Phone Tag: Interview with Etienne de France

Posted on May 8, 2019 by Linnea

*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.

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.

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.

Sketch for Between, site specific sculpture project, 2019.
Sketch for Between, site specific sculpture project, 2019.
Sketch for Between, site specific sculpture project, 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.

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.

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.

Hilma af Klint’s Vast Cosmic Synthesis at the Guggenheim

Posted on March 10, 2019 by Linnea

Installation view. *Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future* at the Guggenheim Museum, October 12, 2018 – April 23, 2019.

Between 1906 and 1915, a young artist in Stockholm worked tirelessly under the instruction of a set of spirit-guides to complete a set of 193 paintings. She dreamed that they would one day decorate a circular temple that spiraled upward. Over a hundred years later, that vision came partially true, with the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future installed in the Guggenheim’s high round atrium. Hilma af Klint’s work, largely unknown until about 30 years ago, feels like a surprise and revelation for several reasons. She was a successful female artist in Stockholm at a time when women did not have professional careers, and she was a visionary who painted abstract paintings avant la lettre. For the former, Hilma produced careful botanical illustrations; the focus of the exhibition is her magnificent body of abstract paintings, particularly the 193 paintings for the temple.

*Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 13*. 1915. Oil on canvas.

The exuberantly colored paintings look as though they could have been made yesterday, so easily do they fit the visual mores of our time. Hilma intended these paintings “for the future”, when they would be more readily understood as diagrams that reveal the essential nature of the universe. Abstraction as we often understand it–simplifying the form of a real object like a tree or chair to get at its essential nature, for example–is not what is happening here. “Nonobjective” painting, which the Guggenheim was founded as a temple to, use geometries to attain a spiritual dimension instead of relating to the physical world. Hilma’s work, although spiritual and geometric, operates by yet another means.

*Group VI, Evolution, No. 7*. 1908. Oil on canvas.

The artist’s extensive notebooks and journals detail how she saw these works as diagrams of natural and scientific phenomena, such as atoms and evolution. It is as if she was attempting to make a periodic table of the cosmos in 193 paintings. A devout Christian, Hilma famously claimed that spirits guided her early work, telling her what to paint. Today that sounds like quackery. It was more common and accepted within society, and, indeed, the scientific community at the time. Her approach is painstaking: she strives for an accurate analysis of the systems of the cosmos using visual means.

Installation shot, *Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 5 – 8, Adulthood*. 1907. Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas.

*Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood*. 1907. Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas.

The The Ten Largest series represents the different stages of life. Each line and color aligns with a complex symbology that Hilma created. For example, Hilma associated the blue of the above work with childhood. These ten paintings are presented in order of childhood, to youth, to adulthood, to old age on the Guggenheim’s walls, which is what the artist intended: they were meant to be seen as a series and only in that order can they represent that whole lifespan of a person. Hilma made these large, roughly 10×8-foot paintings on the floor (before Pollock). This series is the first you encounter at the Guggenheim, setting the stage for the exuberant and complex paintings the fill the circular ramp.

Tree of Knowledge, No. 1. 1913. Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper.
Tree of Knowledge, No. 3. 1915. Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper.
Tree of Knowledge, No. 4. 1915. Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper.

At the same time, watercolors like the gorgeous Tree of Life illustrations show how Hilma also worked on a very small scale. She was an inveterate planner and notetaker. Partially this is because she wanted to make sure future generations understood her work. Notebooks contain detailed instruction on different symbols or the meaning of certain colors. This care points to her confidence that future generations, if not her own, would appreciate the detailed, god-given visions that she presents.

*Altarpieces* (from left to right): *Group X, No. 2*, *Group X, No. 3*, *Group X, No. 1*. All oil and metal leaf on canvas. 1915.

After 1915, and a personal crisis, Hilma’s practice changed from one of explicit direction by spirit guides to a more self-directed selection of imagery, in series of paintings such as Evolution, Dove, Swan. For Hilma, the scientific and spiritual worlds were naturally conjoined, and so she moved easily between the subject matter of Evolution to the trio of Altarpieces (above). At the same time as Hilma explored a radically non-representational mode of painting, she was trained and successful as a botanical draftsperson, of which there are a few examples. Her life’s work, therefore, seems to have been one of vast synthesis. Hilma’s colorful iconography illustrates no less than the interconnected nature of all natural systems and world religions. Sweeping from the micro of a botanical illustration like the one below to the paintings above, Hilma could see a world in a grain of sand, and then create a visual analysis of its place in the cosmos.

