LandEscape Art Review // Special Edition

LandEscape

MARK

Stine "Ess" Beck is a MSc

Audio Design graduate from Aarhus University's Faculty of Arts and Communication (2016). As an autodidact musician and music producer, she has been active on the Danish and European Experimental underground music scene for the past 5 years with bands including ZRN, Tales of Murder and Dust, and as a live VJ, before entering the world of mixed media arts.

Combining her work as an experimental musician with multimedia and performance, she explores the cross-field between analogue and digital technology, examining how tools and technology shape creative processes and the subjective production of meaning in a theoretically "closed" semantic system.

Evangelia Basdekis Greece

Evangelia Basdekis studied MFA at Lincoln University and BFA at De Montfort University. She was funded by Artsadmin and participated in mentoring scheme with Franko B. Solo shows in AD Gallery Athens, Toynbee studio London, VN Gallery Croatia, Ladden Gallery Munich, Site Gallery Sheffield. Her work was presented in Performance week Venice, Arnolfini Gallery, TanzquartierMuseum Quartier Wien, Plateaux Festival Frankfurt, 1st & 2nd Biennale of Thessaloniki, Ujazdowski Castle Warsaw, Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki, BIOS, Theater of Piraeus Athens, Museum of Contemporary Art Crete, also in: France, Switzerland, Turkey, Japan, U.S.A, Sweden, Israel, Serbia, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Estonia, Armenia, Argentina, Montenegro, Czech Republic, etc.

Israel

As a multidisciplinary artist engaged in visual arts, poetry, performance and dance, I am interested in the interaction between images, text and the body. My work is basically minimalist, and my artistic endeavor is to create a critical view of the individual and social circumstances, sexuality, stereotypes and human relations.Using photographs, text, video, performance, objects and ready-mades I create a syntax which reveals a conceptual yet personal drive, merging the universal with my biography and the local reality I live within.Zigzagging between the different elements and mediums I strive to create a multi-layered experience of the senses while exploring an eclectic world of diverse existence which is at times dramatic, absurd, humorous, hallucinated.

IDEAS = SYMBOLS = CULTURAL IDENTITY How ideas become symbols and symbols - ideas.My interest: the symbolism in the the world cultures, their ideas and elements that represent their identity.My technique: I always use ceramic because I need to work with my hands, in an exercise of feeling without thinking. Ceramic has its own life, clay and glaze react at will and speak in my work, almost deciding. Ceramic’s fragility and complications challenges me continuously. In history, ceramic has been the most accurate tool in the study of civilizations, it is eternal and universal, a dictionary of symbols. I work in ceramic together with other materials - metal, wood, glass. I tie everything; tying as joining pieces respecting their own individuality, tying to unite, and staying one when released. I have always been fascinated with the old way of signing by the means of sealing, using symbols instead of signatures, so I sign my works with a stamp, a symbol that becomes part of the peace itself.

USA

The purpose of my artwork is to invoke an awakening of the sensual - to stimulate a perceptual, internal, and intellectual response for the viewer. Creating symbols of universal connection, visuals that speak to life's experiences, underscores the relationship that one person has to another to nature.

Art conveys my nonverbal view of life. My work is an ongoing portrayal of myself, my behavior, adventure, exploration, risk taking, and non-acceptance of convention and the status quo. Constantly in search of the new and different, I am fascinated with the unconventional. Life has a hard, aggressive side, as does much of my work, represented by rigid, angular lines. However, the soft side is also apparent, visible as curves and soft forms.

Using the invaluable experience of the mentorship of Bill Prokopiof and Doug Hyde, along with my own vision, I have created an evolving body of work in alabaster, marble, limestone, and bronze. Combining different elements, I bring forth a duality in the sculptures that I create.

The power of the natural world, its intrinsic energy and fundamental properties, is dependent upon a fine balance. The balance of positive and negative forces resides from the smallest particles that make up our universe to concepts we live with every day: night/day and dark/light; finite/infinite and one/zero; quiet/loud and soft/hard; organic/manmade and the natural environment as opposed to the constructed cities. My work has been centered on concepts of this balance of opposites, as well as methods of numerical systems and patterning we use to construct an order to our world. Counting and measuring have been our way to bring order to the disorder around us. I have been pursuing a deep investigation of the symbolic number, 108, a number with powerful meanings, especially in Eastern religions and traditions. The repetition of 108 occurs in many of my paintings as background, a regular pattern or a block of forms, usually related to the circle or spiral. I often use a vertical red line or bar symbolizing the energy of life between heaven to earth, as it weaves through our lives, past, present and future.

Pascal Pierme Fance / USA

Pascal Pierme is a Frenchman who settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico USA in 1997. Prior to that time, he had gained a European reputation as a promising young sculptor. He accomplished several solo exhibitions in France and Switzerland, and worked on collaborative projects alongside creative giants such as Pierre Cardin.Pierme cites his Grandfather as an early inspiration. He was constantly in his garage creating – an exceptional maker, as well as a painter. In Pierme’s earliest memories he was fascinated by what his Grandfather could do with a simple piece of wood. In a few hours or days he would witness what this wood would become by way of his Grandfather’s hands. “The idea to be 100% responsible for creating something from A to Z amazed me.” Pierme recalls.

I think of a stream of daily life experiences since childhood that have influenced me, including listening to a variety of musical artists, seeing a wide range of visual art, interacting in the natural world, and interacting with other people.

I feel that my cultural substratum, which comes from my parents and their values, and the people I have been drawn to in my life, informs me and my artistic inquiry with a respect for learning, a respect for questioning, and a joy in expressiveness.

Andreas Monopolis Greece

Andrea Monopolis was born in Corfu in 1976. He collaborates with the Department of Music of the Ionian University he is also a member of the Electroacoustic Music Association of Greek Composers. For many years he was event manager with his own productions house, being at the same time the coordinator on many festivals, video maker, sound engineer, and the Founder of O.S.C.S. NCO. From 2010 his producing prototypes and custom-made sound devices branded as MoCM and lately, he is building motorcycles to as MoCM gear. He is the owner of Jimmy's restaurant, and partner on Locandiera Hotel.. His artistic impulse is expressed not only through music but also through images and materials images.

