INTERVIEW TO SARAH FAUX
Elisa Muscatelli

Elisa Muscatelli – If you had to recount your artistic research to someone who encounters it for the first time, how would you describe it?

Sarah Faux – I paint people without clear boundaries, bodies that cannot be seen quickly because they’ve dissolved into fields of sensation.

EM – In your works important references, from Cubism to Schiele, up to Frankenthaler and Krasner, are easily identified and combined with a very pop color palette.
Is there an artistic movement whit which you identify yourself and that has influenced you the most?

SF – I’ve spent a lot of time looking at painters who play with color perception, like Rothko’s vibrating color fields or Bonnard’s sleeping dogs hidden within passages of far-out optical mixing. I’m also indebted to artists who’ve embedded charged imagery into works that read overall as abstract, like Ghada Amer and Ellen Gallagher. But ultimately I’m a contemporary painter, chewing up and spitting out influences constantly, and more identified with my peers than with any 20th-century movement.

EM – After a few years of painting production, your cut-outs came out.
They remind me a lot of a grown-up version of the ‘70s DIY paper dolls: how did you approach this stylistic practice?
And how has your approach to the canvas changed?

SF – I’ve made cut-out pieces for at least 8 years now, and actually they predated my first painting shows. I made them to help me organize my thoughts and my oil paintings, which were really ambiguous at the time and weren’t conjuring up bodily experiences as much as I wanted them to. Drawing from life and then making cut-outs of the forms I recorded really helped me to see that our physical bodies look very abstract already. So if I wanted to create paintings about abstract feelings, I realized that I didn’t need to obscure the figure so much as I just needed to reveal the figure’s weird, shifty, inherently abstract nature.

EM – You have described the production phase of the paintings as a thoughtful process, that needs a long executive time, that dialogues perfectly with a narrative tendency but at the same time is in contrast with an instinctive and abstract doing that characterizes it.
I was wondering how these two components manage to dialogue giving life to the visual description of a body which is, by its nature, in constant changing.

SF – I think you’re asking about the inner and outer life of a person. The body is one of the only things we experience from both inside and outside, so I always want to keep those elements in tension within my work – exterior narrative experiences and inner unnameable sensations. So I start my paintings with an image composition in mind, like let’s say a couple grinding on each other with their elbows sticking out in awkward opposing triangles. Then I’ll pull colors, forms and shifting materiality to the forefront just enough to let that glimpse at the couple slip away. I go back and forth until I strike the balance that scratches my own itch.

EM – Color seems to be a central part of your artistic practice and more generally of your theoretical interest, in fact, one of the books that particularly struck you is Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, in which blue is at the center of a subjective and philosophical meditation.
What is your approach to color? Do you think it has a certain type of spirituality that you use on a symbolic level?

I remember learning about pigments in college, and realizing there was really specific language for small differences between the variations of one hue, like for example blue – cobalt, cerulean, ultramarine, prussian, indigo, etc. The thrill of playing with those subtle differences has never worn off. Color relationships trigger intense sensations for me, both feelings like longing or joy, and also synesthetic responses like sexual desire or a distinct temperature (i.e. heat). Maggie Nelson’s Bluets does justice to the complexity of the color blue in a way that I feel incredibly grateful for.

As for my own approach to color, I don’t see it as symbolic because every color is too shifty to symbolize any one thing. But I feel that shiftiness profoundly, in the same way, I feel my physical and emotional worlds always shifting, fragmented, never forming a static whole.

EM – In the contemporary art scene there is a lot of talk about avatars, A.I. and digital alter ego that are used as an extension of one’s body within a digital reality capable of emancipating itself from the physical and moral limits of everyday reality. It is interesting to note how your works share this desire for body extension, although with a very different language. I would like to know how you approach this thematic.

SF – That’s an interesting parallel to draw. I think of my paintings as perceptual puzzles much more than I think about them containing nameable characters or avatars. But the desire the transcend the confines of the self is very much present in my work. Often, I orient my paintings from an up-close, first-person point of view to make the piece into an extension of the viewer’s body.

EM – The expressive freedom, especially when it comes to sexuality, of women has always had to compromise with the surrounding society. You talked about a force that comes from buried anger and the need to overturn the male pain (point?) of view. Do you believe that art should take on this ethical responsibility towards the new generations?

SF – Yes, but not necessarily directly. I don’t think art needs to illustrate ‘ethical values’. At the same time, my paintings are loose, sloppy, and sexual, because I want to pull viewers into a loose headspace that’s free of certain hang-ups. There’s an ethical core to that impulse. The bodies in my work betray their boundaries because those confines are limiting. The verbal, narrative world is limiting. Bringing people into a headspace where gender and desire are as shifty as color, that feels liberating.

Sarah Faux’s works can be seen until 25 December in the exhibition For Her,  Capsule Shangai space. https://capsuleshanghai.com/exhibitions/29/overview/

INTERVIEW TO VEIT LAURENT KURZ
Laura Baffi

Laura Baffi – You were named the award-winner of the 42nd edition of the Matteo Oliviero Award, the Contemporary Art contest co-run by The Blank, where you will be the protagonist of the exhibition at Casa Cavassa in Saluzzo. The solo exhibition should have been inaugurated on April 24th, but, like many other events, this one has also been postponed to a future date. So, I seize this opportunity to ask you to synthetically present your artistic research to everyone who, even beyond the public here in Saluzzo, doesn’t know you yet.

Veit Laurent Kurz – My artistic practice objectives within installations that mostly consists out of paintings, drawings and sculptures. Over the last years I developed a way how to integrate film and writing as a method of personal research and its integration as integral works into these installations. As a Tracking method those two medias record my thoughts along a more object oriented studio practice.
My hope is to capture conscious and subconscious elements. My interest in archeologic and biologic phenomenas brought, through a visit in Pompeii, volcanoes to my attention. The fate of that city through the Vesuvius as well as the present danger of the Campi Flegrei under Naples, drew my attention intensely.
As another strain, and driven by personal trauma, I followed the conception of nuclear powers in our civilisation and the thread they create based on accidents in the near past. Volcanoes as well as Nuclear Power Plants seem to have similarities within their geographic integration in our human life as well as the thread they mean.
The Installation I develop for Saluzzo is an interwoven story that brings those two places, formed from a scientific and personal research together and by this uses words from each of those world as its vocabulary.

LB – The intention of your characters – correct me if I’m wrong – known as the Dilldapps, is to have a benevolent effect on the visitors, since they are “advisers”. Rather than familiar, the Dilldapps seem alien to us. Maybe your intention is to unleash the uncanny?

VLK – The first time I encountered the Dilldapp was in a book about carnival that had its origin in the Hunsrück-Area (Germany) which is close to where I grew up. There was no photo or illustration but I liked what I read and for some reason my mind kept on spinning the attributes of this species. I kept the name of the Dilldapp but soon the species entered my practice as my own alter ego. By this it would change its role and function within the installations. For some time now I develop my installations in dialog with this creature and it helps me to have a changing perspective on my practice as well as an eye for detail within the developing narrative. In this way the Dilldapp is an advisor to the audience but also to myself. It reminds me of a responsibility that my narrative should have without crossing the line to pure fiction.

