Phone Tag: Interview with Bronwyn Katz

Driekopsieland (Île à trois têtes) (2019). Mild steel, wire, steel wool, steel pot scourers, cardboard. Installation view at Biennale de Lyon, Lyon

Bronwyn Katz is a South African artist who frequently turns to metal, found metals, and other objects to consider structures of place and language. These resonant and unruly materials bring specificity and context to the minimalist forms. In this Phone Tag interview, Bronwyn describes her family connection to metalwork, the importance of sustaining networks, and how the different environments of Capetown and Johannesburg shape her practice.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

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Linnea West:  You mentioned that you are recently back from a project in Lyon. What were you working on there, and what are you working on now? 

Bronwyn Katz:  Currently I’m working in my studio. I’m preparing work for a solo show at Peres Projects in Berlin. While I was in Lyon, I was preparing work for the Biennale. I spent three weeks there preparing the work for the Biennale. 

LW:  Were you in Lyon for so long because you were making work there, or because it just takes that long to install, or…?

BK:  For the Biennale it was important that all of the artists make new works. Most of the works that were on show were new works created specifically for the Biennale. It was also important for the Biennale that we collaborate with local factories and local artisans. Many of the artists ended up producing the work from start to finish in Lyon.

Driekopsieland (Île à trois têtes) (2019). Mild steel, wire, steel wool, steel pot scourers, cardboard. Installation view at Biennale de Lyon, Lyon

LW:  What did you make?

BK:  I created an installation out of wire and steel wool. The installation is called Driekopsieland. Basically, it’s a continuation of work that I’ve done before, but on a larger scale. I was trying to also shift some of my previous thoughts and ideas about what I was making. Most of the work that I made for the Biennale is very similar to work that I made earlier, where I was working with the idea of language, language formation, and the possibility of creating an alternative language with material. Also sounds. I created sounds.

For the Biennale, using the same material, I was still interested in the sound but also in trying to create a landscape. I was also reflecting upon the fact that the Biennale was being held at an old washing machine factory, and so I wanted to create a type of metal landscape. The installation looks like a fuzzy cactus metal forest, and the wire extends from nine meters up so that it begins to look like a type of water source or rainfall.

LW:  That sounds amazing. The first image on your website is of some sculptures made out of steel wool. When I first looked at those, I didn’t know what that material was, and it almost looks like it could be soft instead of sharp. Why do you like working with steel wool? Where does that interest come from?

BK:  I think I’m generally interested in metal. Growing up, my father was a metal worker. He made gates and burglar bars, and I’ve always had a relationship with metal. I think that the work comes out the way it comes out, because I try to find alternative, quirky ways of working with the material. Instead of spending time welding a large structure, I’m more attracted to softer metals and also found metal.

Untitled, notes on perception (i) (2018). Wire and rope from used beds. 186 x 250 x 23 cm, 186 x 127 x 5 cm. Image courtesy of André Morin and the Palais de Tokyo

LW:  That’s sounds like it has been an interesting influence. I wonder who else or what else influences how you work now?

BK:  I’m not sure. I’m very influenced by my community that I grew up in, but also the community of artists that I practice with currently—my network basically. Also what’s happening in the country, in South Africa, but also the rest of the world. It’s difficult to point out one specific thing. It’s more about the way I’m living at the time, how the city works, or just what is around me and the space that I’m living in. So many things. I think place would be the number one influence on the work.

LW:  You mentioned working in a community of artists. Is that a community in Johannesburg? What’s that art scene like?

BK:  I’d say it’s a community between Johannesburg and Cape Town. I spent a lot of time in Cape Town. I studied in Cape Town. After studying, I spent two extra years in Cape Town. Most of my community is in Cape Town. Now, having moved to Jo’burg, I’ve been able to broaden my network and expand my community.

In Cape Town, I was part of iQhiya, a collective of 11 women. We all met at university, at different stages of university, and we decided to come together as a network to support each other’s practices. When I speak about a community or network, that was a very structured community-network.

In Jo’burg it is more fluid. There are artists in similar positions of their career that I’m engaging with. I’ve also recently joined a reading group called the Lessor Violence reading group. Just being able to share ideas with people on a regular basis is important for my practice.

LW:  Absolutely. I’m interested in this collective in Cape Town that you were part of. You mentioned that it was 11 women. Is it a coincidence that they all happen to be women, or was it specifically women coming together?

BK:  It was very specific. Like I said, at the time we were all studying together but at different stages. We were all black women students at the university, and the way that we were taught about art, the art world or just who was able to have a successful career or who was acknowledged within the institution… it was almost never a black woman. Coming together, we wanted to create that space where we give each other the attention and support that we were not finding within the university.