Special thanks to Haylee Lenkey, Martin Gantman , Krzysztof Kaczmar, Joshua White, Nicolas Vionnet, Genevieve Favre Petroff, Sandra Hunter, MyLoan Dinh, John Moran, Marya Vyrra, Gemma Pepper, Michael Nelson, Hannah Hiaseen and Scarlett Bowman, Yelena York Tonoyan, Miya Ando, Martin Gantman , Krzysztof Kaczmar and Robyn Ellenbogen.

Mark Yale Harris

Lives and works in Carbondale in The Roaring Fork Valley, Colorado, USA

An artist's statement

The purpose of my artwork is to invoke an awakening of the sensual - to stimulate a perceptual, internal, and intellectual

response for the viewer. Creating symbols of universal connection, visuals that speak to life's experiences, underscores the relationship that one person has to another to nature.

Art conveys my nonverbal view of life. My work is an ongoing portrayal of myself, my behavior, adventure, exploration, risk taking, and nonacceptance of convention and the status quo. Constantly in search of the new and different, I am fascinated with the unconventional. Life has a hard, aggressive side, as does much of my work, represented by rigid, angular lines. However, the soft side is also apparent, visible as curves and soft forms.

Using the invaluable experience of the mentorship of Bill Prokopiof and Doug Hyde, along with my own vision, I have created an evolving body of work in alabaster, marble, limestone, and bronze. Combining different elements, I bring forth a duality in the sculptures that I create.

Mark Yale Harris realized his true passion in the Southwest. Santa Fe became his home in the late 1990s and synchronously stone carving became his life’s work. He dedicated himself to creating in 1996 and, with much to learn, the artist chose a mentor whom he had long admired, sculptor Bill Prokopiof (Aleut, 1944-1999), to assist with honing his burgeoning artistic skills. In the spirit of the nation’s most recognized Native American artist Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache, 1915-1994), Prokopiof and sculptor Doug Hyde (Nez Perce) took Harris under their wings and generously shared their immense knowledge, talent, and vision. Inspired by the geographical region and grounded in the wisdom of his teachers, he began zealously creating sculpture.

Transitioning into the life of a full-time artist required Harris’s dedication to enveloping himself in all aspects of his new profession. Prior to this shift, Harris spent many years in the area of sustainable urban development (specifically real estate and hotels), a conventional career in which he was quite successful, but not fully satisfied. The adjustment into a wholly fulfilling vocation was both challenging and exciting. The artistic passion that had existed just beneath the surface of Harris’s longestablished business persona was finally able to present itself in tangible form. He accessed the invaluable tutelage of his mentors, along with his own vision, to create an evolving body of work in alabaster, marble, limestone, and bronze, often combining different elements to express his take on the inherent duality in mans’ essence. Over the past fifteen years, Harris has continued to challenge himself as a sculptor, finding it important to continue learning and teaching. Several intensive workshops, including studies with Terry Allen, Jo Harvey and James Surls, have expanded his understanding immensely. Harris’s charitable endeavors have been numerous; he cites his work with Fine Art for Children and Teens (FACT) in Santa Fe, New Mexico as especially gratifying. Of the 250+ exhibitions outlined on his resume, Harris has the distinction of 80+ solo shows in gallery, museum and international exhibitions. 100+ publications have featured his sculpture (books, magazines, newspapers) in the past 10 years. In addition, ARTWORKinternational Inc. Press published Mark Yale Harris: Figurative Abstractions in 2010 and Mark Yale Harris: Untamed in 2011 as part of their Acclaimed Artist Series. In addition, Mark Yale Harris, A Retrospective was published in 2006, updated and reissued in 2013. All three books document the important works created thus far in this sculptor’s career.

Exhibition highlights include: the Royal Academy of London, Marin MOCA, National Museum of Wildlife Art, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, the Royal Scottish Academy, Monmouth Museum, La Grange Art Museum, National Sculpture Society, Roswell Museum of Art, Millicent Rodgers Museum, The Wildlife Experience Museum, Peace Arch Park International, Museum of the Southwest, Holter Museum, Masur Museum, Las Cruces Museum of Art, Chesterwood Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum, and Austin Museum of Art. Harris’s sculpture is represented by eighteen prominent galleries in the US and UK. Current works can be found in many permanent public collections, including: Hilton Hotels; Booth Western Art Museum - Cartersville, Georgia; Rock Resorts: La Posada Hotel - Santa Fe, New Mexico; Herman Memorial Hospital - Houston, Texas; State of New Mexico - Ruidoso, New Mexico; Four Seasons Hotel - Chicago, Illinois; and City of Roanoke Historic District - Roanoke, Virginia. Furthermore, Harris’s sculpture has recently been featured at the Open Air Museum - Ube, Japan; Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art - Biloxi, Mississippi; Polk Museum of Art - Lakeland,

LandEscape meets

Mark Yale Harris

Hello Mark and welcome to LandEscape: we would like to invite our readers to visit http://markyaleharris.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. Over the years you have participated in lots of workshops and in particular you gained a solid formal training under the mentorship of sculptor Bill Prokopiof: how did these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does the cultural substratum due to your American roots direct your artistic research?

In my first profession, I focused on the business of my decades-long career in the realm of hospitality/urban development. All the while, I maintained an abiding

interest in art. I always dedicated time to learning and to creating. Eventually I became a collector. I found myself drawn to the medium of sculpture, particularly certain sculptors - Henry Moore’s graceful and minimal figures, Constantin Brâncuși’s bareness of line and stylized form.

When I finally made the decision to change careers and become a professional artist, I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For instruction, I turned to Native American artists whose work I had admired and collected for years, Bill Prokopiof (Aleut) and Doug Hyde (Nez Perce), former protégés of the nation’s most recognized Native American artist, sculptor Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache).

The aesthetics of their work in stone appealed to me. While under their wings, I was grounded in their wisdom, talent and skill. The beauty of the geographical region of the southwest was also inspiring.

The technical skills required were daunting, but in some ways learning them was the easier part of creating art. The practical and specialized aspects were solid and tangible. I wrapped my mind and my physical dexterity around the tasks over and over until I began to excel. Compare this to understanding motivations and inspirations! As I was concentrating on technique, I also had to give serious consideration to what I wanted to create and convey –that I found demanding (stimulating and tough).

