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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.