Droom boek (2017). Salvaged bed springs and mattress. 180 x 150 cm

LW:  It’s wonderful to make spaces like that. When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

BK:  I’m not sure.

[laughter]

LW:  Do you think of yourself as an artist?

BK:  I do, but I can’t think of a point where I didn’t think I was an artist or a point where I started to think that I was an artist. I’m not answering your question well. [laughs]

LW:  Well, one of the things it seems to me, from the outside, is that you’re younger and you’ve already been quite successful. That you have galleries in different places, and you’re showing work all over. Maybe you haven’t had to wrestle as much with that identity because you’ve been able to show work.

BK:  I agree with you. I was on a residency just outside of Jo’burg with an older artist a few years ago, and she was telling me every five years she had to make a decision to continue being an artist. In my career, this is something I haven’t experienced because my career has been so short. Maybe that’s a question for the future.

Untitled, notes on perception (iii) (2018). Wire. Image courtesy of André Morin and the Palais de Tokyo

LW:  Do you have a studio? What is an ideal day like in your studio?

BK:  Yes, I do have a studio. An ideal day is me waking up on time, going to studio, maybe reading for a bit, working on a project I’ve been working on, and hopefully somehow magically discover a breakthrough.

[laughter]

Or discover something that I haven’t seen in my work before or just lean something from the material. I think most days, I go to studio and I try and find something that I haven’t found yet. The ideal day would be finding something that I’m looking for.

LW:  You mentioned that you recently moved to Johannesburg. Do you think it’s important for an artist to be in a big city where there are galleries where you can see art, where you can make connections but where it’s often expensive or chaotic, or better to be somewhere smaller or quieter, where it’s a little easier to make?

BK:  Basically, this is my second time coming back to Johannesburg. I lived in Johannesburg in 2017 for a few months. I had moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg to test out how it would feel to live in the city. Then in February this year, I moved back to Johannesburg. I would say that there is a lot going on in Cape Town, in terms of cultural institutions. My gallery, for example, is not in Johannesburg; It is only in Cape Town. I don’t know if you’ve ever been, but the cities are on opposite ends [of South Africa], and they’re very different from each other.

My main reason for moving out of Cape Town was that Cape Town is a very expensive place to live, because it’s a tourist destination. It’s a lot cheaper to live as an artist in Johannesburg, especially in the center of the city. Most of the center has moved to other parts and the center has sort of been abandoned. The center is poor in Johannesburg, whereas in Cape Town the center is very wealthy. The poor in Cape Town are outside of the center, pushed out far outside of the center. It’s much more affordable to live in Jo’burg, and I would say it’s much more interesting to live in Jo’burg as well. I think Cape Town has the potential of becoming a bubble. There can be a disconnect from what’s actually happening in the rest of country. 

But in comparison to a place like Kimberly, which is a smaller city, where I’m from, that’s a different aspect of your question. I think it would be very hard at this stage of my career to live in a place like Kimberly where there is no art market. I think that maybe at a later stage of my career, that would be possible, but at such an early stage of my career I think it’s important that I live in either Cape Town or Jo’burg. And for the way that I wish my practice to grow, Jo’burg makes more sense.

LW:  That makes sense. It was great speaking with you—thank you!

BK:  Thank you.

Driekopsieland (Île à trois têtes) (2019). Mild steel, wire, steel wool, steel pot scourers, cardboard. Installation view at Biennale de Lyon, Lyon

Phone Tag: Interview with Beto Shwafaty

Shwafaty Phantom Matrix
The Phantom Matrix (Old Structures, New Glories), 2016. Sugarcane wood mill* (150 years old), electrical motor and components. Variable dimensions. Context specific installation, commissioned by SITU Project, Leme gallery, São Paulo. Photo: Filipe Berndt

In this Phone Tag interview, I speak with Beto Shwafaty about finding his way as an artist, deconstructing rhetorics of Brazilian identity, and the inherently political nature of art. Beto has a research-based practice, investigating cultural questions through material forms. He lives and works in Brazil.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions. 

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Linnea West:  What kind of work do you make?

Beto Shwafaty:  The type of practice that I am developing has a direct connection with my education. I did a visual arts BA in Brazil, then I went to work in museums as an installer and as a producer. I worked for the São Paulo Biennial, too, and worked as an assistant to some artists. Later, I went to study for an MA in Italy. It was a hybrid program, mixing curatorial studies and visual arts. I started to have deeper contact with curatorial thinking, with more theoretical debates about display, the phenomenology of contemporary art, the art system and so on. I had also, in that moment, a broad interest in institutional critique and public intervention.

