origin in honesty, in a personal and sincere source of concern, of interest, in who I am. I believe that if we created thinking initially about our audience then surely we would

In 2015, I will be shooting my two next feature films, one titled Imagimundo and another one that remains untitled for now. The latter will be based on the family and will have both a documentary and a fictional component. I believe my work will find itself evolving through the new experiences yet to come; breathing with active consciousness lets me into a reality of greater suffering but one apt to be fully lived, enjoyed and then turned into a magical realm to be explored and interpreted by the audience.

Kosmas Giannoutakis Game, as social extension of brain activity, and Play, as associated complex behavior, are concepts fundamentally related with every creative process. Perception and creation of Art are creative complex processes with an intrinsic gaming nature, well hidden in the subconscious. The focus of my artistic research, is to raise the mind's gaming nature to the level of conscious awareness by creating artworks, which are performative art games. Using sound as the main communicating medium, my engaged performers interact with dynamic audiovisual systems by developing listening virtuosity and acting adaptability. My perceivers experience the direct artistic result and at the same time a subliminal, recursive, self-similar effect, which links the gaming structure of the artwork with the gaming structure of their perception. The Art making paradigm I propose, is an inevitable consequence of our interdisciplinary cybernetic era, which is opening our concepts and preparing the ground for more transcending steps.

Kosmas Giannoutakis Kosmas Giannoutakis

Breathe Forrest, Breathe! Installation(4mx4mx4m), 2013

Snapshot of a performance of the game piece "Zeitleben/Timelife"with four "shadows" in action. 021 4 Double bass performance by Juan Pablo Trad Hasbun, photograph by Nick Acorne.

Summer 2015

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

Kosmas Giannoutakis

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

LandEscape meets

An interview with

Kosmas Giannoutakis Kosmas Giannoutakis accomplishes the difficult task of providing an Ariadne's Thread that unveils the connection between the subliminal dimension that drives the creative process and the conscious level, at

which the viewers relate themselves with the outside world. The nature of his approach urges us to investigate the relationship between reality and the way we perceive it: one of the most convincing as-

Kosmas Giannoutakis

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal training and after having earned your Bachelor of Music from the University of Macedonia, you moved to Germany where you eventually degreed with a Master of Music from the University of Music, Freiburg. Moreover, you are currently studying Computer Music at the Institute for Electronic Music und Acustics. How have these experiences influenced your evolution as an artist? and in particular, do you think that being exposed to a wide, international scene may have informed the way you conceive and produce your works today?

Thank you very much ART Habens for the invitation to share my thoughts with you and your readers. I had indeed a formal training in different disciplines of the conventional music making (composition, theory, piano, percussion), which began from my childhood. In the last years, I have moved towards more experimental and radical approaches of music making (algorithmic composition, mechanical instruments, dynamic systems, games), which I am currently studying at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics in Graz Austria. The institutional training was very important for my development, because I learned in depth historical practices of music making. I would claim nevertheless, that I am more a selftaught artist, since my actual artistic language was developed through my personal interests and investigations. Being exposed to a wide, international scene allowed me to know and develop a critical stance to the parallel artistic approaches of my colleagues and raise my work standards. pects of Giannoutakis's practice is the way he establishes an area of intellectual interplay between memory and perception, condensing the permanent flow of the perception of the reality we inhabit in. We are very pleased to introduce our readers to his refined artistic production. Hello Kosmas and welcome to LandEscape. To start this interview, would you like to

Your approach is marked out with a deep symbiosis between several practices, that are combined to provide your works of a dynamic and autonomous life. I would suggest our readers to visit http://www.kosmasgiannoutakis.eu/ in order to get a wider idea of your multifaceted artistic production. While superimposing concepts and images, crossing the borders

Land

scape

Kosmas Giannoutakis

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

of different artistic fields, have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different viewpoints is the only way to achieve some results, to express specific concepts?

I like to drew my inspiration from philosophical questions and paradoxes, that challenge the human mind. Starting with very abstract ideas (time, space, change), I am conceptualizing my works by combining mentally different artistic fields which could possibly create interesting dynamic situations. Experimenting and improvising with concrete materials allows me to decide which combinations should I keep and develop. If I find unintended potential in a specific media combination, I don't hesitate to change completely the initial concept. Sound, Game and Performance have always central role in my concepts. I would start to focus on your artistic production beginning from Zeitleben/Timelife, an interesting project featured in the introductory pages of this article. What most impressed me in this project is the way you have create a point of convergence between a functional analysis of the context you examine and autonomous aesthetics. Do you conceive this in an instinctive way or do you rather structure your process in order to reach the right balance?

The processes I conceptualize, are highly structured, because I am focusing on complex systems which exhibit indeterministic behavior. In Zeitleben/Timelife, I explored for the first time the notion of continuity, which had aesthetic and technical consequences. Changes were not discrete and there were infinite states of the system. It was really a challenge to compose the music, which had to aesthetically work for every possible state. In the technical level, I had to use delay lines instead of static buffers. Dividing the process in five distinct rounds, made the implementation possible and the perception more transparent. I suppose my intuition have developed more sensitivity concerning live processes, during the last years I have been working with dynamic systems.

Kosmas Giannoutakis

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

A possible performance state of the piano in the game piece "unlock the piano" Photograph by Kosmas Giannoutakis.