However, when it came down to me using my new skills to develop my own artistic style and expression, I was also influenced by non-Western carvings from Africa, Oceania and India, as well additional Western influences that included Jacob Epstein, Pablo Picasso and Alexander Archipenko. Although an astute student of past styles, my art is my individual interpretation based on fundamental sculptural principles. I do believe that my early and shortlived music education embedded in me an appreciation for the rhythm of line that manifests itself in my work.

The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of

LandEscape and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article has at once captured our attention for your ability to manipulate shapes rich of symbolism in order to unveil the ubiquitous connection between humans and nature, as in the interesting Water's Edge: when walking our readers through the genesis of this stimulating work, would you tell us something about your usual set up and process?

I use a combination of primitive and industrial tools. The pneumatic chisel is my favorite tool. With it I feel like I am drawing on the stone. I develop a rhythm when using it that puts me in a dreamlike mental state. I work on 3-4 pieces at a time, creating 12 -15 new original works a year. Depending on the scale and complexity, a sculpture takes approximately 80-300 hours to complete. After beginning my art career in beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico, I was fortunate to relocate to a large studio in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado.

Much of my work is created from the “direct carving method” – I carve directly on the material in front of me with limited use of a maquette or

plaster model. It is the process of the emergence and release of the figure from the stone. In doing so, I allow the material to guide me. Working in this way enables me to translate my visual interpretation of what I am thinking and have experienced. Water’s Edge, as seen on these pages, is carved out of Colorado Yule Marble, a metamorphosed limestone that is unique to the area in which I now live. Since it is indigenous to my home, the local stone enriches the meaning of the work for me.

The figurative work has always been most difficult for me. Everyone inherently knows what a body should resemble; we are all familiar with human proportions. As such, there is little room for error. Even more challenging is conveying emotion. I have spent my career attempting to refine this ability. Water’s Edge symbolizes the metaphor of thoughtfully standing at the edge; knowing you should get in and maybe even cross the space before you. Daring to sample the water with your toes.

Working with the intrinsic qualities of the stone, I seek simple, strong, expressive design. Try and fail, continue working through a concept

Awakening III

until it feels complete. Since there is little margin for error in the reductive art of stone carving, you work slowly, sure-handedly. With natural material, one can only delete. Eventually something evocative develops - that pure essence of the subject, the soul of the matter, abstracted.

How important is spontaneity in your work? In particular, do you conceive your works instinctively or do you methodically elaborate your pieces?

I use my insight and conceptualization, my heart and my hands, to form threedimensional objects. Each new piece starts with an idea of what I want to convey. As always, I envision unpretentious, yet resolute, meaningful design. Some of my pieces speak best on an intimate scale, while others require a monumental voice – this naturally is something I decide ahead of time.

As mentioned above, the interpretation of the human form is the most challenging, and rewarding, to me. Animals are delightful to create, as they do not require the same attention to detail as the figure. When sculpting figurative work, I may start with a drawing or maquette or even reference a live model for inspiration.

Once these decisions are made and I begin to actually carve, I immerse myself in the inherent qualities of the stone. I allow the material to instinctively guide me. When I reach the point where the form is revealing itself to me - which could be described as “instinctual” up to that moment, I then gingerly carve, refine and polish until it feels complete. The latter part of the process could be deemed more “methodical,” though it could be said that it is grounded in skill yet driven by instinct.

Showing a gorgeous combination between realism and powerful abstraction, Whirlwind and As One provide the viewers with an heightened visual experience, to unveil the convergence between reality and imagination. How would you consider the role of abstraction playing within your process? And how important is for you to provide your sculptures with an abstract feature?

In my case, attempting to blend form, figure, emotion and gesture often results in a figurative abstraction. I am attempting to capture the brief passing of a strong emotion. I alternate between gesture and geometric form. I use distortion to

express sensuality. Any idea or emotion I strive to portray –emanating from the preconscious, the unconscious, the soul, or the spirit - is an intangible. This lends itself to a depiction that rests between realism and abstraction. For instance, in the two sculptural works included in this article - As One, which personifies a profound love that transforms two into a single being (captured in Carrera marble), and Whirlwind, where the model and the stone both led me to capture the emotion of contemplation while surrounded by whirling options and possible hazards (in bronze) – the core emotions call for a fluidity and inexactitude. Imprecision or abstraction can often illuminate emotions more powerfully, because these qualities are elusive.

We appreciate the way you include a wide variety of materials, including alabaster, marble, limestone, and bronze, that convey both the ideas of strength and such captivating sensuous qualities: how do you select your materials and what are the qualities that you are searching for?

I find the mental and physical challenge of creating a sculpture from a block of stone, whether marble, onyx, limestone or alabaster,

emotionally gratifying, The type of stone that I choose to carve is the one that “speaks to me”. I select the one that has my piece already within it. My Native American mentors believed that you should quietly observe the shape of the rock, see the image within and it will come forth. A particular stone’s longevity, striations and outdoor permanence can be a definite factor. Certainly the stone’s size, shape, color, texture and appearance are elements that affect my aesthetic and practical choice in the moment.

At times I have chosen bronze for its capacity to expand the surface and scale possibilities, as well as the number of sculptures that I am able to create. Bronze editions are taken from a piece that I originally carved in stone and then cast to make multiples using the lost wax process.

I continue to expand my repertoire of media and techniques through intensive workshops and relationships with other artists. Broadening my range of proficiency in various media opens up possibilities for future work. At one workshop, I experimented with printmaking. I have incorporated different media,

such as steel, grog clay and broken glass, into some of my pieces.

Your art seems to reflect the duality of hardness and softness that characterizes the ebb and flow of life, and we dare say that the combination between angular lines and smooth sides that marks out your sculptures could be considered a powerful allegory of life. How does your daily life's experience fuel your creative process? In particular, what are your usual sources of inspiration?

My art conveys my nonverbal view of life—an ongoing portrayal of myself: my behavior, adventure, exploration, risktaking, and my non-acceptance of convention and the status quo. I am continually in search of the new, the different, and I am fascinated with the unconventional. I seek to express emotion in its myriad forms. Life has a hard, aggressive side, as does much of my work, represented by rigid, angular lines. However, the tender side is also apparent, visible as curves and soft forms. My evolving body of work evokes this duality.