These inputs influenced me to, somehow, try to develop an art practice that is not based on a specific medium, but more on an idea of how certain questions and research can influence the materialization of a specific cultural situation. I do not want to position myself as someone who can give answers, because I think that is too much to demand from art alone. But I would like to rely on the freedom that art gives us to speculate about our current times and situations, looking to the past, to the present, and also thinking about the future.

Shawafaty Phantom Matrix
The Phantom Matrix (Old Structures, New Glories), 2016. Sugarcane wood mill* (150 years old), electrical motor and components. Variable dimensions. Context specific installation, commissioned by SITU Project, Leme gallery, São Paulo. Photo: Filipe Berndt

BS: I’m still very much concerned with the material presence of art. There’s a phrase—I think it’s from Donald Judd—that first of all, art must be something interesting, then you can go deeper. I still want to develop the material side of my projects, employing diverse artistic languages. So, some works may become a sculpture, an object, a video, a photo, but normally they work together inside a context or environment.

I create my own productions, thinking on how each piece can be understood as a certain chapter of a narrative, as a certain instance of an idea, or a certain moment in the space when the viewer will be confronted not only with the ideas, the things, and the content but also with the varying materialization and relations of those elements. And I always try to choose the materials, and every visual and material aspect of the works, in relation to the researched subject. If I chose a color to paint a wall, I try to choose that color because it will be connected to the subject I am dealing with, so it can add something. Even if it’s not explicit, it is part of the research.

Shwafaty Phantom Matrix
The Phantom Matrix (Old Structures, New Glories), 2016. Sugarcane wood mill* (150 years old), electrical motor and components. Variable dimensions. Context specific installation, commissioned by SITU Project, Leme gallery, São Paulo. Photo: Filipe Berndt

LW:  I like how you said that you don’t want the art to give answers, but to be a way to speculate and think about the future. Do you think in that way your work has an activist quality?

BS:  Nowadays, we are facing very intense and strange times, everywhere, politically speaking. When I went to São Paulo in the beginning of the 2000s, the art scene was very different here in Brazil. We had fewer galleries and almost no public programs. The system was much more closed, maybe even more commercial and not so open to experimental work that would point to systems outside of the artistic one. Politics were not allowed to be touched, I can say. If you are an artist from the ’70s, maybe you had your “political phase” but in that moment, these approaches were almost dead. At that same time, you also just had documenta X curated by Catherine David, which was trying to reintroduce certain political debates in the mainstream global aesthetic and cultural arena.

I was part of a group of young artists in that time. We were not totally aware of these things, of course. Now I can talk about it in this way, but in that moment, we were more intuitive, feeling that something had to be done, both in cultural as well as in political terms. We organized a scene of collective groups, trying to work together with social movements and within urban spaces. Those experiences had an activist drive. From those experiences, I can say for sure that my works started to have deeper political concerns.

Also art, for me, is a political practice. It is because it exists only in the social realm. So I see any art piece as something political. It doesn’t matter if it talks about race, gender, landscape, or flowers. It is stating, defending, and presenting values—social, cultural, financial, economic ones– and it will be only understood as art because of social norms, agreements and also disputes that find their final existence in the collective thought of society. Some art may be more connected to certain political struggles and representation, but in the end, the very existence of art is a collective social endeavor, and so, broadly political for me.

Shwafaty Tomorrow
Installation views of Tomorrow I will remember anything, solo show at Luisa Strina gallery, São Paulo, 2019. Photo: Edouard Fraipont

BS: Later, I started to be more interested in history too. I started to look to the past, to the past of Brazil and to art history, to try to understand how we arrived in this current moment. Slowly, one big interest has started to occupy part of my practice: to explore how art was being used in political schemes, for example in national rhetorics of progress in Brazil, or as a symbol of counter-culture somewhere else, and even as tools to challenge certain situations–to try to emancipate the subjects involved.

Some people saw my most recent show at the gallery Luisa Strina in São Paulo as a quasi-activist thing. But it wasn’t all that radical in my opinion. It was more like a personal reaction to the conservative wave of policies we are facing now. Sometimes I put issues and themes that could be part of an activist agenda in my work, but I don’t call that a form of ‘direct activism.’ I’m trying to put things in a suspended situation, at a certain distance, and then relate different things, diverse situations with different subjects. I’m trying to establish connections between things that maybe no one or few people saw before, or are not comfortable to highlight. I try to address specific aspects of a political moment, a historical moment, a cultural moment. In this scheme, I hope both the art propositions and the audience may be moved, questioned, confronted, and collided.