Land

scape

Kosmas Giannoutakis

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Piano preparation with all keys detached in the beginning of the game piece "unlock the piano"

Kosmas Giannoutakis

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Rationality and instinct are harmonically tuned by working intimately together for the same cause. In particular, I like the way your performative approach conveys both an aseptic point of view on formalism and a suggestive gaze on today's reality. This combination reminds me of the idea behind Thomas Demand's works, when he states that "nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead". While the conception of Art could be considered an abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a sense of permanence, going beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of those concepts you explore. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion, personal experience is absolutely indispensable as part of the creative process? Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

Symbolic strategies can be very efficient, but they have to be really strong. In Zeitleben/Timelife the simple functional game of moving images resembles metaphorically how the mnemonic experience works. But this comes in a secondary conceptual level, the resonance of the medium is of primarily importance. It is really beautiful when an artwork invites for interpretation in different levels. The sense of permanence can be associated with these factors, namely the depth of interpretation levels and the intensity of mind resonance for each level. Creative processes are gaming acts, associated with past personal experiences and absolutely connected with direct experience. Artists are always interested in probing to see what is beneath the surface and one of the aim of your practice is to bring to a conscious level the variety of sources that are subliminally driven: your approach unveils a subtle but ubiquitous narrative providing us of an Ariadne's Thread that invites us to the discover the connection between these apparently separate dimensions, and that's incredibly

Land

scape

Kosmas Giannoutakis

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

beautiful. Stimulating the viewer’s psyche, you approach works on both a conscious level and a subconscious one: maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your view about this?

My position is that the Nature of every creative process is fundamentally related to the notions of Game and Play. When we perceive art, we experience a kind of inner-subjective game where our past experiences come into interplay by defining patterns of appreciation and understanding. When we create art, a more complicated process, we try things, experiment, improvise. We create temporary rules, play under them, come up with a result, perceive the result, decide if our mind resonated well enough and repeat the process, by keeping the same rules and trying to play better or change the rules. A fixed artwork, for example a sculpture, functions as a stimulant for such a perceptive game to occur. A dynamic artwork, for example a performance, follows inevitably the gaming pattern. It is not a coincidence that in most languages we use the word “play” when we are referring to music or theater activities. Art is the resonant game of the mind. Holding this position, I create artworks which consciously reflect their gaming nature. My game pieces and installations involve the perceivers in self-similar recursive processes, because of the similar structure between the artwork and perceptive process. Revealing our inner Nature, I invite us for a deeper exploration of ourselves. I have enjoyed the way you probe the evocative potential of the medium, involving a crucial role of modern technologies to provide the viewer of an extension of usual perceptual parameters that allows you to go beyond any dichotomy between Tradition and Contemporariness, as in the interesting Inextricable, establishing a stimulating osmosis between materials and techniques from a contingent era and an absolute approach to Art: do you recognize

Kosmas Giannoutakis

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Portrait still of the artist's tools. Photograph by Panagiotis B

Land

scape

Kosmas Giannoutakis

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

The artist sound-directing a rehearsal of the game piece "Zeitleben/Timelife". Photograph by Nick Acorne.

Kosmas Giannoutakis

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

any contrast between Tradition and Contemporariness?

Contemporariness arises from Tradition. Tradition have to be studied in depth, in order someone to be able to attempt successful steps in unexplored areas. The prerequisite for an artistic movement to be Tradition, is to be first Contemporariness. The value of Tradition lies in the provision of solid ground, where new art can be build. As Heidegger points out, the art that have lost contact with the world it was conceived and made, is nothing more than a relic. This is an enormous problem in music, where we arbitrary modify old musical artworks in order to assign to them unintended modern functionality. We use modern media to massively communicate them (for example recordings and amplification) but we don't realize how much we distort their originality and how much we cloy our modern world with mutated â&#x20AC;&#x153;masterpiecesâ&#x20AC;?, which take over the vital space of new creation. The cybernetic era we have entered, provide us with new media, which extend our brain functions. These meta-tools and universal machines should not be treated as limb-extended instruments but as brainextended organisms, which mirror our cognitive abilities. I think this is a fundamental difference between the old and new media, and it will take decades of digestion, until Art will completely adapt to the new world. What is the role of computer-based techniques in your composition process? Do you still use an acoustic approach and then manage the evolution of the ideas you develop through high end technology or does your approach blends these apparently different approaches?

The complex systems I create have two components, a dynamic system, which is realized with digital technology, and the human agency (performers). The dynamic system receive input information (sound, image) from the performers and results to very complex, indeterministic and chaotic behavior. The performers have to react on the variable output of the dynamic

Land

scape

Kosmas Giannoutakis

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

system according to a set of rules of possible actions I provide (instructions, score). The resulting complex system (dynamic system ↔ human agency) is a coupled feedback system, with both components feeding with information each other. I describe these situations as “games” and the resulting artworks as “game pieces”. My approach has a hybrid form for now, since there are lots of fixed events involved. My future goal is to make both components of the complex system 100% dynamic. Real-time digital signal processing algorithms, acoustic properties of the set up and human agency, with it's acoustic instrumental extensions, are all conceived together in initial phase. Over your career you have exhibited internationally, showcasing your work in several occasions. So before leaving this conversation I would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

An utopian vision I have, is the creation of artworks, which will know where and when they should take place in order to maximize their communicating effectiveness. This should require embedded complex cognitive functions which should collect and process in real time enormous amounts of environmental and human data. When this will be achieved, we will experience a transcending step in Arts, namely the conscious artwork which adapts successfully in multiple real life environments and situations. For now, I am working on adaptive systems, which enable my dynamic systems to adapt into the specific acoustical characteristics of the rooms they are taking place. Also, I try to design my interactive environments in a specific way, which enables their presentation as installation for open public participation and as performance for specialist performers. I believe that good artistic ideas have the potential to be presented and communicated in multiple forms, languages and media, and adapt successfully in multiple contexts. One of my future distant goals, is to create such meta-artworks, which will exhibit intelligent adaptability.

