Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.06.2011, Qupperneq 30

30
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 7 — 2011 The Venice Biennale, huh? That sounds pretty
prestigious. Is it 'the SXSW of visual art'?
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EB: Are there any threads running
through your work, or patterns that re-
appear in different projects?
LC: You could say that there are two
main paths which feed into and ques-
tion each other. One is an interventionist
approach, appropriating and reinventing
given structures. The other observes,
maps, and portrays reality.
L+ó: Our slide carrousels, which were
always developed as part of our environ-
ments, map places and portray people
in their lived-in surroundings. Since the
environments themselves were always a
synthesis of us encountering the place,
the slide shows introduced a distance
into their immediacy and concreteness.
They enabled us to ask questions about
a particular reality and how it could be
represented, and they paved the way for
the later video works. All our videos are
portraits, documents of performances or
actions/interventions. The portraits are
either of people working or giving tes-
timony about their situations and living
conditions. The documents of interven-
tion-performances record us or others
performing a public action.
EB: Let me come back to your interest
in the concept of “estrangement” which
as we know was developed by Bertolt
Brecht. His approach to theatre was
always closely con-
nected to participa-
tion and the trans-
mission of a clear
m e s s a g e — w h i c h
you would probably
define differently for
your practice. Curi-
ously, his term ‘Leh-
rstück’ is translated
to English as “learn-
ing play”. The literal
translation, though,
would be “teaching play”. Here we are
with the relationship between learning
and teaching again.
L+ó: Yes we have been inspired by
Brecht’s ideas, but also by other artists
who have furthered them in different
ways. We like the radicalism of Brecht’s
vision, with its participatory concern and
use of distancing devices to reflect on
the ideological construct of capitalist
reality.
EB: I wonder if you see any parallels in
your work to the didacticism of Brecht.
L+ó: No, we don’t. There is a didactic
aspect we play and work with, at least in
some of our projects, but Brecht had a
rather authoritarian idea of didacticism
that we don’t have.
EB: Humour and play are important
strategies in your work.
L+ó: Yes, humour and play are very
important indeed. They are relativisers;
they are subversive and destabilising
aspects, and that is how we use them.
They are existential factors we can in-
clude. They can free us from constraints,
and undermine hierarchies and reorder
them.
EB: You have made critical work on so-
cial and political subjects, but you have
also worked directly with political activ-
ist groups. How does this relate to your
artistic practice?
óó: We work first and foremost in
dialogue with the art context, but our
practice is very often enriched by ideas
from other fields. Working with political
activist groups is a way of deepening
our knowledge of social and political is-
sues, and of bringing some of their ex-
perience into our work. For ‘Avant-garde
Citizens’, for example, we joined De
Bezoekersgroup, a group of people who
regularly visit undocumented migrants
imprisoned at the detention centre at
Rotterdam Airport. We joined the group
twice to attend a mass at the detention
centre. Officially they were helping the
priest to arrange the chairs, hand out
the songbooks, and so on, while actu-
ally they established communication
between some of the people and their
lawyers and/or family and friends, or
just listened to their stories or answered
their questions. Those were weird ex-
periences in which we witnessed op-
pression, manipulation, pragmatism,
post-colonialism, patronisation, hope,
and despair.
EB: Your relation to your collaborators
on the one hand, and to the audience
on the other, is an issue you renegotiate
constantly. One ongoing relationship, for
example, is to the composer Karólína
Eiríksdóttir. She composed the music for
‘Caregivers’ and ‘The Constitution of the
Republic of Iceland’ (2008/2011)—which
you will also present in Venice—and she
is also composing the music for the new
version of ‘Your country doesn’t exist’.
This relationship is special, for sure,
but you have also collaborated with a
choir, with activists, asylum seekers, il-
legal immigrants, caregivers, lobbyists,
ministers—the list is long. Could you go
into more detail about the role these
different individuals play in your work
processes and how far they shape the
final work?
óó: People are our inspiration and our
muses. Our friend Herman Kerkhof,
for example, is a Dutch jeweller (fifth
generation), clock restorer, gardener,
cyclist, passionate provocateur, lover
of people, and the instigator of chance
meetings—the more absurd the bet-
ter. He performed in a few of our early
works and for a while he was probably
the person who had seen most of our
works in various places in the Nether-
lands and in Spain, Iceland, Istanbul,
and Belgium—apart from us. At first we
didn’t collaborate much with other art-
ists. We were in dialogue with them, for
sure, and that was and is very important
for us. But for our projects we worked
with people who were not art profes-
sionals and whom we met by chance.
We met Chucci and Asdrubal in Havana,
for example, when we started working
on our project ‘... no te creas cosas’ for
the 8th Havana Biennial in 2003. Chucci
and Asdrubal were hanging out at a gas
station where we stopped to buy rum,
so we started talking. We showed them
some of our posters, and in return they
invited us to a party. They became our
assistants, and we also collaborated
with their families and friends. They
were the ones who introduced us to the
local saying “no te creas cosas” which
means “don’t be smug about yourself”,
and we picked that up as the title for our
work, like we often do.