Shwafaty Tomorrow
Installation views of Tomorrow I will remember anything, solo show at Luisa Strina gallery, São Paulo, 2019. Photo: Edouard Fraipont

LW:  To make that a little more concrete, what are you working on now? What is your current project?

BS:  I have many things. My projects take a long time to develop sometimes. Some started six years ago. It’s like having ideas that are in small boxes. Sometimes I can open and mix them. One idea brings me to another.

LW:  What is one that you’ve been thinking about lately?

BS:  Now I’m doing this research that started in Paris. It is an exploration of two Modernist Brazilian artists that lived there. They are more like an entry point, or an excuse, to think about certain issues that are still present in Brazil like national identity, self-exoticization, debates about racial representation, appropriation of the Other, control over the rhetoric around the politics of otherness, and so on.

LW:  Who are the artists?

BS:  It’s a couple, a woman and a man. The woman is the modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral, who had a major show at MoMA last year and now at MASP in São Paulo. Her husband at that time was the poet and writer Oswald de Andrade. I was in Paris visiting archives, museums, locations… going around and trying to figure out a certain type of atmosphere. Tarsila is very important for the construction of a notion of Brazilian cultural identity. I am trying to question this—not her work, I think she was an amazing woman and historical figure, very progressive in her views and actions—but still, her practice helped to create specific rhetorics for Brazilian culture that I want to review. I’m trying to articulate or embody somehow certain ideas and certain concerns that she might have had, that I also have, and that I see in her work.

So, this research is becoming a series of propositions that deal with different aspects of Brazilian questions, which are present in her work and may echo similar questions from other places, in many moments of past and present Brazilian cultural history. I am planning to somehow realize these questions through my work. So the project is not about her, but about the recurrence of issues, questions, and problems that I feel are still present and haunting realities in Brazil, or mine at least.

Shwafaty Foundations of the Design
Installation views of solo show Foundations of the Design Substance: Cultural Metaphors to Design a New Future, at OCA Ibirapuera – City Museum of São Paulo, 2014 – in development. Sculptural elements and printed material . Metal structures, c -print on cotton paper, ‘lambri’ wall paneling (wood), MDF sheets with bass relief texts, automotive paint, blasted glass and printed graphic material, video. Variable dimensions. Photo: Edouard Fraipont

LW:  When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

BS:  That happened in a very strange way. When I was younger, I was drawing comics, superheroes and that stuff. I had a teacher that was a bit older than me; I think I was 15 or 16 years old, and he was 19 and attending the art course in the university. We became friends. I started to go to the university, to the parties. I started to have older friends from the art school. I knew I would like to do something with drawing, but I was not sure what. Maybe design, maybe architecture, maybe advertisIng. Then I said, “OK, I’m going to do visual arts as a basis. From there, I can decide later.”

I didn’t see myself at that time as an artist. I was just exploring things. I had no experience. The course here was based a lot in techniques—painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture classes—not much about what you wanted to do or why you want to be an artist—the basic questions that later you start to put to yourself. So, I was just doing the activities and exploring things.

Shwafaty Foundations of the Design
Operational structure for a conceptual field: Centro direzzionale (diagram transformed into structure), 2013. Metallic structure, mdf plates with CNC engraving (bas relief), automotive paint, sand blasted tempered glass and engraved granite. 12 m2 (three modules measuring 2,05 x 2,4 x 0,05 m each). Photo: Edouard Fraipont

BS: I started to understand that maybe art would be what I wanted to do when I began to question the professors about things that they were not comfortable answering, regarding techniques or, if they were talking about artists, I was asking strange questions about their practices. My friends were not doing that. I thought to myself, “OK, I have this inquiring mind about art that others do not have. Maybe I needed to understand this more and better.”

I left school and started to work with other artists. I think my second school was the biennial of São Paulo. I worked in three biennials as an installer, assisting artists and being a producer. I was in direct contact with many great artists, generous people… from whom I learned a lot. It was an amazing experience.Then I think I started to see myself as an artist. It became clearer when I had the opportunity to travel to do the master degree. Then I said, “If I go away to do this, then it’s a life investment.”

LW:  Yes, that’s a life choice.

BS:  Still, today, in fact, one of my big questions is “what is it to be an artist?” Sometimes, in workshops and similar things, younger people ask me: “What is the formula? What should I do? Teach me how to be an artist” or something like that. I say, “No one can teach you. I can talk to you, discuss with you your ideas, the things you are doing. You can learn techniques. But to be an artist, it’s something very personal. Not just personal. It’s about the risks you want to take, because it’s not an easy job.”

It’s not a profession. I normally say it’s more like a curse.

LW:  [laughs] OK.