Kosmas Giannoutakis

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Kosmas Giannoutakis

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Kosmas. Finally, would you like to tell our readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

It was a pleasure, thank you for your challenging questions! In August, my piece Zeitleben/Timelife will be performed in the Soundislands Festival - 2nd International Symposium on Sound and Interactivity in Singapore, where it received the “Si15 best student submission award”. In September, I will be in the Netherlands, where I will present a concert version of my interactive puzzle game installation “Ascending and Descending”, which I developed during my composer-in-resident program by conlon foundation in the Muzieckhuis in Utrecht. I have recently performed myself my new game piece “Contraction point” for piano, performer and feedback system, in CUBE-IEM, in Graz and in Kubus-ZKM in Karlsruhe. These performances were totally improvisational and now I am working on making a score by fixing the events, which have to be fixed, and developing more sophisticated tracking algorithms, which will enable the feedback system to function completely autonomous, without the intervention of an extra operator. For my future game pieces, I want to explore complex systems which involve more than one performer. I want also to enhance the physical flexibility of my dynamic systems, by enabling the dynamic change of the positional and perspective characteristics of the input/output instruments (microphones, loudspeakers, cameras, projectors) into the game rule set. So, I have the tendency to seek for more variability and complexity which requires deeper understanding of mathematics, acoustics, computer science, media theory and philosophy. I am really privileged that my institutional environment, the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics, can provide me the space and materials for these interdisciplinary art experiments.

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Boris Eldagsen Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

An artist's statement

erlin-based German artist Boris Eldagsen has studiedphotography and visual arts at the Art Academy of Mainz (Vladimir Spacek & Klaus Vogelgesang), conceptual artand intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts Prague (MilošŠejn & Milan Knížák) and fine art the Sarojini NaiduSchool of Arts & Communication Hyderabad / India(Laxma Goud) – and philosophy at the Universities ofCologne and Mainz. In 2013 he participated in a RogerBallen Masterclass.Eldagsen grew up in the South-West of Germany andmoved to Berlin in the late nineties. He travelled most European countries, the US, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan. From 2003 – 2010 he lived betweenBerlin and Melbourne / Australia. His photomedia work has been shown internationally ininstitutions and festivals such as Fridericianum Kassel, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, CCP Melbourne, ACP Sydney,EMAF Osnabrück, Videonale Bonn, Edinburgh ArtFestival, Athens Video Art

Festival, Kuyre Istanbul, MediaForum Moscow, WRO Media Art Biennale Wroclaw,Biennale Le Havre and Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth.2013, he has been awarded the Prix Voies Off / Arles forthe strength of his photo work “how to disappear completely / THE POEMS”. Boris works as a multi-media consultant and a lecturer.He has lectured at Centre for Ideas – Victorian College of the Arts and Music / Melbourne, the Photography StudiesCollege Melbourne, the Akademie für Bildende KünsteMainz, Hochschule Furtwangen, the Sommerakademie ofFotografie Forum Frankfurt, Westlicht Wien, F/StopLeipzig, Centre for Contemporary Photography Melbourne, RMIT University Melbourne and MonashUniversity Melbourne.For his collaborative work BORIS+NATASCHA he isrepresented by Yasha Young Gallery, New York.

Boris Eldagsen

ICUL CTION C o n t e m p o r a r y

A r t

meets

R e v i e w

Boris Eldagsen An interview by Julian Thomas Ross, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator landescape@europe.com

Hello Boris, and welcome to LandEscape. To start this interview would you like to tell our readers something about your background? Besides your studies of Photography and Visual Arts at the Art Academy of Mainz you have studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, as well as in India...moreover, you recently participated in a Roger Ballen Masterclass. How have these experiences impacted on the way you currently produce your artworks? By the way, I sometimes wonder if a certain kind of formal training could even stifle a young artist's creativity... since you are also a lecturer I would ask your point about this...

In the nineties, I studied visual arts and philosophy for over six years. I was training my mind and collecting skills. After 2000 those various skills became an orchestra that I could play with. From 2010, I became conscious of the always underlying red thread and started to concentrate one my own personal subject, my own personal tune. Participating in a Roger Ballen Masterclass was a conscious choice, because his approach and thinking is close to mine. For me, he is the most inspiring living artist working with photography. His most valuable advice was to go back to that early days of forming and have a close look at how it all started. And then to develop aspects that have been forgotten on the way. Lecturing for over 10 years, I believe that the

main task of teaching is to take away fear. Fear of not knowing enough, fear of having insufficant skills, fear of making yourself ridiculous, fear of fear. Once you are able to create a fearless space where students can experiment and learn freely, everything else will fall into place. Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?

The process is a balance between analytical preparation and an intuitive realisation. Technology always serves the purpose of the specific work. You would be surprised to see how little technology I really need. Since 2008 I regularly give workshops called 'No Budget Staged Photography'. I would also like to state that I have two complimentary modes of working: The POEMS use analytical preparation and intuitive process on equal terms. THE SCHOOLS need sharp analytical glasses, especially for the script, and its rewriting during shooting and editing. Now let's focus on your art production: I would start from How to disappear completely, that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: an I would suggest to our readers to visit your website directly at http://www.eldagsen.com/ in order to get a wider idea of this interesting project... In the meanwhile, would you like

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Boris Eldagsen

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

to tell us something about the genesis of this work? What was your initial inspiration?