The idea for ‘The Constitution of the
Republic of Iceland’ was motivated by
our professional dialogue with Karólína
Eiríksdóttir. From working with her we
have learned how our concepts hooked
up with our collaborators’ ideas and vice
versa—in regards to time, space, ab-
straction, and engagement.
EB: On the other hand, there is the audi-
ence. Susanne Leeb writes in her essay
that “your works are not participative
in the sense that the audience would
be directly involved in an activity”, but
that within them you debate the role of
the spectator by confronting different
spheres with one another. I agree with
her, and would like to follow up the idea
of the status of the viewer rather than
the collaborator. As mentioned earlier,
you traverse differing social spheres—
by entering public space, by opening
up the art space to other social groups
than the art world, by creating ambiva-
lent objects or situations that function in
different worlds, by producing a piece
for television, to name only a few—and
thus make your work accessible to wider
audiences.
óó: We try to create different ways into
the work. Because who is the art audi-
ence? Some of our latest videos are now
being shown in universities, film festi-
vals, NGOs, and activist websites and
events. To a certain extent these audi-
ences read the work differently from
the art professionals. We are happy with
that and want to connect to those dif-
ferent readings. For our MFA in Gron-
ingen we wrote a ‘Viewer’s Manifesto’:
“Dare to be open. Dare to look. Dare to
see. Dare to feel. Dare to touch. Dare to
get surprised. Dare to be critical. Dare
to disagree. Dare to look beyond. Dare
to go too far. Dare to not get anywhere.
Dare to experience”.
EB: There is the project ‘Uterus Flags’, in
which you hung chains of those typical
festive chains of flags across whole sec-
tions of different cities and thus inserted
a carnivalesque moment into everyday
street life.
LC: Like ‘Your country doesn’t exist’,
the ‘Uterus Flags’ intervene into public
space. They appropriate the well-known
festive ritual of decorating the streets
with triangular flags on a chain, as Dan-
iel Buren has done. Formally, they play
with repetition, because the abstracted
figure of the female sexual organs is a
triangle too. They go back to a basic
form, to a strong signifier. When re-
searching for the project, we investigat-
ed medieval heraldry and found out that
it has almost no female symbols. The
‘Uterus Flags’ have something primitive
and timeless about them, something
Dionysian, as fertility rituals have. But
while Dionysus is a male energy/god,
this is female (sexual) energy brought
to the street. The flags are a celebration
of the female through an abstract repre-
sentation of the sexual organs. The ones
we have done up
to now are gentle
because of their
colours, but they
are also orgiastic
and sometimes
even disturbing
to passers-by. I
find it funny and
sensual to see
them flapping
in the wind. We
heard endless
comments about them from all kinds of
people, ranging from really erotic, hot
stuff, to witty remarks and giggling rec-
ognition, to serious anger or aggression.
Some people even cut them down. Pre-
dictably, response in Italy has been the
loudest and most proactive so far. The
work triggered a broad discussion. The
press reported, and there were several
letters to the editor for or against the
work.
EB: You said elsewhere that your works
are often site-related. If I apply this term
to your sound works, how would you
say that they reflect an interior environ-
ment? Perhaps you could talk about this
in relation to the new version of ‘Your
country doesn’t exist’ in the city space of
Venice. The piece will be a performance
recorded on video and audio, and will
result in both a video and a separate
audio work.
óó: It’s a site-related recording, since
it will also capture sounds from the city,
and this environment will directly affect
the recording. Rather than talking about
space, we prefer to talk about context;
we’re interested in creating our works
in relation to sites. Maybe our audio
works are more related to context than
site. ‘Living Room Reading – The Epi-
sode of Hrut and Mord Fiddle’, for ex-
ample, reflects on Iceland as a site, and
its construct through the centuries until
today. The text that is read, the position
it holds, and the foreign voice reading it,
contrast with the site, though they are
still part of it. For us site-relation is an
attitude to perception or communication
rather than a means in itself.
EB: Relational aesthetics is a term that
the French art critic Nicolas Bour-
riaud coined in the 1990s to describe
artistic practices which emphasise
“human relations and their social con-
text” (Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics
p.113)—key protagonists being Rirkrit
Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Pierre
Huyghe, or Carsten Höller. But to me
their projects oftentimes merely serve
to highlight a social/communal activity
within the art context—instead of ques-
tioning the relation between the art, its
presentation, and the viewer on a more
structural level. I’d say that your practice
goes way beyond that, because it as-
sesses the configuration of the audience
and constructs the exhibition installa-
tion from there.
L&ó: Yes, you could say something like
that.
“We work first and foremost in dialogue with the
art context, but our practice is very often enriched
by ideas from other fields. Working with political
activist groups is a way of deepening our knowledge
of social and political issues, and of bringing some of
their experience into our work.”