*Untitled*. 1890s. Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper.

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future is on view through April 23 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Phone Tag: Interview with Chris Ulutupu

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Linnea

In this Phone Tag interview, Christopher Ulutupu talks about inspirations ranging from images of a 1970s drug fueled photo shoot, Romantic painting, and kareoke; his close collaborative relationships with those who work on his filmed projects, often friends and family; and how he came to the role of artist relatively recently. Chris makes video- and performance-based works out of Wellington, New Zealand. You can watch more of his work here. — *Fitu (Fame)* (2018). Vinyl print on billboard. Installation shot. Courtesy of SCAPE Public Art Festival.

In this Phone Tag interview, Christopher Ulutupu discusses inspirations ranging from images of a 1970s drug-fueled photo shoot, Romantic painting, and kareoke. We also talk about his close collaborative relationships with those who work on his filmed projects, often friends and family, and how he came to the role of artist relatively recently. Chris makes video- and performance-based works out of Wellington, New Zealand. You can watch some of his work here.

*****

Linnea West: It was great of [previous participant] Olivia Koh to connect us. Do you know her through the project you did on recess, or did you know her before?

Christopher Ulutupu: I met Olivia at the Hobiennale. It was in Hobart in Tasmania. For the first time, they decided to do a biennale. I was the exhibiting artist for a gallery up here in Wellington called play_station. I also met another guy, Jake Preval, there. We got on like a house on fire.

I don’t know if you know the context of Hobart or Tasmania. It’s the most southern part of Australia. It’s an island separated from the rest of the land mass. It’s colder. It’s got a different feel to it than the rest of Australia. It’s got a very tight‑knit community there. Our community is amazing and very supportive of each other.

From there, Liv contacted me and was like, “Do you want to show one of your video works?” We went from there.

LW: Nice. Is video and film typical of your work?

CU: I generally make videos now, video and performances, because I’ve found that it’s probably the most payoff I get in terms of creating or money‑making is through a moving image.

LW: Performance as well? Are you a performer?

CU: Yeah, I was both. I did my undergrad in performance design, which was a course set between the New Zealand Drama School, Toi Whakaari, and Massey University. I was specifically looking at performance for theater, film, also performance art.

It was a degree very specific to performance, and being very attracted to different types of performances, especially dynamics between public and private performances, ritual in performance. All these kind of things, I was really interested in earlier on in my career.

*Fitu (Lelia)* (2018). Vinyl print on billboard. Installation shot. Courtesy of SCAPE Public Art Festival.

LW: What are you working on right now?

CU: I just finished a show down in Christchurch, which is in the South Island, which was part of a public arts festival called SCAPE. It happens every year. They commissioned me to do a work, and I proposed to them that I would do the third part of a trilogy.

This final one was shot in the ski field. I took a camera crew and the cast out to the ski field and did some performance stuff there, sang some songs and choreographed a set of pieces.

I was inspired by this strange magazine article in Elle Magazine about a winter Vogue shoot back in the 1970s in the Andes, on the border of Chile and Argentina. I got inspired as the story was very kind of Bond‑esque.

The story goes, photographers and a whole bunch of models including Jerry Hall go down to this resort, a ski lodge, down in Argentina and Chile. They get snowed in and they get surrounded. All they have in the hotel is an open bar and a bag of cocaine and a few bits of food.

[laughter]

*Lelia* (2018). 20:33 min. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

CU: They decide to have this drug‑fueled photo shoot. It turns out to be one of the best winter shoots they’ve ever had. They got these beautiful shots of them fooling around with all this fur, absolute decadence. Actually really an absurd story.

And then, the Chilean government won’t let them leave the resort. There’s a whole bunch of security guards there, and so the Argentinian and American government hatch this plan to release them by getting them to ski down this ski field, in their furs and the jewelry that they wore for the shoot. They ski all the way down to meet this helicopter that takes them away.

LW: That’s a real thing that happened?