LB – According to the contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek, sometimes, although we do recognize that what we are experiencing – or appealing to – is a deception, we still persist in considering it real, or, in other words,  we play along. I find this consideration to be interesting, if applied to your artistic practice: we do know the Dildapps’ imaginary nature, yet this doesn’t make our interest decrease, it actually increases it. The natural and the artificial elements coexist in your works, not only materially, but also ideologically. In particular, your artwork “Campi Flegrei Conferenza”, which will be placed in Saluzzo, features the presence of natural and artificial volcanoes (which you identify with nuclear power plants). The volcano showcased in the center of the room will be created with elements found online, in imitation of their original features and their operation. So: do you think that fiction gives you a magnifying glass to better observe reality?

VLK – Fiction gives me the possibility to connect elements of reality with my own intimate logics. My Installations are often a hybrid out of conscious and subconscious decisions that move between the realm of reality and fiction. On a material level it is sometimes hard, especially when time passes from the making of an object, to see what is organic and what is synthetic eg. plastic or wood. I like this blur, physically and mentally, which leads to a reality on its own. The longer I am working in this method the more I got aware of handling certain parameters  and to give active space to the subconscious. The term “Metaphor” which I introduced in my exhibition at Kunstverein Nürnberg captured this process to some extent. The fusion of reality and fiction is also a way to show myself and not show myself.

LB – I’m going to ask you some more technical questions now: do you work directly on site when it comes to building your scenarios? If yes, what do you decide to keep or remove before the exhibition happens? Are you helped by assistants during the creation of your characters or are entirely realized by you?

VLK – It really depends. Certain projects I develop and execute completely in a/my studio and some others I arrange on side. By this I try to give myself a lot of flexibility and freedom to react towards the context of the venue, the surrounding and its history. Working in various collaborations over the last years, a situation in which you mostly have to hold yourself back for a better outcome, brought this openness as well as a self trust into my practice that I did not know before. In general so I work on my own but here and there when logistics of a project become too overwhelming I get a helping hand.

LB – I think that these kinds of settings would be suitable to stage a performance. Have you ever attempted this artistic practice? Have you ever physically joined one of your installations?

VLK – I always had a big interest in theatre and film as well as the aspect of stage design that comes with it. Oskar Schlemmer, Syberberg or the Corman/ Vincent Price productions would draw my attention among others.
Within painting and drawing I have dealt with the idea of the stage as well as in the installations themselves. The way how I handle material is also influenced by stage design and the illusion of props that appear within those narratives.
I have engaged my installations in a performative way, alone or with my band Steiketo but just recently I started for the first time to work with two friends that work in film and theatre to transfer mental and physical ideas of my work into those medias.

LB – Your work examines aspects of life on Earth during the Anthropocene Era. In general, does a glimmer of hope for humanity shine through in your works? Are you confident or skeptical about the developments that are taking place in the Anthropocene Era?

VLK – I am reluctant to diagnose an outcome for this scenario but I think one needs to be hopeful. Technology seems to develop with a high speed and opens doors in various directions. This knowledge as well as other achievements are not accessible to everyone since educational and economic structures are not equally distributed while other big parts of society seem not willing to give up their comfort and routine.
What I see is some hope within the younger generations who seem to be, in the range of their possibilities, proactive to make a change and are in general sceptic. By this they stand up against their “parents”.

I receive the art world as a very confusing bubble with regards to these tasks, torn between luxury and intellectualism and by this stagnant for real change.

LB – Relating to my previous question, we know that Dilldapps survived natural and artificial catastrophes. About this last topic, I can’t help thinking about the Covid-19 emergency. Do, or will, the Dilldapps face this kind of catastrophe too?

VLK – The Dilldapp, my alter ego, was born from a similar situation than Covid-19 in the first place or that is at least how I interpret his autobiographic come into being. Instead of an invisible virus it was the invisible threat of the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster in 1986 that brought radioactive particles like Iodine-131 or Caesium-137 to the area where I grew up. In my early twenties I got diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorders and a thyroid under function (which stand in scientific correlation) that are strongly driven by contamination thoughts. All my life I would wash my hands, throw away objects and be in general fearful about an invisible threat. A behaviour that I experienced as individual became, through Covid-19, a collective disorder.
In regards to the Dilldapp, who is expression of this discomfort, I am not sure yet how these present circumstances will navigate and feed into its narrative and existents.

LB – Would you ever imagine your works not as physical and real presences, but as avatars able to reveal themselves only through the use of specific devices, e.g. via app?

VLK – I thought in this direction but sometimes I feel my installations already went through this “virtual” being, I see them as post- virtual. Maybe there are aspects of my work where something coded or rendered would make sense but at the moment I don’t see the necessity.

TB BOARD | INTERVIEW TO VIOLET DENNISON
Laura Baffi

Laura Baffi – What is the file rouge, or better, the conductive thread of your artistic research?
Violet Dennison – My work has always been invested in how technology, infrastructure and consequently pollution, shape the human body. 

LB – Most of your works use electromagnetic, sound frequencies and waves. Where did your interest for the “invisible audible” come from?
VD – Initially I was drawn to the scale of the electromagnetic flow layer, how it acts as a hyperobject, (as defined by Timothy Morton) and I wondered if wireless networks can operate like “Ki” or spiritual energy.
I made the first frequency works in 2017, some of which included Radio Frequency Transponders. At that time I began more research on the applications of sound frequencies and electromagnetic waves. Specific technologies directly influenced my show at Kunstverein Freiburg, for instance the tool, Marketing ‘Beacons’; that apps use to track consumers via ultrasonic frequencies. I use Data-over-sound technology as part of a piece in the show. This technology is essentially a Morse code communicated externally through speakers that only electronics can understand.

LB – What were your goals in the Dance Dance Revolution video? Getting the public into a repetitiveness cycle? Are you, or have you ever been, an amusement arcade regular client?
VD – I never was a regular at the arcade. I played a lot of video games and computer games at home. My earliest memory interacting with a computer was playing a game. 

LB – The colors you use for the pauses between one game session and the other one, contribute to instilling a trance state, projecting the viewer into the alienating dimension of the game. Even if it is intended as a pause, the public remains alert and awake. So, the reprogramming could have a double meaning: bothering and therapeutic. Would the animation want to distract us or make us even more involved? Would it relax us and have a beneficial effect on the public (I think of chromotherapy), or bother us?
VD – As you rightly point out, it is operating in various ways. I’d like to think it functions in a similar way to the arcade game, Dance Dance Revolution, as it creates both an addictive behavior cycle via the “pauses” and also a trance state. The animation “pause,” as you refer to it, creates a type of unpredictability in the video and triggers a reward when the viewer waits for the next gaming session to occur. The trance type state is created through rhythmic visual and auditory patterning that emulates the psychotherapy treatment, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. This experience creates a bilateral stimulation of the brain.

LB – The movement of the dancer, whose sneakers are framed, speeding up gradually. It becomes almost ridiculous, and appears as the parody of a danse macabre where you let yourself go in a reflective state of mind.
There is in Dance Dance Revolution an attempt of symbiosis between the human being and the machine, which reaches a limit-point: even if you hold yourself to the safety bar, you can’t go beyond a certain speed. In this regard, the German media theorist Siegfried Zielinski affirmed that ‘men are the best machines’. What do you think about this statement?
VD – I would alter this statement to say “humans are best with machines.” Humans are optimized via technologies, like Apple Watch or Vaccines. It’s a symbiotic relationship where the self, consciousness and the soul are complemented by analytics and unlimited cloud storage, for example. I see technology as an extension of the human body. The description you gave of my piece Dance Dance Revolution highlights this relationship. The Arcade Game trains the gamer to be a hyperattentive surrogate to the machine. It teaches strange and tactical movements that enhances performance and releases endorphins. Dance Dance Revolution shapes the human body, mind and spirit through control. We invent fictions and we transform ourselves to be a part of them.  