With the POEMS, I want to create images that speak directly to the subconscious, finding new versions of timeless psychological archetypes. Half of my images are produced in a 'street photography' style, without any manipulation, half are 'staged photography' in which I create a set in front of the camera which is then creatively 'documented'. Both create an alchemical mix of photography, painting, theatre and film â&#x20AC;&#x201C; no matter how they were produced. Working like this depends heavily on an intuitive process. Some props and ideas can be prepared, but THE POEMS' working method is highly intuitive. Whereas the videos of THE SCHOOLS are conceptual works in which the analytical mind plays an important role. Since 2012, I started creating more and more POEMS using a tumblr workaround. Browsing the endless stream of images, I map my own subconscious by liking images I respond to the most intuitively . Once a month I revisit those likes with an analytical eye, examining the reasons for my choice. Step by step I become aware of the archetypes that influence me. When I work with models, I give them a preselection of those images and ask them to pick their favourites. This way, I find out to what ideas they subconsciously respond to. Then I take these ideas further. Because I have my model personally involved, he or she will be much more daring than without this method. Multidisciplinarity is a crucial aspect of your art practice: you produce photographic works as well as videos and transdisciplinary projects... while crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you ever happened to realize that a synergy between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?

Land

scape

Boris Eldagsen

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Yes, this was what was leading me from photography to video and from video to installation. The work will tell you when it is finished and what form it needs to be complete. For me, different forms are like different spices, and I like to mix them and add some flavours to the main mediums I work with. Your works are strictly connected to the chance of establishing a deep involvement with your audience, both on an intellectual aspect and -I daresay- on a physical state... so I would like to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

It could, but it is not my way. Personally I consider works without direct experience as shallow. Direct experience creates a thunderstorm of emotions and images in your subconscious mind, and this is what I draw from during the process of creation. I follow my intuition which is nurtured by direct experience. As you have remarked once, your works utilise the external reality, to paint the inner reality, that of the unconscious, archetypical and unspoken... I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a way- to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?

It is the role of the artist to become more and more conscious about the universe inside him, and how it dances with the world around him. So firstly, he needs to decipher the nature in himself, to travel fearlessly into his inner realm. Then he needs to come back and translate this dance of realities into an artistic form. When somebody describes me as photographer I always correct the term into 'artist working with photography'. One can be a succesful photographer without having any idea of yourself. Sticking to the surface, creating glossy images

Boris Eldagsen

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Boris Eldagsen

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

and believing in a simple idea of reality can suffice. But for an artists, the journey inwards is inevitable. And I couldn't do without mentioning SUPERHIGH, an extremely interesting collaborative project that you have created with Sabine Taeubner... I personally find absolutely fascinating the collaborations that artists can established together as you did, especially because this often reveals a symbiosis between apparently different approaches to art... and I can't help without mention Peter Tabor who once said that "collaboration is working together with another to create something as a synthesis of two practices, that alone one could not": what's your point about this? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between several artists?

I totally agree. Collaborating with others brings out the humorous, absurde side in me. In addition to that, I always meet common ground with my collaborator. Working with Sabine was an excercise in what she calls 'czech humour' â&#x20AC;&#x201C; absurde black humour that is even more bent than british humour. It was easy because we are knowing each other for 24 years and we always loved sharing the absurde side of life. Since 2004 I am working with Australian artist Natascha Stellmach. We share an interest for the play with words and the beyond, this led to our ongoing work 'ORACLE'. Last year I started working with Spanish artist Rosana Antoli. We needed half a year to work out our strenghts and how to combine them to a consistent work. Her passion for sex, death and animals plays into my fascination for Jungian archetypes, so we started creating seductive and disgusting monsters called THE MOTH, THE SPIDER etc. Your works have been exhibited in many cultural events and exhibitions, both in Germany and abroad, as in Australia, Canada, France and even in India... It goes without saying that feedbacks and especially awards are capable of supporting an artist: I was just wondering if an award

Land

scape

Boris Eldagsen

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

-or better, the expectation of a positive feedback- could even influence the process of an artist... By the way, how much important is for you the feedback of your audience? Do you ever think to whom will enjoy your Art when you conceive your pieces? I sometimes wonder if it could ever exist a genuine relationship between business and Art...

These are many questions in one. Let me see if I can answer them one by one. How important is feedback? During your studies and forming, feedback is essential. Feedback from peers and experienced teachers. Feedback from a neutral audience. But once you have found your own path, you better follow this very own calling. Can awards and expectations influence the process of an artist? Generally spoken: yes. I think the earlier you receive them in your career the more they will. During the last eight years I got beyond any external influences. I do what I need to do, uninfluenced by any feedback or external reward. This is why my photomedia work has its own signature. There were times when I had zero feedback from the audience and I kept on working. Since two years, the appreciation exploded. It is wonderful to see that my work actually has an impact on others, but frankly I would have continued without that. For sure an award opens doors, gets attention and broadens reach. I see this as a reward for all the blood, sweat and tears that were invested into the work. Do I have a target group? No. An artist needs to create his work out of himself. If he works for an audience, he will crumble when he gets no feedback. And if he follows trends to receive appreciation, his work will have a short life span and a shallow ground. Is there a genuine relationship between business and art? Sure, it is called art market. Ideally art comes first, with no purpose than opening a window on life. Then the business is put on top. In reality this has of course always been mixed up to create a hell of a mess.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts with us, Boris. My last question deals with your future plans: what's next for you? Anything coming up for you professionally that you would like

Boris Eldagsen

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

readers to be aware of?

Sabine and I turned SUPERHIGH into a onenight event for contemporary art museums, starting with Van Abbemuseum in the

Netherlands. Check out www.superhigh.org/ontour to be informed of the following events.

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

E dan Gorlicki Living and working between Groningen, the Netherlands and Heidelberg, Germany

An artist's statement

he philosophy and beliefs surrounding Edanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s artistic approach are based on searching the self within its surroundings. Inspired yet confronted by the world around him, Edan finds artistic comfort within the search for belonging and connecting. What better way to explore life then through movement and researching the body within the space around it? Edanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work always explores psychological and emotional realms. He believes that through personal experience he can use his work as a mirror for both his audience and himself. In the past Edan has made stage works on numerous subjects such as hierarchy, sexuality, fantasy, stress, addictions, belonging and perceptions amongst others.