I believe that as we go through life we can only interpret and create beauty from that which we have, or are given. This is the challenge and the satisfaction I experience in creating my work. I like to

look for the beauty of “what can be” in places where others may see only what is.

Often witnessing the brief passing of a strong emotion inspires a gestural sketch or sculpture. Then I wrestle with “what” I want to convey, “how” best to convey this, and even the “why” I wanted to convey it. This forces me to confront each piece, in progress and after completion, to understand it.

My studio is in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado. It is a bucolic and geographically impressive area. It is peaceful and inspirational. After a lifetime of mainly urban living, I found myself drawn to the mountains and the vast clear skies of the southwestern part of the country. I pay attention to my natural surroundings.

I continue to nod in appreciation to the part of me that succumbed to the enticement of art. This has been a great gift to myself. I find gratification in the mysteriousness of the process, the tactile involvement and I even revel in the frustration of each new challenge in the execution of my work. It keeps me motivated and energized.

As you have remarked in your artist's statement, the purpose of your artwork is to invoke an awakening of the sensual,

stimulating a perceptual, internal, and intellectual response for the viewer. The power of visual arts in the contemporary age is enormous: at the same time, the role of the viewer’s disposition and attitude is equally important. Both our minds and our bodies need to actively participate in the experience of contemplating a piece of art: it demands your total attention and a particular kind of effort—it’s almost a commitment. What do you think about the role of the viewer? Are you particularly interested in trying to achieve, to trigger the viewers' perception as starting point to urge them to elaborate personal interpretations?

My desire is to explore the unknown and the familiar, and express and record it with the eyes of a child. I strive to provoke a perceptual, internal, and cerebral response from the viewer. My aim is to spark something – a memory, an insight, an appreciation, a flicker of something soul-stirring. I depict my figures in a pause, caught in the middle of that hazy divide between the undertaking and the emotion. I understand that the perception will be different for each individual, but I hope that my interpretations of some of life’s conflicts and joys and paradoxes

provide viewers openings to individual rich experiences that I could not begin to guess at.

We like the way your practice balances elements from ancient cultural heritage, as The Ancient One and Pecos Red, with refined contemporary sensitiveness: do you think that there's still a contrast between Tradition and Contemporariness? Or there's an interstitial area where these apparently opposite elements find a point of convergence?

Although an astute student of art history, my art is my individual interpretation based on a lifetime of inspiration and a basis in fundamental sculptural principles. While my main materials of choice – stone and bronze – are those used for ages in older traditional sculpture, they are natural and timeless. Traditional, old-world sculptures provide a distinct contrast to the often smooth and lustrous look of my works, resulting in a blend of contemporaneousness and agelessness.

As stated above, when using the direct carving method, I allow the material to guide me. This enables me to translate my thoughts and experiences into a

visual representation in the moment. It is the process of emergence and release of the figure from the stone. Living in the here and now, I believe that what develops, while perhaps informed by traditional training and education, reflects my contemporary sensibility.

For instance, in Pecos Red, the material is Texas Red Sandstone, a special material found only in Pecos County, Texas. It is a nod to the source. Then comes the age-old iconography of the bull, and its wealth of history and meanings. But the smooth surface, free from projections or unevenness, speaks of my experience. The content and peaceful expression, the fresh and clean interpretation, this is my effort to convey an emotion. Perhaps a bit reductionist. This piece personifies the unreserved spirit that I share with the state of Texas.

The Ancient One is carved from travertine. For this work, I chose the less familiar rust-colored variety. Travertine is limestone deposited by mineral springs and often has a fibrous or concentric appearance. Pitted holes and troughs in its surface characterize the stone. Although

these troughs occur naturally, they suggest signs of considerable wear and tear over time – a fitting material for The Ancient One. We all understand the strength that can only be gotten through wear and tear, great wisdom from living life. Again, this is a sculpture that certainly has its underpinnings in traditional methods and imagery, yet my deliberate choice of hard angles and soft edges lends a contemporary incarnation.

Over the past fifteen years, your works have been showcased in several occasions, including more than 80 solos: before leaving this interesting conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

My primary drive in my art is to illuminate the human experience. My reaction to and manifestation of the complexities of human emotions has always been personal – with the underlying assumption that much of it is universal. I have to trust myself that

my efforts to create beauty out of the ordinary, to find the phenomenal in the normal, to breathe the miraculous into the mundane, have a collective appeal. In that regard, the “language” I use in my art is consistent; in that regard, a particular context or audience reception is not a factor in my work.

In producing symbols of universal connection, underscoring the relationship that one has to another and to nature, I have found that many collectors appreciate my unique animal forms. They are abstracted, and often have a humorous character to them. They are intended to provoke a warm response on behalf of the viewer. However, I began these works before I had an audience, so it would follow that my initial creative decisions were well received. This may well have encouraged me to continue exploring those avenues with new works.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Mark. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future

projects? How do you see your work evolving?

I plan to further refine my work in stone, to further refine the depiction of emotion, so that I can effectively render a discernible feeling with the sparest of lines, curves and gestures. Brâncuși’s quote speaks to this beautifully: “When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement; give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.”

Additionally, I hope to continue translating this simplicity into monumental works. Changing scale while maintaining the integrity of the form and retaining the impact of the subject matter is a challenge I am enjoying.

atherine Eaton Skinner

An artist's statement

The power of the natural world, its intrinsic energy and fundamental properties, is dependent upon a fine balance. The balance

of positive and negative forces resides from the smallest particles that make up our universe to concepts we live with every day: night/day and dark/light; finite/infinite and one/zero; quiet/loud and soft/hard; organic/manmade and the natural environment as opposed to the constructed cities.

My work has been centered on concepts of this balance of opposites, as well as methods of numerical systems and patterning we use to construct an order to our world. Counting and measuring have been our way to bring order to the disorder around us. I have been pursuing a deep investigation of the symbolic number, 108, a number with powerful meanings, especially in Eastern religions and traditions. The repetition of 108 occurs in many of my paintings as background, a regular pattern or a block of forms, usually related to the circle or spiral. I often use a vertical red line or bar symbolizing the energy of life between heaven to earth, as it weaves through our lives, past, present and future.