BS:  I say, “If you want to be an artist, try this. Try to stay six months without producing anything. If you manage, then you don’t need to do it. It’s not a necessity. Then find something else. You can still do creative work in other fields.”

It’s a bit romantic, I must say, this vision. But for me, there is a degree of necessity that art must feed itself from. It must be grounded on an urgency. I’m not trying to give a formula or anything, but the type of artwork that I like to see is where I can see the artist dealing with this aspect of the work, of art, that ends up reflecting on other aspects of our existence.

Scwafaty Remediations
Installation view of Remediations, installed at Paço das Artes, São Paulo. 2010 –2014. Installation composed by video, TV monitor, dvd player, various furniture, construction materials, vitrine, photographs and graphical interventions on found printed matter. Various materials, dimensions variable. Photo: Edouard Fraipont

LW:  This leads into my next question, which is about who has influenced you…

BS:  It’s very difficult to say because I…How can I say? I have no prejudices.

LW:  Everything. [laughs]

BS:  I can look to a painter and see interesting things there. I can look to an installation artist and see things there.

There are artists that I have been in closer contact with that influenced me, not directly in aesthetic or practical terms, but sometimes in a more human way. I had many, many good teachers that were really important in how they transmitted a certain ethos, a certain way of positioning yourself in relation to the world, to the art system, to your practice.

Of course, there are artists and intellectuals that I really like. I like Simon Starling, with whom I studied in Frankfurt. He was a super generous person, an amazing mind and an amazing artist. He’s really good. At Campinas University, Luise Weiss is an amazing artist working on personal memories employing printmaking, photography, and objects. There, I also met Tuneu, who is an incredible painter and teacher, super generous—coincidentally he was the only student of Tarsila do Amaral. I still remember one class of art history that he gave, still using photographic slides, showing and putting in relation images of cultural artifacts from diverse eras, in a double screen projection… all the students in the dark room seeing that compression of time and space. It was an installation. Also, classes of art and cinema history with Jorge Coli and Nelson Aguilar, at the Human Sciences and History department, were extremely important.

Shwafaty Remediations
Installation view of Remediations, installed at Paço das Artes, São Paulo. 2010 –2014. Installation composed by video, TV monitor, dvd player, various furniture, construction materials, vitrine, photographs and graphical interventions on found printed matter. Various materials, dimensions variable. Photo: Edouard Fraipont

BS: Many friends in Italy as well—I was very lucky because Italy became my second home. The course I did there was very political driven, so the director of the course became an important influence, Marco Scottini. Francesco Jodice, a photographer and film maker that I worked with in Brazil, in the 2006 São Paulo Biennial, who also taught in this course and helped me to go to Italy, is a reference. He has a very sharp mind and eye to the social and political sides of our society and culture.

Then, I did workshops and things like that. I met in Luxembourg Marjetica Potrc, Monica Narula from Raqs Meda Collective… there I met too the curator Berit Fischer from Berlin. In Frankfurt I had contact also with Nikolaus Hirsch and Eyal Weissman. Their work were also very inspiring. I mean, there are many, many influences. I try to look at what interest me with an openness that may allow me to learn something from that contact.

LW:  Do you have a community of people in São Paulo that you speak with, that you discuss ideas with?

BS:  We are a big community. The thing is that I don’t live in São Paulo. I live in Campinas, which is a city 100 kilometers from São Paulo. My family is here. Because of a personal situation, we live here, and then I chose to have the studio in São Paulo because I also work hiring different people to produce specific things and this is much easier to organize in São Paulo. Also, everyone comes and passes through São Paulo. Part of the week I’m here in Campinas, part of the week in São Paulo in the studio or outside, doing something.

LW:  How long have you had that kind of situation, where you’re in‑between the two places?

BS:  All my life. I was always attached to Campinas. It’s where my university was. I met my wife here. Then I had friends here. My house was here. I had friends and it’s a big countryside town. It’s not big but it’s not rural. It’s in between. You have more nature than in São Paulo, let’s say. Sometimes it’s good to balance. São Paulo is very fast and very dense. Here I have a more quiet and calm reality.

Shwafaty Remediations
To Govern is to Communicate (Super block with red square in a new horizon), 2014. Announcement on behalf of the advertising class praises the president General Emilio Medici in the Panamerican Day of Propaganda (December 4th, 1970) with facsimile of page from the photobook Brazil Magic Land (1970’s) with painting interventions. C-print on cotton paper with oil painting interventions, 70×50 (framed). Photo: Edouard Fraipont

LW:  Do you think it’s important for an artist to be in a big city like São Paulo, where there’s an art scene? There’s all these resources and people are coming through, but it also tends to be very expensive and chaotic.