Every work of Edan has been a personal and touching transparency of what we all as humans go through on a daily basis. Through his work he has dared to approach these difficult issues and expose them respectfully yet courageously to his audience.

Edan Gorlicki Born in Haifa, Israel, Edan Gorlicki is a choreographer, teacher and movement research artist based between Heidelberg, Germany and Groningen, the Netherlands. As a dancer he has worked in Israel with the Batsheva Ensemble Dance Company and Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak Dance Theater. In the Netherlands he has danced for NND/Galilidance and Club Guy and Roni. Edan has performed the works of may choreographers such as: Ohad Naharin, Inbal Pinto, Sharon Eyal, Itzik Galili, Paul Selwyn Norton, Emmanuel Gat, Guy Weizman & Roni Haver and many more.

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

Maya Gelfman

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

LandEscape meets

Edan Gorlicki An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Barbara Scott, curator landescape@europe.com

Edan Gorlicki accomplishes a refined investigation about the liminal area in which the Self establishes an ephemeral relationship with the outside reality: his incessant search of an organic symbiosys between several viewpoints offers to the viewer a multilayered experience, creating an area of deep interplay that allows us to enter psychological and emotional realms urging to force things to relate andexploring suspended worlds filling them with our personal experiences. One of the most convincing aspect og Gorlecki's work is the way he lead us to evolve from a passive audience to conscious participant, inviting us to rethink about the way we relate both to the outside world and to ourselves. I'm particularly pleased to introduce our readers to his multifaceted artistic production. Hello Edan, and welcome to LandEscape: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid training and after your dance studies in California, you moved to Israel where you degreed in Performing Arts both at the Wizo School and at the Reut School, in Haifa. How did these experiences influence you as an artist and and how do they impact on the way you currently conceive and produce your works?

Hi! Thank you for having me! Yes I started dancing at a very young age and have been fortunate to have studied at very good schools

in Israel. My teachers there were a great contribution to my development as a choreographer and I am very grateful for their mentorship. At school I was the only boy in the dance department. Of course this was difficult on many levels but it was also a great benefit as I was able to receive allot of attention from my teachers. They invested allot more energy in me then they did to the rest of my class. I am not sure that my school or my teachers have a direct influence on the way I conceive and produce my works today but I imagine that being an Israeli has something to do with that. I think we all are very influenced by our cultural upbringing. Especially growing up in such a complex survival driven country like Israel. I think that that survival instinct is imbedded in my attitude towards my work and lifestyle in general. Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?

Well first of all I must point out that every creation process has a different identity, process and outcome. In most cases I have an indication of what the next work will be like but then discover as I go that actually the work is something else completely. I guess I could say that the creation process is for me more of a listening process and following where the work is taking me rather then directing the work. It is more of a relationship between my goals for the work and the work

Land

scape

Edan Gorlicki

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

itself. The choreographer in me then becomes a mediator. I normally start with a clear direction that interests me, weather its a feeling, a visual image, a scenario or atmosphere, a personal experience or even just an interest to work with a certain dancer or collaborator. It is never the same. Inspiration comes from everywhere. In the freelance dance scene, unfortunately the development of a work mostly doesn’t start in the studio or experimenting with materials, those things come later. I never work alone. In dance we are always collaborating with many people. Because of this, the amount of organization, productional preparations and grant confirmations always needs to be done first. In the beginning I really had allot of problems with this because I was impatient and just wanted to get into the studio. Now I have more appreciation for this process because it shapes the way the work will be made and forces the first conceptual steps and ideas to form. I think I enjoy more the creations that are driven from a personal psychological place where the process for me might be more therapeutical. I think I just care more about those pieces. Funny enough though, with a critical eye, I think those pieces don’t end up my best work. Maybe they are too emotionally charged, Im not sure, but I can tell that those works are not the most communicative to the public in the end. Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from Body Language, an extremely interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest our readers to visit directly at http://edangorlicki.com in order to get a wider idea of your multifaceted artistic production. In the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?

‘Body Language’ is actually one of the works that grew more organically through time.

Production: The Herd

During the creation process of another piece of mine ‘A little too close’ I developed together with my dancers an improvisational movement vocabulary that was quite unique to me. After we finished that creation process I became quite fascinated with the idea of diving deeper into this unique physicality to explore what exists further in this quality. I went into the studio with one of my dancers who deeply

Edan Gorlicki

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

inspires me: ’Mayke van Kruchten’. While watching her move this way it seemed to me as though her body was deciding for her what she was doing. This triggered an interest for us to see if it is possible to have our body choreograph what we do. We developed a step by step process that attempted to eliminate (as much as possible) mental creativity, judgment and decision making

while improvising. This resulted in a fascinating journey where Mayke was discovering where her body is taking her, something that was equally exciting to watch. This is where the idea came to present this form of movement and live experimentation to the public as a performance installation rather then a theatrical work. I called it ‘Body Language’ and we started to perform it in

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Production: The Herd

Edan Gorlicki

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

diverse locations. During the performances we started to notice that Mayke’s body was behaving and producing interestingly different qualities and physicality’s based on the space and environment that she was in. Now for me ‘Body Language’ is an installation that exposes the authenticity of a certain environment created by the space, energy and people in it through the physicality of the dancers body. The hallmark of your practice is a search of the Self within its surroundings: when explorating the relationship our relationship with the ousde world, you seem to deconstruct and assembly memories in order to suggest a process of investigation about the liminal area in which the Self and the Outside share an ephemeral coexistence: maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?