LB – On the Net I found an old project of yours very interesting! I am talking about Violet’s Café: could you tell us about it, perhaps starting from the choice of the title?
VD – Violet’s Café was an experimental artist run space that I operated with Scott Keightley and Graham Hamilton from 2013-2015. We conceived the project while all working at a restaurant together, (bus boy, waitress and bartender). The name riffed off of that. As an homage to its conception we’d always serve food at the openings. Often times the food was some extension of the artwork, including our own “vintage performance wine”. The name created a blurry authorship as we collaborated as the three members and with friends. It was a fun project that I miss a lot. The spirit of the Violet’s Café can be encapsulated by a phrase Scott would say, “we can’t fail because it is an experiment.”

INTERVIEW WITH GABRIELE DE SANTIS
ELISA MUSCATELLI

Elisa Muscatelli – How would you describe your artistic practice to an audience encountering it for the first time?

Gabriele De Santis – Flying by Jesse Novack | Instrumental track
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MesS_YKCf68

EM – A harlequin riding a Williamsburg, spaghetti and basil in soccer shoes, Greek columns on wheels, but also takes on stances like all fasci are shit. How did your artistic vision come about?

GD – FloriDada by Animal Collective
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuoIvNFUY7I

Child (of limousines)
What’s the best place (That you have seen)
All of the hands (That you have shook)
Home of the queen (of everything fancy)
Is there a smell (That you can tell)
Gives you some peace (sends you to hell)
All of the beds (That you have yearned)
Is there a dream to (where you’d return)
Where is the plight (With the most stars)
Where do you drink (By Echo guitars)
What’s the best shore (Seen from a boat)
Miniature heads that (colour the shoreline)
If you could rest (A minute to tell)
Get me some grass (Iridescent shells)
I know there’s a nest (Fit with a hatch)
Sunset a glowin’ (Makes us all sweaty)
I don’t even know where to begin or how I should start these days.
(The green mountain south or)
The Clay of the westerns
The Maryland meadows at midnight they do have a misty grace
(Take a trip to blue bayou)
Find Roy Orbison crying
A continent molded from glass or maybe a town I can taste
(Dresses that glow on)
Girls from Barcelona
I wanna discover the key and open the everywhere place
(A mix of sky from Montana)
Dipped in FloriDada
[…]

EM – In your works, we can perceive an atmosphere of playfulness even though the conditions of a real game are not there

GD – Become a mountain by Dan Deacon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtBmZYqZZjU

I got up
Tired in my flesh
I’m getting old now
I’m so lucky
Yet I forget that I’m still hungry
For the future
In this day ahead of me
Will I seize it or will I run
All the time
Is right here
It’s right now
I have this feeling
Almost all the time
I have this feeling
Like this feeling isn’t mine
Mystic familiar
It already knows
I can see it waiting for me to explode
Close your eyes
And it becomes a mountain
Become all around you
Become the sky, become the sea
Open your eyes
And remain the mountain
Breathing deeply
Feeling the day change with the breeze
All the time
Is right here
It’s right now
I have this feeling
Almost all the time
I have this feeling
Like this feeling is not mine
[…]

EM – Popular culture is a big reference for you, the protagonists of your works sometimes even have cult character names (like the dolphins DJ and Elliot in reference to Scrubs). What is your relationship with mass culture?

GD – Maledetta primavera by Loretta Goggi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foJV_y4mSiI

Wanting to hug and then
White wine, flowers, and old songs
And they laughed at us
What a hoax it was
Damn spring
What’s left of an erotic dream if
Upon waking, it became a poem?
If with empty hands of you
I can no longer do
As if it were not love
If by mistake
I close my eyes and think of you
If to fall in love again
You’ll be back, damn spring
What a cheat if
It only takes an hour to fall in love?
What was the hurry
Damn spring?
What was the hurry
If it only hurts?
What’s left inside me?
[…]

EM – In your Instagram stories, besides cycling, you have a collection of numerous recipes. Cakes, pizzas, an embarrassing carbonara y guacamole combo, you’ve even created an artist’s cone with a Dear Martina flavour. What is your relationship with the culinary world? Does it interact with your artistic work?

GD – Sis Around the Sandmill by Avey Tare & Kría Brekkan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l382GBQ8tU

[…]
Eat slowly and there’s my ha ha
They eat slow the others might ha ha
Eat slow the others might ha ha
Eat slowly and the others might wah ho

EM – If we had to look for a part of you in a book or movie, which one would you tell us?

GD – Stranger Things – Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein | Instrumental
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RcPZdihrp4

INTERVIEW WITH GIAN MARIA TOSATTI
ELISA MUSCATELLI

Elisa Muscatelli – How would you describe your artistic practice to a first-time spectator?

Gian Maria Tosatti  – So I create devices that generate performances, this is the most correct description of my work, which is normally defined as an environmental installation, but what environmental installation means: it is the creation of a machine inside which the viewer is placed and when he is inside it he has an experience. This experience is the work of art, also because as Marcuse said in one of his essays published in 1938 when a man is incapable of fully living his experiential capacity, art will stop being meaningful. The problem is that today we still have enormous difficulties in knowing ourselves, in experiencing life at all its levels, and art is a tool that helps us to appropriate these capacities that we should have, however, to live a full experience of our life. There are meanings that often escape us in our daily actions, confessions that we are not able to make to ourselves and that also determine the way we live our lives every day; here, art comes to the rescue and tries to provide a solution, a solution to an impasse. My machines, these large environmental installations that I build in cities around the world, are fields of friction between what we are used to being on the outside and what we are on the inside.

EM – You often exhibit in many different urban contexts. Have you encountered different approaches compared to the ordinary public, classic visitors to museums? Do the cultural specificities and traditions of the place where you work influence the presentation of the work?