CU: Real thing. It is very Bond‑y. I was inspired some of the images of the story and use it as an aesthetic crux to inform someone my costume ideas and how I wanted it photographed.

LW: What’s the story arc over the course of the trilogy?

CU: The first one, Into The Arms of My Colonizers, is about courtship and desire… lust. Framing it so you’re asking questions about identity politics. I feel the question has always been, “Where do I belong?” or “Where do I fit in?” Then in that particular work I’m asking more “Who do you want to be?” or “What is it you desire?”

I feel like we, as diasporic artists, can start to piece those things together ourselves. We spend a lot of time though articulating or asking, “I don’t belong here, but where do I belong? I’ve got connections here.” A lot of energy is spent doing that. I feel we should be asking more along the lines of “Who do you want to be?” You can construct these narratives, I think, and I have the luxury to do that.

*Into The Arms Of My Colonizer* (2016). 16:22 min. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

The second one is called Do You Still Need Me. It’s a lot of performances in nature, in a forest, and a sand dune. A whole bunch of people, all of them actors and models, are singing karaoke. There’s a screen and they sing karaoke in nature. That was inspired by an artist friend Etienne De France. He asked me one day if I enjoyed poetry in nature. I was like, “Well, not really. It’s kind of a white thing.” [laughs]

It’s not really what I do. The equivalent for me is probably karaoke in nature. I really enjoy karaoke. So I did that. Took a whole bunch of singers out to these really picturesque places around New Zealand and just sung some big ’80s and ’90s power ballads.

If the first one’s about love and courtship, I think the second one was about heartbreak, dissonance, and miscommunication, and longing for the other person. Both these works have a strange dynamic where I tease or allude to this relationship with a colonizer. [laughs] I can be quite playful with it, but also present the heartbreak.

Then the third and final chapter, it’s the marriage: the acknowledgement that we exist in the same space, that we have a partnership. Through all the heartbreak and miscommunication, it’s a sense of acknowledging that we exist in the same space and we must coexist. I feel that this is an ongoing thing. It’s not going to just disappear.

*Do you Still Need Me* (2017). 21:20 min. Installation shot. Courtesy of play_station gallery, Wellington, NZ, as part of the Hobiennale show *The Romantic Picturesque* (2017).

LW: It’s interesting that you cast it all as a romantic adventure.

CU: I feel like there is so much heartbreak and so much sadness between this particular relationship between indigenous, colonizing…anywhere. Specifically, I was looking at probably more a New Zealander binary in that relationship. For me, it’s hard to say, “You did me wrong.” [laughs] “And you should pay me.” It’s not really how my personality goes. It gets layered with a whole bunch of funness or laughter and humor.

LW: You mentioned one person who influenced you, but in general who or what are your influences in the making?

CU: I’m very influenced by those who are around me, my loved ones. Especially in all the films that I have, I’ve mainly just cast friends and family. I see a person, and for some reason I get a flash of, “Oh, it would be great if they were here in this setting in this particular way with these people.” That’s how I make work actually. I’m inspired by other people and that triggers other things or other images.

LW: It was interesting watching your videos. It felt at times like I was watching a painting. It’s like a living tableau.

CU: Yeah. Lots of my works—not particularly this trilogy, but including this trilogy—reference Romantic painters.

LW: Romantic, capital R. Like Delacroix.

CU: Exactly. I think it was because when I first started looking at shooting in nature and I started recreating postcards and these beautiful picturesque places, I was looking at photography specifically. Photographic practices that documented indigenous people, brown people.

LW: –which there is such a history of.

CU: Yeah, there’s a huge history of. But then, when I developed and created more work, I realized it wasn’t those images that actually helped inform my practice or the way I make decision‑making around designing the frame and the staging. I was actually painting. It felt more like the Romantic painter, trying to emulate the scale of things or the beauty of the surroundings. There’s a two‑dimensionality that I really enjoy about having no moving frame or just having a still frame. Just the action, the performances be very still, static.

I’m also inspired by other video. I’m not the greatest fan of Matthew Barney, but I really enjoy the way he creates imagery. He superimposes or juxtaposes a whole bunch of different things to make a new meaning. I love that. I work inherently like that, try to put together certain things, make it new.