Yes I think that is very interesting way of putting it and touches the essence of the identity of an artist as well. I do think that the role of the artist is to mirror society in some way and create a form that could offer the platform for discourse and interpretation, especially relating to our inner nature as people and our nature as a society. I think that I frame my work around exploring the self within its surroundings because it is a natural thing for me to do. I feel it is the basic need we have as social animals for belonging and connection, whether its to one another, one with nature, one with his/her beliefs and spirituality and so on… I have appreciated the way Body Language takes an intense participatory line on the conception of art. In particular, your investigation about psychological and emotional realms has reminded me of the idea behind Thomas Demand, who stated once that "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements

Land

scape

Edan Gorlicki

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

within the medium instead". While conceiving Art could be considered a purely abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the concepts you capture. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

I don’t know much about this to state a clear hypothesis. The only think I can do is speak from my own personal experience. In that case for me many of the subjects in my works are driven from an emotional place of personal experience. However, it is my inspiration more then it is my practice. I don’t think its either this way or that way. I think its possible to create something that has no personal experiential influence and it can be great. I think that its possible to do both. In fact I would encourage to give that a try and explore the difference. I definitely think that personal experience is intrinsically implemented into what ever we do - its what we know. But shouldn’t a creation process be more about what we don’t know? You seem to be in an incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between several viewpoint out of temporal synchronization, that offer to the viewer a subtle but effective sense of narrative: moreover, the reference to the universal gestures that recurs in your works seems to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. In this sense, I daresay that the semantic juxtaposition between sign and matter that marks out your art, allows you to go beyond any track of contingency... What's your point about this? And in particular, how much do you explicitly think of a narrative for your works?

Like I said, every work is different and therefore needs diverse strategies and

Edan Gorlicki

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Production: The Herd

Production: Spinsels Photographer: Koen Jantzen

Edan Gorlicki

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

methods to be able to communicate what you want to say. Clarity is very important to me. It offers the viewer freedom to experience and feel more then to have to think, analyze or solve some sort of puzzle or mystery of ‘what is the artist trying to tell me’. In some cases the tool of narrativity can be very useful for clarity. I try my best to layer my works in a way that offers the viewer both the clarity of what this work is discussing but also the abstraction to interpret your own take on it. In my work ‘A little too close’ I consciously chose to work with a very well known pop-song. I am aware that this creates a very specific association to most of my audiences, immediately narrating a direct story. However, I then repeat this song in the piece using 7-8 different cover versions that then distorts this association, suggesting that there are many ways of seeing something that was a moment ago perfectly clear and simple. Simultaneously very aesthetically presenting abstract movement that offers plenty of room for interpretation. Another intersting work of yours that has particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words is entitled Hunger, in which you accomplish a deep investigation about the psychological and social affects of addictions: when I first happened to get to know with this experimental piece I tried to relate all the visual information to a single meaning. But I soon realized that I had to fit into the visual unity suggested by the work, forgetting my need for a univocal understanding of its symbolic content: in your work, rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize the desire to enabling us to establish direct relations... Would you say that it's more of an intuitive or a systematic process?

I guess its a little bit of both. In general I am quite systematic in my head with what I want but the moment intuition comes to play I immediately let go of my systematic thinking and let the intuition take over. I appreciate what you say about HUNGER, I really wanted

in this piece to show the complexities of the addictive patterns and cycles. The triangular psychological relationship between the addict, co-addict and the addiction itself was at the heart of this work. This systematic cycle is very clear when you lay out the roles of each participant, however, the cycle itself becomes an entity of its own when you begin to look at the bigger picture and consider all three participants as one existing issue. As Marina Abramovich once stated, "to be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre", to reject the idea of a fictional representation of the reality you are questioning in your works. But when it comes to investigate about the semiotic of power and control as you did in A little too close it is almost impossible to split form from substance: the thin line that separates positive leadership with intimidating hierarchal control and dictatorship is almost embedded in a male-constructed culture, that conveys apparently innocuous symbols to in order to convince people to take it as true ... what's your point about this? In particular, the capability of discerning the essential feature of a concept to translate it into an accessible visual is a key point of your practice: how much do you explicitly think of such communicative aspect for your work?

Quite allot. I make work for public of all kinds of people. Although (unfortunately) most of my audiences are cultural intellectual types of people and I very much care for their experiences while watching my works. I am still very interested in capturing the hearts of the (lets call them) un(dance)educated public who for whatever reason find themselves in the theater watching this. A little too close talks about such a simple subject that anyone can relate to which is the power of and in a relationship. It was important for me to make this work very easy to watch. That is actually another layer in the piece as well. Relationships are tricky yet from the outside they always seem simple. Other couples always look like they have it all figured out -

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Production: The Herd

Edan Gorlicki

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

but do they really? The visual aesthetics in this work offer that kind of starting point. It seems so beautiful, until you get used to the attractive image and then you see whats really happening inside. Everybody understands this, and I love that. By the way, although I'm aware that this might sound a bit naĂŻf, I have to admit that I'm sort of convinced that Art -especially nowadays- could play an effective role in sociopolitical issues: not only just by offering to people a generic platform for expression... I would go as far as to state that Art could even steer people's behaviour... what's your point about this? Does it sound a bit exaggerated?

Absolutely! I not only believe this is true, we even have the evidence to prove it. In 2007 I had the privilege to co-found Random Collision together with my friend Kirsten Krans. Random Collision is a company that develops work in a very unique way involving the general public in the creation process. Part of our programs were collaborations with other fields, especially scientific fields of research. Recently, Kirsten developed a trilogy titled Experiment A, B and B+. This project was a scientific experiment about group formations and was collaboratively developed by social psychologists and choreographers. These experiments manage to prove that the visual performance that the public is watching directly affects the behavior of the public after the performance and the way they interact with one another. This is a fascinating project and I recommend looking it up at www.randomcollision.net Over these years your works have been performed in several occasions around the world, including your recent participation including a recent participation at OpenFLR in Florence, Italy. Moreover, I think it's important to highlight that you are the creator of LAMA movement research, that allows you to get in touch with a worldwide scenario, teaching both to dancers and non-dancers. So, before taking leave from this interesting conversation I

Land

scape

Edan Gorlicki

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?