Repetition used as a practice allows for focus. The completion of this work over time takes determination and concentration, which leads to an inner center of quiet, the dissolution of the self into the whole. Purity and simplicity come with the commitment in this ritual of patterns and their echo. Energy and a sense of order are concentrated in the work by the continuous reiteration of the same path, the same pattern, the same practice.

Numerous methods have be used to go through the number of cycles in ritual repetition, thus eliminating the distraction of keeping count. The earliest method was stones counted out and then dropped into a bowl of water, as prayers were recited. Knots or beads on a thread are called a rosary or mala, and have been used for centuries to count prayers. The word “bead” traces to the Saxon word, bidden, meaning “to pray”, and the Sanskrit word buddh, meaning self-realization or enlightenment, from which comes the word, Buddha. The Buddhist mala has 108 beads, often bodhi tree seeds, an encasement of life. The Sikh tradition has a mala of 108 knots tied in wool twine.

Gya-gye (Tibetan for 108 and one of my series) has powerful meanings, the numbers themselves adding up to nine, but also divisible by 9, one of the sacred numbers in Buddhism and Hinduism. According to their beliefs, humans tell 108 lies, have 108 earthly desires and 108 forms of delusion. There are 108 feelings; with 36 related to the past, 36 related to the present, and 36 related to the future. The 1 in 108 stands for God or higher Truth; the 0 for completeness and emptiness achieved with the abrogation of the ego to the universal spirit. The 8 symbolizes infinity and the idea of samsara, reincarnation and the repeating cycle of birth, life and death of the soul. As a mark-maker, I am drawn to marking methods that have been used by peoples and even some animals to indicate presence and construct a deeper relationship to place and nature. Our cultural memory lies within the physicality of place, as well as its historical and metaphysical meanings. We live in a world where it may be difficult to feel a part of the whole, but we continue to find ways to connect to place, striving ultimately to create a connection with each other.

The five Tibetan elements of earth, water, fire, air, and ether or space also inspire my use of artistic materials. These natural materials are often combined or used in juxtaposition to each other: beeswax, damar resin, oil paint and pigments, stones, old cloth, silk and collected threads, wood, lead, steel and copper wire. The papers used are Himalayan handmade papers made from Edgeworthia bark, 100% Rag photo papers and antique papers from Japan, India and Myanmar. The challenge is to balance and oppose the elements simultaneously. Beeswax mixed with damar resin is applied molten to a prepared wood panel. Colored wax and oil stick are built up, erased, scraped and layered, and fused multiple times with a hot air gun. Different colors melt at different rates because of the varying chemical composition and value of the pigments. Layers can be transparent or opaque and the colors gently moved when the wax is in liquid form. The durability of encaustic is due to its imperviousness to moisture, an archival protection for the papers. The final paintings incorporate the fragility of their components within a durable, lasting presence.

LandEscape meets

Catherine Eaton Skinner

Hello Catherine and welcome to LandEscape: before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would like to invite our readers to visit http://www.ceskinner.com

Let us start this interview with a couple of questions regarding your background. Years after having graduated with a Bachelor of Arts & Sciences from Stanford University, you nurtured your education in the field of art with multiple experiences, including your recent participation to the group workshop East/West Calligraphy in Venice, Italy: how did these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your previous studies in Biology direct your interest into the exploration of the balance of opposites that marks out your artistic research?

As a young child, I picked up my first crayon and continually drew. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States with fresh water lakes and the Puget Sound between multiple mountain ranges. Our parents surrounded us with Northwest Art

and encouraged our creativity. My sister and I were close in age and we both became artists. My career as a professional artist began at Stanford University, illustrating for the Biology Department, while getting my bachelor’s degree. The San Francisco Bay Area Figurative Movement was in full force at that time; this was influential when I took art classes in-between my pre-med schedule. Drawing class with Frank Lobdell was sumiink, bamboo pen and brush. I still use this medium, investigating calligraphy and loving large, loose brushes, plus mark-making with graphite on Mylar. Painting class was oil on canvas with Nathan Oliveira. Acrylic paints were newly available on the market, but not allowed in class.

After graduation, marriage, and a year as a VISTA volunteer in Atlanta, Georgia, I moved to San Juan Island, Washington. We built our home, grew our own food for three children and tended to our farm animals. I learned to spin my sheep’s wool, weave and use natural dyes. My illustration concentrated on marine invertebrates and algae for field guides, books, graphics and research papers. My illustration was ecology driven - based on the interactions of the different species and

plant life. The ink and watercolor nature drawings started to be exhibited regionally.

After an amicable divorce in my mid-thirties, I remarried. We built and operated a farm and garden store called Haymakers Mercantile for five years. When we moved to Seattle in 1990, I returned to oil painting on canvas, exploring color and texture, as well as the simplicity and complications of abstraction, after the years of precise ink drawing.

The balance of opposites refers to much in my work: between fine lines and large gestural strokes; from dark to light within the piece; and panels of opposing values. I explore the balance of energies in many cultures; the intrinsic energy and fundamental properties of the delicate natural world depend on this. The equilibrium of positive and negative forces extends throughout universal concepts: dark/light, finite/infinite, soft/hard, and organic/inorganic. The five elements - earth, fire, water, air and space - are the foundation of this universe, our bodies, and our mental and spiritual selves. Maintaining the balance among and within the elements and understanding their energies is paramount to our survival, as well as to my spirit.

You are a versatile artist and the body of works that we have selected for this special edition of LandEscape reveal your ability to cross from painting, encaustic and photography to printmaking and sculpture. What addresses you to such stimulating multidisciplinary approach? In particular,

what are the expressive qualities that you are searching for in the techniques that you use in your artistic research?