GMT – There is no standard public for art, in the sense that the typical public is not necessarily a public that confronts the work of art in the way it should be approached, what I mean is that art is always for everyone, sometimes the museum visitor expects something specific from art that is linked to his or her expectations. In reality, I have often had a more pleasant relationship with people who had no previous training, with those who at first says: “Well, I don’t understand anything”, because art doesn’t have to be understood, it simply has to be confronted and made to work, that is, to activate something that concerns us from that device that is the work of art, so there is this difference between those who stand in a pure way in front of the work without trying to understand it and then is able to experience it in depth and those who are there and try sometimes even technically wrongly to understand something that is not even what should be understood. Art is not a quiz. Many times I find myself in front of an audience that pretends to be more informed and almost tries to say “Oh but this comes from this, this comes from that other” art is not a quiz because it would be like looking at a person and then saying “Oh this comes from his mother, this comes from his father” and at that point, you have completely lost the identity of that person, you have turned him into a Frankenstein of pieces, it is not like that in the truth, when you do this you lose the identity of that person, and it is the same with art.
In the end, there is no audience that is different from the general public, in the sense that it is the way in which you approach the work of art that changes things, so I always try to work by deducing the knowledge that I am looking for through the work because I am a researcher and for me, the work is a mechanism of knowledge. This is how it goes: the artist knows something and then leaves the artwork open as if it were a trap for other people to fall into, the artist builds the trap to fall into and then leaves it open so that it is not only the artist who falls into it. I go around the world creating works of art because every city, every community has a certain amount of knowledge about certain important topics. Fortunately, we do not live in a country at war, for example, while I was recently in Ukraine where there is a war that has been going on for many years. Fortunately, some elements of “Being” in Italy cannot be understood today and it is necessary to move, to go to other places, to understand what it means to live in a condition where death can arrive for political reasons. So it is obvious that when I try to find the secret of a community and then exhibit it, the relationship with that specific public, which I repeat is not always the whole public, because many people travel specifically to see these works or perhaps come from other countries or see them through documentation, but the public of that country often feels profoundly revealed, revealed to itself, not revealed to the eyes of the world, they do not think about that, but they feel revealed to themselves. I have often realized how powerful this can be because there have often been scenes of deep emotion, of crying, even of suffering at a certain point, spectators who have been physically disturbed during the opera, but not because there were any particular fatigues, but because confronting some images that belonged to them so intimately had activated a sort of mechanism that we know from the scene in Hamlet’s opera when the king becomes blind, or in any case can no longer see because he is faced with the truth of what he has done. In that case, it is an accusatory act, in my case I never try to put myself in front of the public in an aggressive way, but certainly showing them something that concerns them so deeply means that the reactions are not the usual ones you might expect in a museum experience such as “Oh beautiful” and usually this never happens, there are many very different things that happen in my works, especially when people leave. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to be able to meet or be recognized by people who come to see the work and outside maybe they approach you and tell you what they think, other times you stand to one side, especially in distant countries, you stand to one side and observe the way people come out and you realize that they have completely changed their way of being compared to when they came in and this means that the work has worked.

EM – Indro Montanelli, Edward Colston, Cristoforo Colombo, vandalized monuments and the desire to rewrite a part of history. How does the urban art installation fit into this debate?

GMT – The urban installation is not a monument and this is an essential point, it is something else and if it became a monument it would have no reason to be demolished and I will explain why: the classical monument is something that was born in a different society from ours, we have been through different eras, clearly the Greek era, the Latin era, the monument against which we lash out or a part of society lash out that I don’t really feel I belong to at the moment, is the monument that was born in feudal society, that is, a family of powerful people, whether princes, counts, marquises or kings, against this model, which then sometimes comes together with figures that are not necessarily linked to this type of logic, for example, Cristoforo Colombo is an explorer, but in his own way he represents the power of a certain type of society, I understand it. Obviously, the problem is to detach them from their historical reason, however, the idea is always the same, in the sense that this person discovered this world that is America, he represents our European power, Spain and then the other countries that founded this country after his discovery, obviously, I repeat, it is a dynamic that no longer belongs to us in the sense that we are now in a totally democratic society, so there are no longer monuments like these that are erected. What was done for Montanelli was already quite comical in the sense that you could see that it was a gesture out of time, so in my opinion, its destruction does not concern so much the issues as to say related to alleged violence, but primarily concerns the fact that you can not try to put in a museum of contemporary art a picture painted as in the twenties or as in the mid-nineteenth century, and no matter how well made, and which that monument obviously was not, it is still something out of time. Beyond the beauty or the ugliness of the monument, it is something that is out of time, so it is a mistake, and mistakes should be eliminated, especially in art. In a democratic society, there is another type of monument that is becoming more popular, and that is the monument that is the result of an artistic gesture, which can be a work of art of any kind.  I have created a few artworks in that sense, but not consciously because a monument is never built consciously, because what makes an artwork a monument is its recognition by a community. A few years ago I was involved in a place called MAAM, which at the time was not yet called MAAM Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove (Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere) in Metropoliz on the suburbs of Rome, a large factory occupied by migrants and also by Italians who had arrived from all over the world. I remember that mine was the first work made inside the factory, and it was this big telescope that had to frame the moon as a place of utopia, a place to move towards. It had to do with the logic of the migrants, the same workers who were the people who lived there and helped us, who in short would later become the creators of this self-managed contemporary art museum, an inhabited museum.
For the first time they were confronted with this work that spoke of who they were, and so they told me: “We want to take the work to the top of the tower”. There was a forty-meter tower on top of this factory, which was more or less inaccessible because there was only an iron ladder to take you up to it, so it was already very difficult and dangerous to get there on your own, so just imagine carrying a giant object over four metres long and three metres high. When they told me this, I said why, because the work of art was conceived to be in the courtyard of the factory, which seemed to me to be a sufficiently clear and ideal place for a work of art, and they answered me because even in this very remote suburb of Rome, where basically everything is rather hard and even ugly, let’s be honest, even down here nobody wants to see us, as long as we are behind the walls of this factory and we are invisible then everything is fine, but when we go out to do our activities to take our children to school then nobody wants to see us. We would like to put this telescope on top of the tower because for us this telescope is a symbol, it tells the reason why we are here, we are here because we have dreams, we are here, we move, we travel because we are looking for a better life. So, let’s say that my telescope was just a work of art, a kind of sculpture installation that certainly had this meaning inside, but it becomes a monument when the community tells you that for us this is a symbol, and you would not have imagined that it could become a symbol. When you create a work of art, you create it to be a trigger, not to be a symbol, it becomes a symbol when someone really recognizes it as such, elects it as such and creates the monument, so this community created the monument and the work of art, in the end, we took it to the top of that tower really risking our lives. There’s a film called ‘Space Metropoliz’ by Giorgio de Finis and Fabrizio Boni about this quite daring gesture, and we’ve got it up there, it’s been up there now for ten years, and it’s been ten years that anyone who enters Rome by the Via Prenestina consular street, a street that has existed since the days of the Roman Empire, whoever enters Rome by that street, before entering the city, sees this tall tower with this enormous telescope made of spent oil barrels on top, and that is the way that that community tells the rest of the world that they are not a group of criminals or whatever the worst racist culture has attributed to people who come and travel to find a better life, but they are dreamers. They are people who help us to think of a better city, and among other things they are men who live in and have created an inhabited museum, a wonderful innovative element that has been talked about all over the world, so, among other things, this is a monument that does not make a generic promise that we don’t know about, that we don’t know if it will be kept, but it speaks precisely of a community that has been so dreamy as to have created at home, in Italy, in Rome, one of the most luminous and beautiful museum exceptions ever seen. It is probably a rather unsettled prototype if you like, but certainly, no action or discovery is born perfect, the important thing is to have taken the first step in a new direction, and the MAAM certainly is. I believe that public art today has this kind of logic and function, which is to create monuments that are proposals, even unconscious proposals, but capable of being collected by a community and transformed by it into a monument.

EM – מייַן האַרץ איז ליידיק ווי אַ שפּיגל, the Yiddish name of your project – a pilgrimage to map democracy in various parts of Europe. Where documentary approaches finish and artistic abstraction begins?

GMT – There is no documentary in this project, in the sense that an artist’s portrait is never a documentary, an artist’s portrait is always something magical from a certain point of view, magical because it is able to show what is not visible. A few days ago I was talking about The Portrait of Dorian Gray and I was saying that this short novel by Oscar Wilde is an interesting element to reflect on, because on the one hand, the portrait that the painter makes of the protagonist is the only thing that he is able to look at, beyond the external aspect, but above all, there is another important aspect: that portrait in fact kills the evil in the protagonist and in doing so kills the protagonist himself because perhaps that character Dorian Gray is a person who could not be saved. But looking inside ourselves and finding it almost impossible to bear the evil, the evil inside us, means that in a certain way we necessarily begin to correct it, we necessarily begin to change it, to fight it, and by fighting it we are perhaps fighting against ourselves, but all this is right. It is never exactly a documenting as much as it is revealing, and the works are revealing, so ‘My heart is as empty as a mirror’ is a great confession in front of oneself, and a confession is not really a document, it is a revolutionary act because it is the first step to being able to change.