I might be making allot of my work for my own satisfaction but I first and foremost create things that I feel I want and need to share with others. Those others are my audiences. We need to be a bit more selective on what we present to the general public. If we (artists) want to make a difference on any level in whatever way, we have to think of who is watching what we are making first and then see what it is we can show them and think how can we surprise, touch, educate, transform, develop and create more thoughts, questions and discourse amongst the public. I personally do care about what they see and experience. Not necessarily what they think about it as in like or not like. But I try to remind myself that the reaction or reception I get from the public after a performance can be a great guide for me towards understanding more the way they see things. This can improve my next pieces. For me, the public reception is my critic. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Edan. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects. How do you see your work evolving?

Well, as a freelance choreographer I am forced to exist in my past, present and future simultaneously. I am still reflecting my last project, am working on several current projects and busy with organizing and developing future projects as well. I am currently working on a new full evening production called ‘The Players’. This piece is the final part of my three-year study on power and control. Inspired by the theme of Psychopathy, The Players raises questions about social status, manipulation, peoples’ intentions, what is reality, hierarchy, deceit, and how far are we willing to go to get what

Edan Gorlicki

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Production: A little too close Photographer: Christian Glaus

Pako Quijada ICUL CTION

Dalia Smayze

Lives and works in Dallas, USA

An artist's statement

My body of work intends to capture moments of intimacy that evoke our own individual memory. I am interested in human emotions and how these shape us.

Individualism is a big topic in my work and, with this in mind, I am looking for a discourse between our environment and how this affects us as singular beings. On this matter, my photographs and video pieces are deeply connected to my experiences in the time they are created. They are an embellished reflection of what is on my mind, what I see on my everyday life and, most importantly, what I feel.

Pako Quijada

Land

scape

meets

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Pako Quijada An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator landescape@europe.com

Berlin based multidisciplinary artist Pako Quijada's work accomplishes the difficult task of capturing moments of intimacy that evoke our own individual memory. His video Intermission Prologue I that we'll be discussing in the following pages, inquires into the sphere of memory as a confused and imperfect quality in the human psyche, urging the viewers to rethink such ubiquitous still elusive notion. One of the most convincing aspects of Quijada's practice is the way it investigates about human emotions and how these shape us: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to his multifaceted artistic production. Hello Pako and welcome to LandEscape. To start this interview, we would you like to pose you a couple of questions about your background: you have a solid formal training and you studied both Photography and Filmmaking in San Sebastiàn, Spain. How have these experiences influenced the way you currently conceive and produce your works? And in particular, does the relationship between your Latin roots and living in multicultural places like Berlin inform the way you relate yourself to art making and to the aesthetic problem in general?

I was trained as a filmmaker and I learned concepts that have more to do with film than with video art and this is the very first thing that can be noticed in my video works. My interest for art was always there but I didn’t necessarily see myself as a video artist or experimental filmmaker until a few years after I finished my studies. In the case of photography it is different and I would say that it was the starting point for me and where all my passion for

creating images, both still and in movement, derived from. The way I conceive my works nowadays is very intuitive and based on some principles that feel very natural to me because I have interiorised them. When I come up with an idea for a new work I let it sink and let the concept “ask” me what type of medium I should go for. There are some works that will work better as a series of photographs and some others will be better as video pieces. Also the aesthetics are very important to me. Sometimes a new body of work will be born from an image that I have seen or that is just in my head. I aim to create beauty with my work but also make this beauty be a multilayered vessel for its true purpose, which is to get to people’s minds and emotions. The way that living away from Spain has influenced my work is how now I can visualise what I have known since I was a child in a form of idealised melancholia. When I was still living there it was hard to see my surroundings as something that could be made into art but after a few years detached from those spaces, I can clearly focus on certain experiences or places from my past and include them in my work. You are a versatile artist and your approach encapsulates several techniques, revealing an incessant search of an organic symbiosis between a variety of viewpoints. Your inquiry into the intimate dimension conveys together a coherent sense of unity, that rejects any conventional classification. When walking our readers through your process, we would like to ask you if you have you ever happened to realize that such multidisciplinary approach is the only way to express and convey the idea you explore. Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://www.pakoquijada.com in order to get a synoptic view of your

Land

scape

Pako Quijada

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

multifaceted artistic production: in the meanwhile, would you like to walk us through your process and set up? What are your main sources of inspiration?

My process is often chaotic and I need a relatively long time to finish my works. The reason for that is because I never want to constrain the work from evolving into its own and for that you need time to let it rest. Also because I am a multi-tasker and I am always working on a few different projects at the same time. With my video works, the time between shooting and editing is often a few months because I need to detach myself from the project to be able to continue with it. During this time, I reflect on it, on the original idea, on the experiences created during shooting and how that may have changed the starting point. Then I go into editing and find myself discovering details that I may not have planned but that happen to be there because it’s been a long, thought-out process. With my photographic works it’s a bit different and I don’t take long breaks between shooting and retouching although it might be projects that require taking photographs during a long period of time. For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected Intermission Prologue I, an extremely interesting work that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. The inquiry into the notion of memory you accomplished in this video is a successful attempt to create a work that stand as record of existence: when capturing nonsharpness with an universal kind of language, to establish direct relations with the spectatorship: What is the role of memory in your process?

Memory is one of the main topics in my work. Even when I am treating other topics, there is an element of memory in it. Given that I take a long time before considering a work finished, this allows me to create memories on the project itself while creating it so it all becomes a bit meta.