For many years, I have been a full time, multidisciplinary artist, usually working conceptually in series. My different media cross-pollinate with beeswax, resin and oil, binding the work together. I have always collected stones, as used in Kamidana, (god’s shelf in Japanese) - 108 wrapped on 9 red waxed bars. For Gather, 108 juniper sticks collected while on walks were bundled, wrapped with hand natural dyed textiles and wire, then fastened to a waxed Bhutanese paper mounted on a wood panel. Wire strung across a work is hung with found objects, feathers and old textiles, and another painting with bundles of purifying salt. Precious metals of gold, silver and palladium reflect off soft, wax backgrounds. Book pages, collected papers and multiple photographs form the basis of the 108 grid patterns. Cast glass and bronze sculptures stand with the painting series of ravens. Lead sheeting, crumpled and wrapped around a wood panel, represents earth, opposing the subtlety of pale blue wax symbolizing water or ether. The work defines the material it needs, and the opposition of these media expresses the integration or conflict of the elemental concepts I am trying to express.

Fortunately, I have been able to travel extensively: Bhutan, India, Japan, Myanmar, Indonesia, the Southern Hemisphere, Africa and many European countries. My travel,

Passages VII, 24x24, 2015

photography skills, book-making and journaling all contribute to my portfolio of images and connections to various cultures and times. The thread in my work is the

elemental archetypes of the physical and cosmic world: water, ether, earth, fire, wind and woods. The animal world as expressed in the book Unleashed is paintings of animal

eyes; the Woodland Park Zoo and University of Washington Press published this. The corvid family of birds has sought me out around the world to draw, paint and sculpt,

using techniques that express their voices in their fascinating mythology.

I am attracted to places of worship and natural sites where people have gathered in

Passages VIII, 24x24, 2015

pilgrimage or simply to seek a deeper relationship to locations of metaphysical power. What offerings do they bring and leave behind to indicate their presence?

Our cultural memory lies within the physicality of place and its historical meanings. We live in a world where it may be difficult to feel a part of the whole. Investigating these patterns and

sacred spaces has become my connection with different cultures.

In the deep woods of Bhutan, burgundy threads are placed upon a branch at the

confluence of pathways. Torn from the hem of a monk’s robe on a pilgrimage to the mountain temple, these threads have been tied as an offering to guardians of

the earth. Prayer flags are wrapped in the trees and up wooden poles, twisted and tattered from the fierce winds on a Himalayan pass, sending prayers continually into the sky. In Japan, a stone, paper fortune, or beautifully prepared bundle of rice is left as an offering. An ancient Jewish synagogue in Tunisia has thousands of prayers written on paper and placed in metal grills high on the inner sanctuary wall. As witnessed on the chain link fences surrounding the World Trade Center in New York City, the heartbreak of notes, ribbons and photos are placed to mark the loss and horrors of our current American culture.

We have really appreciated the way your Stacks series suspends the viewers inthe interstitialareawhereremindersto realityandpureimaginationblend together in a coherent combination. How would you define the relationship between abstraction and representation in your practice? In particular, how does reality and a tendency towards abstraction find their balance in your work?

With the eyes of a biologist I peer deep into the microscopic lens and outward to the vastness of the universe. We each see differently in photography, the focus and crop of an image. I often shoot with a 100 to 300 lens, using it as a macro lens, allowing me to stand back. Reality becomes abstract instantly and the image reflects the essence of the nature-based subjects.

The paintings in the Stacks series began with my photographs of printed signatures in the press runs at EBS Press in Verona, Italy. We were printing my newest book 108, published by Radius Books of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Continuous horizontal marks shift with the addition of the new pages and imperfect stacking. Colors and shades between black and white flow downward on the edges. Printed on a 100% rag paper and mounted on wood panels, the piece is then layered and textured with encaustic wax, the color intensified with oil stick.

Stacks dwells in the realm of the horizontal line: the boundary between sky and ocean; distant horizons of desert and open land; layers of water frozen into ice; seeps of mineral laden water in earthen walls; ombre textiles of Navaho rugs; seismic wavelengths; and the tracking of heart rhythms.

You often allow an open reading, a great multiplicity of meanings: associative possibilities play a crucial role in your pieces. How important is this degree of openness in order to involve the viewers in their visual experience?

Nathan Oliveira was my painting professor at Stanford University and in 1999 I worked with him for a two-week residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico. He spoke to the mission

of showing up and doing the work. Staying focused requires being present in the studio. Memories are important to incubate as your own, holding on deeply to ideas until they are resolved before being brought forth into physical form. I also spent a month-long residency with Anne Truitt at the Institute. She talked of feedback as necessary, but sometimes distracting, describing vulnerability as the guardian of integrity.

Each piece then represents a private pilgrimage, a personal truth. When the dialog between myself and the work is complete, it must be released as the power within the work becomes the magnet for others.

My series often have multiple meanings that increase as they build in numbers. Both of the newest series, Between the Gates and Remnants, have multiple meanings. The work must always stand on its own and make the viewer want to live with it, discovering nuances that relate to their daily experiences and lives.

How would you define the relationship between environment and your work in the Passages series?

Passages and Vestiges were developed after traveling on the Eurostar Paris to London on a perfect fall afternoon. I began taking over 300 photos with my iPhone: farmland, forests and industrial structures. The rush of the foreground with the distant

sky was indicative of the landscapes disappearing from our fast-moving world.

During that time, I had been studying in the studio and painting tantric symbols. The red, upright triangle captures the power of the elements of air, wind, water and earth. The triangle above the square forms a house, an image that was repeatedly showing up in my dreams. The simple outline of the house encapsulates the memories that are embedded within us as described in the book I was reading, The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard. These forms inscribed into the moving landscapes enfold the still memory of what is lost.

Your approach has a depth of layers that matches your need to allow a work to be beautiful, as well as spiritual: how do you consider the relationship between spirituality and your artistic practice?

The religion I grew up in celebrated family and ancestors, honoring each day in the Northwest environment. When spending time in churches, I found I would rather be quietly in the woods. When I began traveling to the Far East, I became interested in Buddhism. That is what is in my heart and practice in my work. I have also studied shamanism and am fascinated by the simplicity, as well as complexity, of native cultures. I think all of these come to fruition in my work without specifically speaking to

one religion, but to the spiritual thread that ties humanity together.

The number 108 and its conceptual range have deeply influenced my artwork over

the past twelve years. This didn’t grow out of a personal crisis, but more from a deep sense of sadness. My mother had developed Alzheimer’s and my father, after years of caring for her by himself, had

finally made the decision to move her to an assisted-care facility. The following year, I traveled to Bhutan with Julie Speidel, a close friend and artist. I found myself immersed in a country where the daily lives

of the Bhutanese people are fully integrated with their Buddhist faith. Their respect for the environment and blessings for all living beings are continually part of their existence. It was this journey that set

me on this path and it continues to have a profound effect on my art and my life.