EM – Which historical, literary, or cinematographic reference has had a major impact on the development of your artistic and personal career?

GMT – It is very difficult to answer this question because an artist lives with constant references, they are always in front of his eyes, sometimes they are conscious, sometimes unconscious, sometimes someone says to you, but you did not realize it, that there is so much of this or that in this work. It’s like asking an astrophysicist which star in the galaxy fascinates him the most, it’s impossible, in the sense that the stars are all perfect, all beautiful, so I could name a hundred and fifty thousand and they would all be important. From the one with a more structural role, which was perhaps to create the very image and idea of how a work of art should be done, or even just how one should behave on this earth, to the one that had the smallest contribution from the point of view of the volume, but sometimes it is the detail, it puts detail in your formation that is decisive because it is in the details that the really decisive things are. So I won’t answer, I can’t answer this question, it would be too long, the only thing I can say is that yes, you have to live, but this is true for artists as well as for those who just love art, you have to live constantly in this kind of great trans-temporal process, like the protagonist of Auto da fé by Canetti, who puts a team of friends around us, of people who know us very well and who are the great authors, great characters in literature. We must always be in dialogue with them because they are the guardians of the secrets that we sometimes don’t know, that we sometimes forget. The fortune of art is to be able to put us next to men who were born and lived hundreds of years ago, and who are still present with us, through their works and through their voices. Honestly, I don’t find any difference between the voice of someone who speaks to me in the contemporary world, telling me what he thinks about politics, and the voice of Platone who speaks to me about the Republic, there is no difference in the sense that they are two voices, the words come to me clearly in both cases, it is I who make the difference, whether I intend to follow that thought or not, so I don’t think it is important to say what the references are, but the really important thing is to continue to have a constant relationship with one’s own references.

INTERVIEW WITH GIAN MARIA TOSATTI
ELISA MUSCATELLI

Elisa Muscatelli – How would you describe your artistic practice to an audience encountering it for the first time?

Gian Maria Tosatti – Well, I build devices that generate performances, which is the most correct term for my work, which is normally defined as environmental installation, but what does environmental installation mean? It means the creation of a machine into which the visitor is placed, and when he or she is inside it, he or she has an experience. The experience is the work of art, also because as Marcuse said in an essay in 1938, when a man is unable to fully live his experiential capacity, art ceases to make sense. The problem is that today we still have enormous difficulties in knowing ourselves fully, in experiencing life fully on all its levels, and art is a tool that helps us to appropriate these capacities that we should have, in any case, to live a full dimensionality of our life experience. There are meanings that often escape us in our daily actions, confessions that we are not able to make to ourselves and that also determine the way we live our lives every day; here, art comes to the rescue and tries to provide a solution, a solution to an impasse. My machines, these large environmental installations that I build in cities around the world, are fields of friction between what we are used to being outside and what we are inside.

EM – You often exhibit in different urban settings. Have you encountered different looks from the ordinary public, the classic museum-goers? Do the cultural specificities and traditions of the place where you work influence the presentation of your work?

GMT – There is no classic public for art, in the sense that the typical public is not necessarily a public that places itself in front of the work of art in the way that it should be placed, what I mean is that art is always for everyone, sometimes the museum regular expects something specific from art, linked precisely to his or her expectations. In reality, I have often had a more satisfactory relationship with people who had no training whatsoever, with those who at first say “Well, I don’t understand anything”, because art does not have to be understood, it simply has to be confronted and made to work, that is to say, to activate something that concerns us from that device that is the work of art, so here there is this difference between those who stand nakedly before the work, without even imagining that they understand it, and they are able to experience it to the full, and those who instead are there and try sometimes, even clumsily, technically to understand something, which then is not even what needs to be understood. Art is not a quiz; many times I find myself in front of a public that pretends to be more prepared and almost tries to say ‘ah but this comes from this, art is not a quiz because it would be like taking a person and saying “ah but this comes from his mother, this comes from his father” and at that point, you have completely emptied the identity of this person, you have made him a Frankenstein of pieces, it is not like that in reality, when you do this you lose the truth of that person, and it is the same with art. In reality, there is no public other than the general public, in the sense that it is the way in which you approach the work of art that changes things, so I always try to work by deducing the knowledge that I am looking for through the work, because I myself am a researcher, for me too the work is a mechanism of knowledge. It works like this: the artist knows something and then leaves the work open as if it were a trap for other people to fall into, the artist builds the trap to fall into and then leaves it open so that it is not just he who falls into it. I go around the world building works because every city, every community has a certain amount of knowledge about certain important topics. Fortunately, we do not live in a country at war, for example, while I was recently in Ukraine where there is a war that has been going on for many years. Fortunately, some elements of being in Italy cannot be understood today, but instead, you have to move, go elsewhere, understand what it means to live in a condition where death can arrive for such brazenly political reasons. So it is obvious that when I try to extract the secret of a community and then expose it, the relationship with that specific public, which I repeat is not always the whole public because many people travel specifically to see these works or maybe come from other countries or see them through documentation, but the public of that country often feels deeply revealed, revealed to themselves, not revealed to the eyes of the world, they do not think about that, but they feel revealed to themselves. I have often realized how powerful this can be because there have often been scenes of deep emotion, of tears, even of difficulty at a certain point, spectators who have been physically in difficulty during the opera, but not because there were particular difficulties, but because facing certain images that belonged to them so deeply had activated that sort of seeing a mechanism that we know from the scene in Hamlet’s play when the king becomes blind, or in any case can no longer see because he is faced with the truth of what he has done. In that case, it is an accusatory act, in my case I never try to put myself in front of the public in such an aggressive way, but certainly showing them something that concerns them so deeply means that the reactions are not the usual ones you might expect in a museum visit, like “ah beautiful”, and usually this never happens, many very particular things happen in my works, especially when people go out. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to be able to meet or be recognized by the people who come to see the work and outside maybe they approach you and tell you what they think, other times you stand to one side, especially in faraway countries, you stand to one side and observe the way people leave and you realize that they have completely changed their way of being compared to when they came in and this means that the work has worked.

EM – Indro Montanelli, Edward Colston, Christopher Columbus, vandalized monuments and the desire to rewrite a part of history. How does the urban art installation fit into this debate?