BS:  It’s not a formula. I need both, and I’m glad that I can have both. It’s not easy to be here in Campinas, because Campinas has a very small and relatively disconnected art scene. In São Paulo I can meet more people and it’s more productive in this way.

But it depends on how you manage to set up your life. For sure, sometimes an artist must be in the big centers, somehow, to show what he’s doing. I don’t think you need to live there, but you need to be present somehow from time to time.

It’s not an easy question because nowadays a lot of people can’t live anymore in the big cities like New York, Paris, London…

LW:  This is why I ask. You move to a big city as a young artist, and you think that because you’re there, it’s all going to happen in your career, but in fact it can be incredibly expensive and difficult.

BS:  Maybe it’s not the best situation for an artist, because you need really to be aware of how you invest your time, your money, your resources and everything. I understand that the U.S. has a very powerful and strong center for arts in New York city, but I prefer the set up of Europe, where you have a network of different places, different perspectives, different sizes, and maybe a bit more opportunity.

Shwafaty Remediations
Enough of legends, let’s profit, 2014. Advertising of the SUDAM (Superintendency for the Development of Amazonia) during the military regime, in a concept of amazonia as a open space to be conquered, colonized and dominated by capital; with facsimile of page from the photobook Brazil Magic Land (1970’s) with painting interventions. 2 c-prints on cotton paper with oil painting interventions, 70×50 (framed). Photo: Edouard Fraipont

LW: So when you are in your studio in São Paulo, what is an ideal day like?

BS:  For me, it’s very difficult to have a routine, every day the same stuff. It’s impossible. One thing that I know for sure is that I can’t repeat myself. In relation to my artwork, let’s say, if I’m going to do a series of things, I can do three or four, and then I’m starting to say, “OK, what comes next?”

The studio for me is a place where I store things, sometimes I produce and try things out, or assemble the final stages of a work or idea. It is also a place of quiet reflection. In the end, it is storage of things and ideas, where I can have some references for things that I’m working on, or planning to work with. It’s a place where I can take time to research the subject of a book or a paper that I’m interested in. Then I could meet a friend for a coffee or a beer or whatever, to talk. Sometimes, just to walk around.

This more open‑minded environment is very productive for me, when I don’t have to do things. It’s when things happen to me. When I leave space, when I am on the move, then things can slowly start to connect to each other, to emerge and become clear as a proposition or direction to be taken… but it is never an easy process.

LW:  Great. Thank you so much.

BS:  Thank you for listening.

Phone Tag: Interview with Etienne de France

The Green Vessel (video still), HD video, color and stereo, 51 min., 2019.

Etienne de France is an interdisciplinary artist who explores ideas related to nature and architecture, often through narrative and sculptural forms. In this Phone Tag interview, Etienne and I speak about travel, giving up control in filmmaking, and how to stay grounded in one’s practice.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

Linnea West:  How do you know [former Phone Tag participant] Chris Ulutupu?

Etienne de France:  I was doing a residency in Wellington, [New Zealand] in 2016, in a program that is quite special called Te Whare Hēra. I was working on a film project—actually, an installation with a film component called The Green Vessel.

Because the residency was linked to the University of Massey, Wellington, they invited me to come a bit earlier to the residency to participate in a retreat with seminars for the master degree students before school started.

They asked me to come because, due to the nature of the project, maybe I would meet some motivated MA student who could help me out, and there I met Chris. We had a very spontaneous contact, and appreciate each other and each other’s works. I have to say that Chris really saved my life many times on this project.

At that time, like I think he told you in the interview he did with you, he was doing various assistant director work. For me his profile was great because he has one foot in the cinema, one foot in visual art. We just got along very well in that project. He helped me from casting, to production, to AD work, so we had a very intense working relationship and we became friends.

The Green Vessel (video still), HD video, color and stereo, 51 min., 2019.

LW:  I’m already a little jealous of your work because it seems to take you to the most beautiful places on earth.

EF:  [laughs] Yeah, I was very lucky the last few years, to do projects in Chile, New Zealand, and the United States. It’s wonderful.

LW:  Let’s back up a little bit. If you were going to tell somebody what you make, what do you make? What’s your practice?

EF:  I do series of works that are often quite narrative. Often, the central element is a film or a large sculpture work. I like to draw an array of related works around it. I appreciate work that exists as a long series in which parts are sometimes interdependent, or sometimes autonomous. I like a very narrative aspect—it could be even a film—and then having objects that are related. That’s in terms of my practice technically.

In terms of subject, since the beginning I was interested in questioning what the concepts of nature and landscape mean. That can be a questioning of a cultural paradigm, sometimes.