The ritual using the count of 108 for prayers and offerings is cloaked in mystery, but most often in reference to the early Vedic sages of

India. Early connections in the sphere of Hindu-Buddhist thought are made to cosmology, astrology and astronomy. This exploration is fascinating to read, but what became part of my work was the use of that

number to create patterns and repetition of forms. As Mahatma Gandhi so aptly stated, “The mantra becomes one’s staff of life and carries one through every ordeal. Each repetition has a new meaning.”

108 represents the whole of our universe and our existence within it. Each number has its own sacred significance. One represents the supreme truth or god consciousness; zero for the void and the

Stacks

potential for all, the bindu; eight for infinity and eternity, the reincarnation of our souls or samsara.

When I returned to my Santa Fe studio, I reflected on my journey. I began the

creative process by tearing a sheet of Himalayan paper into 108 pieces and then subconsciously drew a form often used in the Bhutanese temples. I discovered later that this image was the classic maniratna,

the precious jewel, placed before the Buddha as an offering.

Each of us follows our own pathways, hopefully continuing to explore, learn and

open ourselves to new thoughts and experiences. I am ever thankful to show my work as an expression of my pilgrimage. Across a world of differences, hopefully all

of us are seeking some joy, solace, and a bond with each other.

We would like to pose some questions about the balance established by colors and texture: we have really appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances that saturate your canvas and especially the way they suggest the idea of plasticity. How did you come about settling on your color palette? And how much does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones you decide to use in a piece, in particular, how do you develop a painting’stexture?

My color palette varies with series and subject matter. I cut color swatches and collage them together in my studio journals. This works especially well for putting colors together quickly within their values, hues and oppositions. My colors also react to what is happening in the world because I do not work in a vacuum, and this may lead to a painting out of series.

Blacks and whites with a touch of red that represent life’s energy are also my signature. I am fond of indigo and sienna, and when finishing a piece, will sometimes touch edges with a light turquoise. The Reiteration series flows between Ultramarine blues and pale greys, whites and blacks. These paintings have a wax layer countered on top with the opposite color in oil stick. Markings through the oil stick must be worked at once, as it will skim up differently with each passing day and I

have to plan ahead. After the work has dried, I will go back in with more color on top, fusing this in lightly.

If I begin with one of my photographs beneath the clear wax, the layering of colored wax and oil stick gives it depth. I always brush on the hot wax and in the melting have learned where to leave textural areas in opposition to the calmness of fully melted smoothness. Textural areas may have filled or wiped color on the surface. The woven linen substrate also adds texture if a heavy layer of wax is not applied. Encaustic has the ability to build texture quickly and an area may be tinted a different hue with oil stick and wiped down. The fluidity of the wax with layered colors is manipulated by the heat.

It's important to remark that you have been working with encaustic media and oil on panel for over 20 years: how do you consider the physicality of this medium and why does it fascinate you?

I was self-taught in the encaustic process before these techniques became readily available for artists. In my thirties I developed a batik process on cotton with India ink pen drawings using my illustration skills. The return to using hot wax was very comfortable when I began the encaustic paintings. I switched to linen on panel, sometimes adding papers with free drawing beneath the wax. Many years in illustration allows me to use any method that works. Working

with wax one can build up, erase, scrape and fuse, balancing the elements of the work “under fire.” Use of the oil sticks gives me the satisfaction of straight tactile painting and the waxes flexibility gives me opportunity. There becomes a seeming fragility and presence of the components originating from the bees and trees.

In your art career you have had 37 solo exhibitions in 38 years, with participation in multiple invitational group exhibitions. How important is it for you to establish a direct relationship with your audience and how does the feedback you receive fuel your artistic research? In particular, do you see yourself creating a particular kind of audience other than that of the art world?

The “art world audience” is vast with multiple facets. As an artist I am vulnerable to criticism. Doing the work brings me joy and satisfaction, being in that moment with each piece as it develops and changes beyond my original idea. My book, 108, gave me a sense of completion of those 14 years of work. The book became an explanation of why, as well as how I live and work. I am fortunate to be able to do what I do, change to another series when life changes around me, and not be held to a certain concept or repetition of what has already left my studio. I may circle back to older pieces and work journals, rework my thoughts and go forward. Each time I travel

it opens new visual avenues. Each exhibition leads to new work. When I am in the studio, new ideas flourish, feeding and leading me.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Catherine. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

Some artists fall easily into writing and talking of their work. I am learning, but do not really enjoy art speak. I would rather write a poem for a statement. Thank you for giving me this opportunity and including me in this fine magazine.

I would love to work on a museum exhibition that curates my published book 108. Conceptually, there is much material to expand into a space. I hope to collaborate again with David Chickey at Radius Books on another book including a mixture of my poetry, new work and photography. More writing seems to be in the plan. I have family and six growing grandchildren that come into the equation, time that moves faster and slips by with each day. Maintaining balance is required as I aspire to be the Jungian archetype of a wise, old woman.

An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryders, curator landescape@europe.com

ascal Pierme

Lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

An artist's statement

PASCAL PIERME (b. 1962 St. Rafael, France) is a Frenchman who settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA in 1997.

Prior to that time, he had gained a European reputation as a promising young sculptor. He accomplished several solo exhibitions in France and Switzerland, and worked on collaborative projects alongside creative giants such as Pierre Cardin. Pierme cites his Grandfather as an early inspiration. He was constantly in his garage creating – an exceptional maker, as well as a painter. In Pierme’s earliest memories, he was fascinated by what his Grandfather could do with a simple piece of wood. In a few hours or days he would witness what this wood would become by way of his Grandfather’s hands. “The idea to be 100% responsible for creating something from A to Z amazed me,” Pierme recalls. “The scent of his studio was also a big attraction. The fragrance of multiple woods combined with turpentine and linseed oil created a magical space.”