GMT – The urban installation is not a monument, and this is an essential thing, it is something else, and if it were to become a monument it would have no reason to be torn down, and I will explain why: the classical monument is something that was born in a different society from ours, we have been through different eras, clearly the Greek era, the Latin era, the monument against which we are lashing out or a part of society is lashing out, which I don’t really feel like belonging to at the moment, is the monument that was born in feudal society, that is, a family of powerful people, whether princes, counts, marquises, kings, build statues that represent their dynasty and therefore, from a certain point of view, generate idols of their own power. This is the opposite of this, which sometimes also meets figures not necessarily linked to this type of logic, for example, Christopher Columbus is an explorer, but in his own way he represents the power of a certain type of society, I understand. Obviously, the problem is then to untie them from their historical reason, however, the idea is always the same, in the sense that this person discovered this world that is America, he represents our European power, Spain and then the other countries that since his discovery has founded this country, obviously I repeat it is a dynamic that does not belong to us anymore in the sense that now we are in a totally democratic society so absurdly there are no more monuments like these that are erected. The one that was erected for Montanelli was already quite funny in its own way, in the sense that you could see that it was a gesture out of time, so in my opinion, its destruction does not concern so much the issues of how to say related to alleged violence, but primarily concerns the fact that you can not try to put in a museum of contemporary art a picture painted as in the twenties or as in the mid-nineteenth century, and no matter how well made, and which that monument obviously was not, it is still something out of time. Quite apart from the beauty or ugliness of the monument, it is something out of time, so rightly it is a mistake, then mistakes should indeed be eliminated usually, especially in art. In a democratic society, there is another type of monument that is gaining in popularity, and that is the monument that is the result of an artistic gesture, which can be a work of art of any kind.  I happened to create some that went in that direction, but not consciously; you never build a monument consciously because what makes a work a monument is recognition by a community. A few years ago I happened to work in this place called MAAM, which at the time was not yet called MAAM Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove in Metropoliz on the outskirts of Rome, a large factory occupied by migrants and also by Italian people who had arrived from all over the world. I practically remember that mine was the first work made inside the factory, and it was this big telescope that had to frame the moon as a place of utopia, a place to move towards. It had to do with the logic of the migrants, the same workers who were the people who lived there and helped us, who in short would later become the managers of this self-managed contemporary art museum, an inhabited museum.For the first time they were confronted with this work that spoke of who they were, and so they told me: “We want to take the work to the top of the tower”; there was a forty-meter tower on this factory, which was more or less unreachable because there was only an iron ladder to take you up to it, so it was already very difficult and dangerous to get there by yourself, let alone carry a giant object over four meters long and three meters high; it was really suicide on a physical level. When they told me this, I said why, because the work of art was conceived to be in the courtyard of the factory, which seemed to me to be a sufficiently clear and ideal place for a work of art, and they answered me because even in this very remote suburb of Rome, where basically everything is rather hard and even ugly, let’s be honest, even down here nobody wants to see us, as long as we are behind the walls of this factory and we are invisible then everything is fine, but when we go out to do our activities to take our children to school then nobody wants to see us. We would like to put this telescope on top of the tower because for us this telescope is a symbol, it says the reason why we are here, we are here because we have dreams, we are here, we move, we travel because we are looking for a better life. Well, let’s say that my telescope was just a work of art, a sort of sculpture installation that certainly had this meaning inside, but it becomes a monument when the community tells you that for us this is a symbol, and you would not have imagined that it could become one. The work of art when you create it, you create it to be a stimulus, not to be a symbol, it becomes a symbol when someone really recognises it as such, elects it as such, and creates the monument, so this community created the monument, and the work of art, in the end, we took it to the top of that tower really risking our lives. There’s a film called ‘Space Metropoliz’ by Giorgio de Finis and Fabrizio Boni which tells the story of this rather daring gesture, and we took it up there, and now it’s been up there for ten years, it’s ten years old this year, and it’s been ten years since anyone entering Rome by the Via Prenestina, a road that has existed since the days of the Roman Empire, whoever enters Rome by that route, before entering the city, sees this tall tower with this enormous telescope made of spent oil barrels on top, and this is the way that that community tells the rest of the world that they are not a group of thieves or whatever the worst racist culture has attributed to people who come and travel to find a better life, but they are dreamers. They are people who help us to think of a better city, and among other things they are men who live in and have created an inhabited museum, a marvelous innovative element that has been talked about all over the world, so, among other things, this is a monument that does not make a vague promise that we don’t know about, that we don’t know if it will be kept, but speaks precisely of a community that has been so dreamy as to have created at home, in Italy, in Rome, one of the most luminous and beautiful museum exceptions ever seen. It is probably a rather ‘lopsided’ prototype if you like, but certainly, no action or discovery is born perfect, but the important thing is to have taken the first step in a new direction, and the MAAM certainly is. I believe that public art today has this kind of logic and function, which is to create monuments that are proposals, even unconscious proposals, but capable of being collected by a community and transformed by it into a monument.

EM – מייַן האַרץ איז ליידיק ווי אַ שפּיגל, the Yiddish name of your project – pilgrimage to map democracy in various parts of Europe. Where do documentary end and artistic abstraction begin?

GMT – There is no documentary in this project, in the sense that an artist’s portrait is never a documentary, an artist’s portrait is always something magical from a certain point of view, magical because it is capable of showing what is not visible. A few days ago I was talking about The Portrait of Dorian Gray and I was saying that this short novel by Oscar Wilde is an interesting element to reflect on, because, on the one hand, the portrait that the painter makes of the protagonist is the only thing that he is able to look at, beyond the external aspect, but above all, there is another important aspect: that portrait in fact kills the evil in the protagonist and in doing so kills the protagonist himself, because perhaps that character Dorian Gray is a person who could not be saved. But to look at oneself, inside oneself, and to find the impossibility of bearing the evil, the evil that we have inside, means that in a certain way we necessarily begin to amend it, we necessarily begin to change it, to fight it, and by fighting it we are perhaps fighting against ourselves, but all this is right. It is never exactly a documenting as much as it is an unveiling, and the works are an unveiling, so “My heart is as empty as a mirror” is a great confession in front of oneself, and a confession is not really a document, it is a revolutionary act because it is the first step to being able to change.

EM – What has been a historical, literary, or cinematographic reference of great impact for you in the development of your artistic and personal career?

GMT – It is very difficult to answer this question because an artist lives with constant references, they are always in front of his eyes, sometimes they are conscious, sometimes unconscious, sometimes someone tells you, but you didn’t realize, that there is so much of this or that in this work. It’s like asking an astrophysicist which star in the galaxy fascinates him the most, it’s impossible, in the sense that the stars are all perfect, all beautiful, so I could name a hundred and fifty thousand and they would all be important. From the one that perhaps had the most structural role, that of creating the very image and idea of how a work of art should be done, or even just how we behave on this earth, to the one that had the smallest contribution from the point of view of volume, but sometimes it is the detail, it puts detail into your formation that is decisive because it is in the details that the really decisive things are. So I won’t answer, I can’t answer this question, it would be too long, the only thing I can say is that yes, you have to live, but this is true for artists as well as for those who just love art, you have to live constantly in this kind of great trans-temporal process, like the protagonist of Auto da fé by Canetti, who puts a team of friends around us, of people who know us very well and who are the great authors, great characters in literature. We must always be in dialogue with them because they are the repositories of the secrets that we sometimes don’t know, that we sometimes forget. The fortune of art is to be able to put us next to men who were born and lived hundreds of years ago, and who are still present with us, through their works and through their voices. Honestly, I don’t find any difference between the voice of someone who speaks to me in the present telling me what he thinks about politics and the voice of Plato who speaks to me about the Republic, there is no difference in the sense that they are two voices, the words come to me clearly in both cases, it is I who make the difference, whether I intend or do not intend to follow that thought, so I don’t think it is important to say what the references are, but the really important thing is to continue to have a constant relationship with one’s own references.

INTERVIEW WITH GÖKSU KUNAK a.k.a. GUCCI CHUNK
ELISA MUSCATELLI

Elisa Muscatelli – How would you describe your research to an audience encountering it for the first time?