Who else? Sofia Coppola, the director. I read somewhere that she compiles a list of songs, and then writes a script based on these 10 or 15 songs. There’s something really nice about that.

*Dispel* (2017). 9:37 min. Installation shot. Courtesy of play_station gallery, Wellington, NZ, as part of the Hobiennale Show *The Romantic Picturesque* (2017).

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

CU: Honestly, I think when I finished my master’s degree, because I didn’t do my undergrad in fine arts or visual arts. I became a set designer and worked in an art department for many years. I worked freelance as an art director for film, mainly.

Then I got sick of that because I was working too much. It was, “Oh, I wanna help people!” I would try to become a social worker, but I wasn’t going back to study. I ended up working for corrections. I worked in a probation office for a couple of years. Then I was like, “Actually I want to be an artist.” So I quit my job. That’s when I decided to do my master’s.

LW: That’s a 180 shift.

CU: It was like: “Go,” and then I did it. I remember the point where I started, I had just finished working at corrections. I had my leaving party on the Friday, and had Saturday, Sunday, and then Monday started the Masters of Fine Arts.

Since then, I’ve been propelled into a whole world. The art industry, for me, is still relatively new. I’m still trying to navigate that as well, and be familiar with the industry I’ve chosen to be in.

LW: That’s exciting. What’s an ideal day in the studio? Are you in your studio now?

CU: Yeah. I also work next door. I manage a costume store. Between these two places, that’s how I create ideas for my work. It’s funny because this year I’ve been working here and at home, and between the two you can come up with ideas and sketch out and plan, because most of my practice is about logistics and planning…facilitating a whole bunch of people to come at a certain time to do this one thing. Between those two places I feel like I get a lot of room to explore and do stuff.

LW: What’s your process like for a film? Do you have it all story‑boarded out? Is it a little bit left open?

CU: For me now, the way I work and how I dig into the answers, I bring all the elements to the site of location that I’m shooting, and then I build a frame. There’s no script or storyboards—that’s what I was trying to get away from. When I was working as an art director, I couldn’t help but feel there was something missing. Because it can be quite hierarchical, it can be very negative.

As part of that, I decided that I would not have a script, not having a storyboard. Be more like: “Bring your talents, what can you do?” Some people were like, “I’m really good at makeup and hair. I did my sister’s wedding?” I was like, “Great you’re in!” One film shoot that I did, I shot at a church one time. The people making the food were my aunties. They catered the two days’ shoot that I did.

That’s the energy I want to create. The final work is important, don’t get me wrong, but just as important as the process. Making sure that people who were involved with the project have autonomy over their experiences whilst shooting the work.

LW: Do you have any interest in being in front of the camera?

CU: Oh no. [laughter]

*Relax* (2016). 4:03 min. Video still. Courtesy of the artist. Part of a Triptych *Honey, Relax, Rinse* (2016)

LW: Do you think it is more important for an artist to be in a big city where you can have a career, where there are galleries, where there is an art scene and people to talk to about it; or to be in a smaller place where maybe it’s easier, it’s cheaper, there can be more of a focus on making?

CU: I would love being in a big city, but I fear that my work would suffer. My practice relies on those around me and specific references: Samoan people in New Zealand or indigenous people in New Zealand and references to the land even. That’s where I get most of my inspiration. I worry if I was to move to other places, it would actually change my practice. I’m very based on my environment, who am I’m surrounded by, what’s happening around me. I don’t know if it would be a bad thing. All I know is that my work would change and my practice would change accordingly.

I love living in a smaller space or city. Wellington is a small city in relation to many other cities, even though is the capital of New Zealand. It’s got a population of 400,000, 500,000, something like that. One great thing I enjoy is that you can walk everywhere. There’s still a thriving art scene. There are heaps of galleries, lots of artists. Here we manage to do quite a bit to support the local community of artists.

If I was to move to a big city, I think it’d be great for my career in terms of networking, access to other resources. It would be really hard to have to find a new crew, where I trust in their abilities and vice‑versa that they trusted me, etc. Although I am also thinking about moving to Melbourne. There’s a lot of crossover between the art scenes. A lot of my friends have done it.

LW: Great. Thank you.

CU: Thank you!