Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.06.2011, Side 29

29
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 7 — 2011
Taste the freshness
of a farmer’s market
Housed in one of the city’s oldest buildings, Fish
Market uses ingredients sourced directly from
the nation’s best farms, lakes, and sea to create
unforgettable Icelandic dishes with a modern twist.
AÐALSTRÆTI 12 | +354 578 8877 | FISHMARKET.IS
LUNCH WEEKDAYS 11:30 - 14:00 | EVENINGS 18:00 - 23:30
2008
GO LIST
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KIRKJUSTRÆTI
HAFNARSTRÆTI
AUSTURSTRÆTI
OPEN FOR LUNCH WEEKDAYS 11:30 - 14:00
OPEN EVERY EVENING 18:00 - 23:30
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
LIBIA CASTRO,
óLAFUR óLAFSSON,
AND
ELLEN BLUMENSTEIN
in-between of art and life. We examine
questions about our context, our time,
our background, and our possible fu-
ture. These questions are a continual
redefinition. We work intuitively. The
first research phase can be focused or
quite expansive—it depends. We might
get lost somewhere only to come back
with something substantial that caught
us.
EB: I’d like to get hold of a certain ex-
pansiveness I sense in your work, to
trace the source of your strategy of de-
liberately juxtaposing topics, influences,
and materialities, and of re-referencing
previous works of yours. I am especially
thinking of your early environments,
like your project at Platform Garanti in
Istanbul, ‘20 minus Minutes’ (2003).
One project, ‘Your country doesn’t exist’
(2003, ongoing), for example, came out
of this exhibition—and you have decided
to develop a new form of it for Venice
now.
LC: Our early environments were sen-
sual, informal, sculptural, and concep-
tual models for exhibitions as situations.
We questioned the context, expected
forms, and frame of the given space, but
also entered into an open dialogue with
its immediate surroundings. To reflect
on the “now”, we wanted to create a lay-
ered situation and sensitise it. The idea
was to set up an open fieldwork to zoom
in on some particular aspects and work
on them in depth. The environments
were the starting point for an approach
we then pursued in subsequent works.
óó: Juxtaposing those elements you
mention is a game of giving a new sig-
nificance to familiar signs. On the one
hand we reveal their constructedness
according to a set of rules and values,
and on the other create a space for
transforming them into another rela-
tional order. This took us to Brecht’s
‘Verfremdung’, and to the tremendous
changes Duchamp brought about by
inventing the ready-made and opening
up new levels of perception.
In ‘20 minus Minutes’ and the other envi-
ronments the viewer is immersed in this
initially disorienting space which prick-
les the senses and simultaneously ad-
dresses the concrete and the symbolic
space. Many elements are “estranged”
through their new role or relation to the
space or to each other and ask for an
engagement with a somewhat discon-
certing and at times dissenting setup.
LC: The aspect of re-referencing is a
nomadic approach; it’s a way to rework
earlier projects in relation to a new site,
and it enables us to link aspects that
originally related to a different site with
the new environment, both formally and
in terms of content.
‘Your country doesn’t exist’, for example,
is a work that originated in the labora-
tory of the environments and has since
developed its own trajectory. The envi-
ronments were our studio, which moved
from place to place; there are other
works that came from this context. We
were interested in working in and out of
a space under its given conditions, and
in generating concrete links between
different spaces. ‘Your country...’ was
intended to travel, to examine differ-
ent territories, and pass through dif-
ferent languages. While always staying
the same, the work changes each time
through its manifestation on site; it’s like
a mirror.
Continues over