Göksu Kunak – Describe my work to a person or to an audience who hasn’t seen my work yet would be
I’m saying that actually like: it’s text-based, I do text-based performances, text-based performative installations, and also text-based installations. I mean that I always start with the text and some elements in the text turn into visual elements to objects, to tableaux vivants, or to movements. I’m very interested in chrono-politics, time politics especially queer chrono-politics, and also southwest Asia, I mean middle eastern politics and chrono-politics.
These are like pillars, the basics of my work. I’m also very interested in middle eastern science fiction, speculative fiction, and also television shows, TV shows in Turkey, and how mass media has been used for certain political discourses through entertainment.
I will delve into Late Modernity and also how my upbringing was influenced by that because I used to be Muslim and I had a religious upbringing, but we were also secular, so this dilemma that’s most of the westerners wouldn’t understand within their perspective of Islam. Also, through that, I’m also very interested in Arabesk music and Arebesk culture because my dad used to love it, and he still. I guess loves Arabesk music, but I used to feel a little ashamed by that because it was not western, and it was like really eastern very rooted in the history of Turkey and that was something that I started to allow myself to like, and I’m really like now when I go for a walk, I definitely listen to Arabesk music and I really use the stories and the music or the sounds that are used in this genre, and I use a lot of repetition while delving into the idiosyncrasies of Arabesk music.

EM – Your birth name, Göksu Kunak, has Gucci Chunk as aka and after some time you decided to use the pronoun, they in your reference bio. What do these choices want to communicate?

GC – The name came because of Microsoft Word because as my name is from Turkey Microsoft Word doesn’t get that name and always corrects my name as Gucci Chunk, so I took that name as my western name, and it also says a lot about the default settings and default understandings of such programs that are most usually designed in the west. That also of course applies to, for instance, my friend Anna Fries they’re working with VR technology, and they have been telling me that within we are scanners, certain body types or bodies with wheelchairs are very hard to scan because the programmers of this scanning program don’t count such bodies as reality, that which is very sad. So, this is the exclusion and discrimination and problems that we face in this reality, of course, mirrors itself and maps itself onto this virtual reality as well so in a way it’s similar that how certain programs how certain default systems see certain bodies as or certain identities as valid and the others not. So, my chosen choice of being non-binary also relates to that, I don’t feel as this or that I feel as many and that’s why I use the pronoun they and that’s why I use different names and as a joke. I also took Gucci Chunk as my other name, which recently actually, to be honest, I’m going more with my name so, but it was a period that I was just finding this hilarious and decided to use this autocorrected name as well.

EM – In performances, you sometimes appear without clothes, others with props: a corset, an extraoral opener, eccentrically designed shoes. How do these objects contribute to the creation of the work and your personality on stage?

GK – Regarding the props and stage design or also the costumes that I’m using in my performances and installations I would say there are several things that influence certain choices. One of them is the morning TV variety shows that I was mentioning in Turkey, because in these shows for instance supposedly unrelated objects may be gathered, like a skeleton model next to a mini-Segway or cooking materials, and there’s a hospital bed and there’s a band there who sings and also plays because in these are the dramaturgy of these shows. The dramaturgy of these shows is very interesting in the sense that it’s very hybrid and one thing in a neoliberal speed happens one after another. So, this is an aspect that I use in my performances, also when it comes to choosing certain objects another thing is like because of biopolitics. My mom and dad are both doctors, I’m interested in the utensils, the tools that doctors use, or the corsets or Botox or other mouth openers like certain objects that create DIY bodily modifications, that’s something that interests me.

EM – Your artistic practice investigates chronological politics, rights, identity, and language in a perspective of awareness and change, where the stage becomes an extension of your reality. What do you think about the decreasing boundaries between art and social activism?

GC – My work is very political maybe not always into your face and maybe sometimes with abstraction, but the texts that I write are political, and the context is mostly in relation to heteronormative patriarchal structures and the criticism of these structures, so I said it is political per se, but I cannot say that I do activism. I think social activism is a totally different engagement, and it’s extremely hard. I find it extremely hard, and what I do is not activism it is art, but it has an important political ground. I do believe that for me for instance when I was growing up or when I was a young adult certain artist works changed my political perception of this world. So, I do believe that art can help to change the world because I had that change in myself and I also saw that change in other people. Because it’s, it just shows you another reality or just like in a cliché way, it also quite makes you question other ways of beings. One thing I need to clarify I guess is also I used the words a lot the East and the West and the middle eastern politics and I use such binaries and such strong words on purpose because in Turkey we grow up with this knowledge of like Turkey is a bridge between the East and the West, so and as we are middle eastern of course the U.S. politics in the region or how Europe or Germany produces certain weaponry and how this affects the region is something that I’m very sensitive about, and that I’m like that I put in my work and I use also mockery around these subjects.

EM – We often talk about translation as a political-identity act, one example was the criticism focused on Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, defined as “too white” to translate The Hill We Climb by African-American poet Amanda Gorman. How do you see artistic-performance languages in this debate?

GC – When it comes to language and the performances for me, I mean of course English is a colonial language so we all have | … |. As a writer, it was and is important to know a language well but at the same time I on purpose use hybrid creole languages, and one of the things that I love about the mixed language that is spoken in Berlin between Turkish and German like what sentences are very mixed that’s one thing that I also face myself that after 10 years of living in Berlin. Similarly, like a very mixed language in Beirut, for instance when I visited Beirut hearing a sentence beginning in Arabic and then turning into French and ending in English. I mean, of course, we need to think about the colonialist and orientalist past about the same time that’s the language living there and I find it very interesting how people find their own way of hacking the hegemonic languages. In my performances and my texts, I make mistakes on purpose or I use spoken language in the way that I take from the advertisements or the streets, and using this hybrid language is important for me.
Considering your question about Amanda Gorman and her translator, yes, I mean certain experiences I think can only be reflected through other people who have similar experiences. In terms of Amanda Gorman’s texts, that really reflects the certain existence in considering racism In the U.S., therefore, choosing a white translator I agree that this might not reflect the experience and might not reflect what the language really aims to. For instance, when The Time Regulation Institute was published in English the first translator was a person from Turkey, and the version that I have read in English in 2013 was translated by two American translators. I think they did a very good job, but of course, I’m also thinking about how is it really possible to reflect what Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar was trying to say. I like it seems like they have done a good job, but I think such questions and problems should be viewed in localities and how local political environments are being shaped by what

EM – Are there any artistic, literary, cinematic references that have had a particular impact on the development of your artistic and personal career?

GK – When it comes to strong influences for my work? Mmm MTV is one of them, as a kid as a teenager, I was watching TV and just I don’t watch it anymore, but pop culture really influences me, I also wrote my master thesis in art history in relation to pop culture. The book The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, is a speculative fiction book that goes into the mockery of modernization in Turkey, that book is an influence or Testo Junkie by Paul. B. Preciado had has also changed a lot in my perception. Besides that, Meg Stuart’s pieces, a lot of performance pieces that I watch have changed my life and my perception and my work, Matthew Barney, Ahmet Ögüt, Banu Cennetoglu, |…|. One film that I watched Ham on Rye the awkward timing in this film was very influential for me when I was working on AN(A)KARA, the piece that I performed at the Sophiensaele, and that now in different forms I performed the piece in various places. And Asiya Wadud, an amazing poet from Brooklyn, her work is very influential for me and |…|. And Ha Za Vu Zu from Turkey, a very interesting performance group, Ibrahim Mahama. I mean there are a lot of names that I can name right now.
I guess that’s the end of this session and thank you so much for listening to me and um and also giving the space um yeah have a wonderful life.