I also have a strong interest in architecture and science, and I draw a lot of influence from utopian experimental architecture.

LW:  When you are going to these very different places, is it because you’re looking for that kind of landscape, or is it just a place to stage an imaginative narrative?

EF: It depends. I don’t necessarily choose the place I’m going. I don’t say, “OK, now I want to go to,” for example, “Belgium,” but I have wishes.

I think sometime it was opportunity that arose. For example, New Zealand was a residency. I didn’t think I would apply at first, because I’m a slow worker. I make a lot of research and a lot of documentation and I didn’t have a reason to go there. I don’t like to go only one time to a place. But when I saw that I could relate New Zealand to the residency and project I was doing before, that’s how it made sense for me.

Sometimes you get surprised. At the end of my residency in New Zealand, I did a lecture in Auckland. I met a group of Chilean curators there, who later invited me to Chile! Then I see relationship between places, for example, between New Zealand, California, and Chile. You have nature policies, a colonial history that can be compared. They are not the same, but they can be put in relation to one another.

For example, when I met Chris, the project had already started in France. I knew already when I was in France that I would go to Colombia, and later to New Zealand. I started to build an idea for a film that would not necessarily document or name each space, but maybe work with the context of each space.

I also do projects based in France. I have been working on a film project in the countryside, in Burgundy, for a few years now.

The Green Vessel (video still), HD video, color and stereo, 51 min., 2019.

LW:  You live in Paris, right?

EF:  Yeah, at the moment I’m in Paris.

LW:  It seems like all of your work is not really in the city though. It’s staged outside of cities.

EF:  It’s true. I lived for many years in Iceland.

LW:  I went to Iceland the summer before last, and I was blown away by how epic, and foreign, and strange the landscape is.

EF:  Actually, I did my studies there.

LW:  I don’t know if I could spend a winter there.

[laughter]

EF:  Winter can be difficult there. I stayed seven years and I did a BA of Visual Art there, and then I stayed a few more years. I was in an interesting community of artists there. Reykjavik is a normal city, but it’s really easy to go to the countryside quickly in Iceland.

A lot of my work is located in the countryside or landscape context, but I’m also interested in urban planning. For example, I’ve been doing various projects on utopian architecture or experimental architecture, and especially one that I was developing in Iceland about mobile cities.

Icelantraincity, inkjet print on paper, 80 × 120 cm, 2010.

Currently I’m working on a sculpture and agriculture project about implementing more agriculture in cities. I don’t think you can be schizophrenic and have a representation of landscape without understanding the city context and the urban relationship to it, and how cities are connected to the landscape or what we call “nature.” I do not have an idealistic view of nature.

LW:  In terms of what you’re working on now, is it a project based on urban farming?

EF:  I have been developing a project with an agriculture and horticulture school in the suburbs of Paris. I conceived of a permanent work for the site of the school. I have also been doing workshops with college and high school students over the past year.

My project is a sculptural or landscape intervention, composed of a sort of theater architecture and sculptural elements in the middle of an agricultural field. The work can be crossed and entered. You can stand in the middle of the field and since it is located in a slope, you can sit on these architectural elements and appreciate the landscape.

This work tries to blur differences between what could be a sculpture, a garden, and an agricultural field: Trying to break down these hierarchical categories, how we can work between these lines–blending aesthetic and functional concerns… Every year, new edible crops and plants will be planted. That project will be launched in June 2019.

LW:  That’s great. When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

EF:  In my first year of art history and archeology.

LW:  How old were you?

EF:  I was like 17, 18. I grew up in an artistic context, and I was already writing poetry and doing photography. But until I went to university to study archeology and art history, I didn’t really realize that I wanted to be an artist more than an archeologist.

LW:  When you think about people who have influenced you as you were developing a practice, who do you think about?

EF:  They are so many in the visual art world, in cinema, in theory, in science. If I think about artists that have recently influenced me, I would mention Amar Kanwar. His films and his activist practice are a model for me. I like how he arranges his writings in a sculptural way. His combination of poetics and activism is unique. I could also refer to the work of Maria-Theresa Alvez, which has been very important for my practice
in the last few years.

Peter Watkins and his films blending fiction and reality have been very influential on the development of my work.  

LW:  Does your own work have this kind of activist quality?

EF:  I hope I can make bridges with various forms of activism, and do a form of activism through my artistic practice. I try to participate in the way I can in our current truly alarming situation. I also believe that you have to work hand-in-hand with activists or scientists or indigenous people, as I did for example with Mohave people in the USA. I believe in these alliances, but it has to be built carefully and always with great respect. You have to listen, know where you stand and explain how you work.

Looking for the Perfect Landscape (video still), HD video, color and stereo, 45 min., 2017.