Pako Quijada

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Pako Quijada

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

In the case of Intermission Prologue I, it was born from a moment with my sister while being on holiday visiting our mother. The way I took the camera and asked her to walk was something completely unplanned and that came naturally to me. After revisiting the footage, I realised I had a fond memory of that moment but, at the same time, that video was the only visual memory I had of it. I started reflecting on how memory works in the human brain and the way it is just a creation of our imagination even if we remember it as some sort of irrefutable truth. It took me a very long time to convey this idea with that particular video but I realised that the longer I waited, the more shape it took as a tangible thing and the less it became an idealised memory that lived in my mind. I then decided to create a project called Intermission as a 4-video installation with my mum and my three sisters on each screen. Each of them would be walking and their faces would not be seen clearly. Also, each video would be based on my own relationship with the person on it and the moment when it was created. I also wanted to create some sort of emotional landscape so the location in which the person walks away from the camera is also a give away on their relationship with me. Intermission Prologue I was the starting point for that project that is still in progress. In the meantime, I have also done a video piece called Study for Intermission, which continues the exploration of the concepts of memory, experience and interpersonal relationships. In this case, I reflected on the representation of memory in audiovisual works. As you have remarked once, this video reflects on memory as a confused and imperfect quality in the human psyche: your works are strictly connected to highlight the bound between experiences in the time they are created, unveiling the relationship between memory and experience. So we would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indispensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

Land

scape

Pako Quijada

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

All creative processes require personal experience. Each person has been through different things and they live their lives according to what they know so creation works in a similar way. Of course you can decide to hide this experience in your work and try to make it more universal but I believe you can’t create without putting some part of yourself in the work. As the late Franz West did in his installations, your work shows unconventional aesthetics in the way it deconstructs perceptual images in order to assemble them in a collective imagery, urging the viewers to a process of selfreflection. Artists are always interested in probing to see what is beneath the surface: maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your view about this?

Art can have many different purposes and revealing unexpected sides of our nature can be one of them. I also believe that one of the responsibilities as artists is that the work has some sort of validity to the time when they are created. This doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t have topics that deal with the past, but its perspective will always be from a present point of view. In my case, working mainly with topics like memory, it can be a tricky thing but ultimately what makes a work from an artist perspective is the latest version that exists of it before letting it go into the world and see it transform as different interpretations come along. By definition video is rhythm and movement, gesture and continuity: in XV you created a time-based work that conveying a moment of time, from past to present, induces us to rethink the concept of time in such a static way: this seems to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. How do you conceive the rhythm of your works?

Rhythm is extremely important to me, mainly due to my formation as a cinema director, as I mentioned earlier. The reflection on what separates narrative cinema, experimental film

Pako Quijada

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

Pako Quijada

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

and video art is also there in my work, particularly with XV. I took what was a fun and interesting topic for me, which is the representation of the devil and showing a sort of possession through a game of lights and cacophonic sounds, and with that I was able to experiment a bit with the framing and thinking how far can you go with creating a claustrophobic feeling within a frame. With that work, I knew that it had to be a very fast rhythm, kind of like pulse raising until it reaches a climax. It's no doubt that interdisciplinary collaborations as the ones you have established with dance artist, performer and choreographer Martí Güell for Decidu (Deciduous) are today ever growing forces in Contemporary Art and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project... could you tell us something about this effective synergy? By the way, Peter Tabor once stated that "collaboration is working together with another to create something as a synthesis of two practices, that alone one could not": what's your point about this? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between two artists?

Working with Marti Güell was such a pleasure. We had been friends for a while and he appeared in a photo series I did a couple of years before called Dancers. He approached me with the idea for this film and asked me to help him put the theory of his work and the choreography into film. We had a really fun time working together and were really happy with the result, considering we had some time and budget restrictions. I have also been a big fan of dance for a very long time so having the opportunity to do a dance film with such talented people only made me want to continue doing more dance films, which I’m sure I will do in the future. I do believe that collaboration can create magical works. It is very important to keep some works to do by yourself, but I agree that when you collaborate with someone, the final work ends up being unique because two or more perspectives have put their love, experience and effort into

Land

scape

Pako Quijada

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

making it a reality. I think especially with film and video, collaboration is very easy because there are so many roles that can be covered by different people and they are all pivotal to the finished work. Your works have been showcased in several occasions, both in Europe and in Central America, including your participation at the 10th edition of the International Streaming Festival. One of the hallmarks of your practice is the capability to create a direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

I love hearing people interpret my work in their own way. I understand my works are a bit opaque sometimes so I’m fully open to people’s own views even if they differ from my idea. I wouldn’t say the audience reception is crucial in my decision-making because my creative freedom is my most valuable asset. What I can take from audience interaction is the motivation to continue doing works that make people think and, most importantly, feel something that they wouldn’t necessarily feel in their daily routines. In terms of language, it is different because it’s not the same trying to explain your work to a gallery owner than to an spectator. The vocabulary is different and I always try to keep it down to earth because I want my works to be accessible to everyone, not just a few. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Pako. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

I have a couple of projects in process at the moment. One of them is a photo series I did last year and I want to put into a book. It explores topics such as loneliness, mental health and melancholia. There are some things I still haven’t figured out about the way it will be

presented but I’m hoping to have it finished by the end of the year. On the other hand, I am working on an experimental film called ephemérea that talks about the world of nightmares and creating

Pako Quijada

Land

scape

CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW

new unknown places where to go mentally when reality isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t enough. It will be a collaboration with a Berlin musician and sound designer so itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a very exciting project for me.

Lastly, I definitely see my work evolving into many different types of disciplines and ways of working. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator landescape@europe.com