HOPE YOU ARE WELL.
HOPE.
TURKEY IS A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE EAST AND THE WEST. DO NOT KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. REMAIN ALERT. HAVE A SAFE DAY.

INTERVIEW WITH GRAHAM HUDSON
ELISA MUSCATELLI

Elisa Muscatelli – How would you describe your artistic practice to an audience that is experiencing it for the first time?

Graham Hudson – Experiencing any artwork for the first time, should be a little uncomfortable, you should have to pull your core tight, remember to breathe, and accept that discomfort is part of the process towards feeling better, towards understanding something new.

EM – In Classic Greek culture, the harmony of the body was reflected in the soul’s value and vice versa. Today, the body is stifled by an increasingly confused body positivity trend. How do you portray the 21st century’s bodies?

GH – The harmony of the body in Greek culture, was, of course steeped in class structure, abuse and slavery. Only a select few got to experience the academy, and the luxury of the gymnasium. This is mirrored today in ideas of health and fitness, the juxtaposition, or in fact, the contradiction is what interests me. We know that good nutrition and exercise can make us feel better, at the same time this message exists within a market structure, which promotes
guilt, shame, and aims to get your money, as well let’s homogenize your body, and your behavior.

EM – In the last few years, the material substance has been remodeling itself, according to the rules of virtual experience. Your account @physical_culture_philosophy presents a new way of seeing physicality. What is your vision on this topic, and what expressive limits/advantages does your social account impose, compared to sculptural practice?

GH – The vision for this Instagram account is to present art, philosophy, science, sport and fitness as one, just like the Greeks and Romans saw it. In the fitness space, it’s rare to meet someone who knows that the history of the treadmill, is actually a prison punishment. To pivot into the future, the gym is an essential piece of equipment on any space exploration, as the muscles start to atrophy, at the moment they’re out of earth’s gravity. Presenting this on
Instagram enables a direct interdisciplinary approach. In the art world, to sculpt is inherently male, “to be a sculptor”. In the fitness world ‘sculpture’, or to sculpt, is actually gendered female, as it suggests the removal of material, the space in between, is where it’s fun to play.

EM – Your recent activities include the difficult request for an artistic residency in a gym and the installation of your work in a Burberry shop. What do you think about the mixing between high fashion, multinationals, and the art
system?

GH – All of those ecosystems: fashion, art, corporate, fitness, have their own embedded hierarchies and behaviors, invisible rules, and social constructs, mixing them up, and putting them face to face, becomes like a raw material in itself. Can a gym be a gallery? Can a fashion house be a vegetable market? Where should art exist, depends on who is asking. What do we expect from art and design anyway? From creative experience? From life itself?

EM – Is there an artistic, literary, or cinematographic reference that had an impact on the development of your artistic and personal career?

GH – So, the easy answer is, of course yes, many, and while I’d love to name a few, I think what’s significant is that every encounter, influences your development in life. In terms of art, it could be a piece made by a student, by a child, or something from a museum that you’ve traveled far, and waited a long time to see. The artistic encounter is reliant on your experience, what kind of day you’re having, is it raining? Are you hungry? A brief conversation can affect your entire life, the decision to take a bus one day, instead of a train. Or to attend an art lecture that you could have easily missed, all these things form the big picture, and I think that’s kind of the inspiring and exciting thing.
Thank you

Elisa Muscatelli – How would you describe your artistic practice to an audience approaching you for the first time?

Irene Fenara – In my work I have always sought a vision, starting with an attempt to understand the vision itself. Vision is a cultural construction that is learned and trained today more and more quickly with the circulation and saturation of images. The history of vision is then inevitably linked to the optical visual technologies that are grafted onto our eyes and that transform our ability to see and therefore also to think. I am very interested in devices, any device we add to our vision determines a way of seeing differently and sometimes creates alternatives. Over time, I have felt the need to appropriate the tools of our contemporary world, the devices of vision, the technologies that orient and determine our way of seeing, going so far as to use images from surveillance cameras. A tool is never just one technology, but represents a way of thinking about what is visible.

EM – Many of the places captured by surveillance cameras appear as random landscapes. The low camera quality, angle, and lighting create images that are sometimes surreal, even giving rise to perceptual misunderstandings, as in MEGAGALACTIC (2017), where lights from computer servers appear as distant stars in a galaxy. What is it that is put on display and what is concealed?

IF – Most of the time nothing special happens, it is mostly a still and empty world that you see through private surveillance cameras, there are not many human beings because since they are private cameras, people often turn them off once they get home. It becomes interesting for me to try to understand why a camera has been placed in one place rather than another. Sometimes being able to see the explanation is quite straightforward, but many others are not. Sometimes there are constant places of interest depending on the countries I go to, for example in England I have found many indoor gardens, in China many car parks, and in California, several LED advertising signs. Then it can happen that a video camera is accidentally moved by a blow or a gust of wind and remains to stare at a white wall for years. But sometimes something happens, and it seems unbelievable just because I’m standing there looking at it, maybe it wouldn’t be so amazing if it happened at any moment, far from any kind of gaze, it would just be something that happens sometimes like the flight of a bird, and part of my research is real technological birdwatching of surveillance cameras where I collect these extraordinary moments.

EM – Today there are signs that art is migrating towards a virtual terrain, in your works, there is a process whereby the real passes through a virtual open-circuit channel – the surveillance cameras – and then returns to real life through the exhibition by means of photographic prints, projection on monitors or physical locations.

IF – Unfortunately, or fortunately, I cannot do without the concreteness of the image, even when I work exclusively in digital. I am used to living with images printed on random test media or just having them in my studio every day. I often think about how delicate photography is, sometimes I feel the need to mistreat surfaces, touch them, cut them, crumple them or throw them in a corner, and then see what survives by living with them. For me, giving body to an image means taking it to another dimension, a dimension closer to our own, and making an image concrete can make it live with us, a body among bodies, and I think this is the only way we can fully understand it in our experience.

EM – Often your eyes become those of the control technologies you choose, whose movement is programmed and limited. The work becomes a synthesis between what you want to see and what the machine is programmed to control. With all the devices switched off and without the mediation of the screen, what is your favourite thing to observe?

IF – Actually, the machine seems to me almost freer, even if it is limited in an infinity of other things, such as technical limits or limits linked to specific and delimited functionality. It seems freer to me because it doesn’t allow you to work on an aesthetic ideal that is already set but allows you to investigate a new one. What interests me about less usual technological tools is that they can really help us to dissuade our human attitude, to look at things in a way we have always been used to seeing them. In any case, I’m interested in landscapes, seen with my eyes or theirs.

EM – At the Academy you initially approached the sculpture, moving away from more and more from the materialization of the work-object towards liquid media such as video. Is there anything that has remained of your sculptural approach and that influences the way you work and see today?

IF – It may be that my need to constantly relate to space is something that stems from having studied sculpture, but also from the fact that I had the opportunity to work in a studio, in a personal space used for work at a very early age, and although the need to have a studio may seem strange, as I often work remotely and digitally, I always feel the need to project my research into the physical and tangible world, which then often takes the form of installations.