LW:  With the project in the United States, what was your working relationship like with the people from the Mohave tribe?

EF:  I was working with Mohave people who live at the border between Arizona and California. This project “Looking for the Perfect Landscape” was researching how you can deconstruct the idea of landscape, through their perspective and experience. How can we deconstruct this notion of perfect landscape in the southwestern United States—a colonial and aesthetic concept that was imposed on Native American lands, a practice and a form of representation that is still largely embedded still in visual arts, cinema, and music video?

I engaged in a discussion with a Mohave spokesman from the Colorado River Indian Tribe. We discovered a common interest in working together on these issues. Then I was invited to spend some time with them. At the time I was based in Los Angeles for three months and so I was going back and forth to Parker, Arizona and we got to know each other.

There were four main people that I was in contact with. I built a story around them and submitted a script to them, which we discussed and choose to work from. It was a really organic process. Like every project, it was at times very easy, and sometimes very difficult. It was a very powerful experience for me, and I learned a lot from it.

Looking for the Perfect Landscape (video still), HD video, color and stereo, 45 min., 2017.

LW:  What’s hard, I think, when you work with other people in that way, you give up control. Whatever your original idea was, it changes by the time you get to the end.

EF:  I am interested in cinema, but what I blame in cinema is this idea of control. The Green Vessel, the film that I was doing with Chris, was much more scripted. It was a fiction. There was much more control even though, due to the nature of the project, we were improvising a lot visually.

But with the Mohave people, it was a very different process. I had an idea of a script I wanted to work within, but then the whole content was reality. It’s a very different way of working and you have to be much more flexible. It makes sense because there is no other choice. If I had tried to control something, it would have gone wrong. What was important to me was to show them how my subjectivity or how my sense of aesthetic could come in an interesting dialogue with what they wanted to speak about or what we were speaking about together.

It’s important to challenge this idea of control in films. Maybe you don’t have a script but rather a grid of ideas, a grid or line of thoughts that you want to put in perspective. Then you work with the people in the space or in the land, and things happen. It’s not really improvised, but it’s also not normal cinema or film creation. It’s very different.

Looking for the Perfect Landscape (video still), HD video, color and stereo, 45 min., 2017.

LW:  Given that you’re working a lot in film, but you also make sculptures, you do other things, what’s an ideal day in the studio? Do you have a studio? What’s an ideal day making?

EF:  My ideal day is I like to come early, and I like to start the day with some reading. Sometimes I like to do drawing in the morning or works on paper. In the afternoon I would do more video editing, or emails, or coordinating projects. Of course, that can shift depending on what’s happening at the moment, but that’s my ideal day. I like to work like everybody else, on a regular time.

LW:  It’s like a 9:00 to 5:00 job…

EF:  Well, rather 9:00 to 7:00…

[laughter]

EF: But it depends, because sometimes I do workshops or I teach. I like to have a full day in the studio, but it is important to be outside regularly, for research and meetings or just for seeing exhibitions and films.

LW:  Do you think it is more important for an artist to be in a big city like Paris, where there’s an art scene and there’s opportunities in galleries, or to be in a smaller place where you can focus on making and living is less expensive?

EF:  You have to do both. For me it’s a constant tension. I have one foot in a really small village in the countryside, and I also spend a lot of time here in Paris.

Reykjavik in Iceland, or Wellington in New Zealand, two cities that I experienced for some time, are smaller places that offer a lot, artistically and for you every-day life. Both have rapid access to areas of nature, forest, mountains.

I have to say, due to the different residencies I have been doing lately abroad, I don’t feel frustrated to be based in Paris at the moment.

Being in a village or a small city, or being in a metropolis just offer very different possibilities. Ultimately, in the future, I would love to have a little foot in the city and to spend most of the time in the countryside.

LW:  A lot of people say they want both.

EF:  They want both, but then you have the economic question, that was implied in your question. I am really lucky at the moment, to have a studio here in Paris and to be able to afford living in Paris, but it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense to spend to all that money in Paris or very expensive cities such New York or Los Angeles.

LW:  I feel like I know artists who go from residency, to residency, to residency for a few years. It seems like it could be very rich but also exhausting.

EF:  I have met people going from residencies to residencies. I think it’s an impossible way of life for me. I have been doing various residencies
in the past few years and being able to travel for your work is amazing, but at the end of the day, I also need to be grounded somewhere, and I need to be in touch regularly with familiar lands, familiar location, and familiar people.

LW:  Well, thank you so much.

EF:  Thanks a lot.

Looking for the Perfect Landscape (video still), HD video, color and stereo, 45 min., 2017.