Pierme himself has since become known as a master of the medium. However, if asked what he values in art, he will reply, “THE IDEA. That is it.” Though teasingly nicknamed “Picasso” at a very early age, due to rampant creativity, Pierme has never been comfortable identifying himself as an artist. That is for others to decide. He is, however, aware that he has prolific creative tendencies. He is a man who does not “feel good” unless he is making.

Hence, the first question this artist explored was his own viability in creating art full-time. The answer came in 1988 after he had given himself one year to become a working artist. Within six months he was well on his way. Pierme elaborates, “In a way, my career has happened in reverse. In the beginning of my career, choosing to be a sculptor and becoming a young father happened simultaneously. Being responsible as a father created an immediate focus and seriousness about my career. In a way, my daughter pushed me to be more professional.”

By 1997, Pascal had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico permanently. He settled in a home/studio atop a mountain reminiscent of those in the south of France. After a few months, Pierme found that he was no longer in Santa Fe but in New Mexico. He began traveling around the state, through

which he discovered amazing landscape, peace and inspiration. Pierme reminisces, “The magic of New Mexico was a life changing experience for me. I fell in love.”

Pierme considered being a foreigner an advantage for his creative process. He quickly discovered a different system, culture and new approaches – opening a new chapter in the young sculptor’s life. Now, nearly a quarter-century later, his career has blossomed in America. Accolades have been swift and abundant. Through apparent maturity in his work, he has been able to take more risks and evolve rapidly. Critics, curators, collectors and artists alike revere his ongoing bodies of work.

Out of the 120+ exhibitions outlined on his résumé, 80+ solo gallery, museum and international shows were solo shows of Pierme's work. Included are: Chinese European Art Center –Xiamen, China; Palm Springs Museum of Art – Palm Springs, California; Phoenix Art Museum – Phoenix, Arizona; Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Annex – Santa Fe, New Mexico; Taos Museum of Art – Taos, New Mexico; French Consulate – New York, New York; Albuquerque Museum – Albuquerque, New Mexico and Ube Center of Art – Ube, Japan.

Current works can be found in many permanent public collections, including ABC (American Broadcasting Company), New York, New York, Roger Guillemin, Nobel Prize recipient, medicine; Palais Bulles, Pierre Cardin’s residence – Cannes, France; Tom Mottola, Casa Blanca Records – New York, New York; Trust for Public Land – Los Angeles, California; Marriott Hotels, Nationwide; City Hall – Cologny, Switzerland and Equifax World Headquarters, Atlanta, Georgia. Countless publications have featured his sculpture. In addition, ARTWORKInternational Inc. Press included Pierme in their 2006 Acclaimed Artist Series and Fresno Fine Art Edition has featured Pierme's work in their New Mexico Millennium and Abstract Art publications.

Additionally, Pierme has found charitable endeavors an important facet in his artistic career. With a true intention of giving back, he has worked as an organizer and benefactor for several organizations relating to the promotion of the arts and the betterment of the community that he calls home. As a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Pierme has contributed to: The Santa Fe Artist’s Emergency Medical Fund, National Dance Institute, Art in Schools, Taos Museum of Art, The Horse Power Project and Aid and Comfort, among many others.

LandEscape meets

Pascal Pierme

Hello Pascal and welcome to LandEscape: you are an established artist, yet at a young age you gained a reputation as a promising European young sculptor. Are there any experiences that particularly directed the trajectory of your art work? Moreover, how did your previous collaborative projects alongside creative giants such as Pierre Cardin inform your cultural substratum and influence your evolution as an artist?

Meeting my biological father, who is an artist, when I was 18 years old was the seed of my artistic career. At that time, I had no idea that I would become an artist, but I was certain that I would be creative with my hands. I was blown away by the freedom of the artistic lifestyle, especially coming from dental technician school where rigor and regulations were so prevalent and important. It was a breath of fresh air. Yet I had the notion that the artistic life included inherent accepted public behavior – playing certain games and displaying attitude – and these were not part of my character, I had no

intention of engaging in that. When I plunged into the artistic world, my trajectory was clear from the beginning: be in the studio, have fun and be honest with myself. All the rest had to follow and adapt to these concepts. The best experience I had, and still have, is to observe, listen and learn quietly from creative people: those who are successful and well-known, but also from others who have not been that successful or prominent. I liken it to driving: it is dangerous to stay too close to the car in front of you, keeping a bit of distance and having patience is the best way to have a real overview. And this is the best way for me to learn.

Working for Mr. Pierre Cardin in a very privileged position over 4 years was one of the most magnificent experiences in my early career and I still measure the impact of it today. Many times I had the chance to share lunch with him, just the two of us. I had in front me a “giant” of creativity, as you said, who had no filter and would talk about any subject with me. I was totally impressed by the way he could handle so many endeavors at the same time and yet would still be so thirsty for more creativity. He once said “Something finished is

something dead. It’s not about the death of a project that is the most interesting, but more about the necessity to begin another one immediately.”

One project I worked on with him was a 50foot high sculpture made out of tubes, laser and water. The sculpture was supposed to be installed on top of a theater that Mr. Cardin owned at the Palais Bulles in Théoulesur-Mer. It was intended to be like a lighthouse. He wanted people from as far as Cannes to be able to see it. Unfortunately, the project was rejected and only existed in our minds. After that he commissioned me to do a sculpture I called “Reincarnation.” This piece is still on display in the main entrance at the Palais Bulles.

When working on a creative collaborative project, 50/50 does not work very well. Usually, it is more about how to fit two 100 percents together. The only way, what is the most constructive experience, is that both artists have to compromise – this is usually impossible, but when it works it is wonderful. Excellent communication helps to define the rules and it assists in accepting differences between the collaborators.

Working on a project with Mr. Cardin was not this kind of situation, of course. It was more about me existing as a little flower near a sequoia, and it worked very well. Learning, learning and more learning mattered. Being humble is a big plus; too large an ego builds barriers and stops the honest and kind transfer of information. Accepting the idea that you do not know things helps you to absorb, digest and redefine your way.

Rejecting any conventional classification, your works convey freedom and a rigorous approach to geometry. Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest that our readers visit https://pascalpierme.com in order to get a synoptic view of your work. In the meantime, would you like to tell our readers something about your process and set up?

My studio is roughly 250 sq m (2700 sq ft) consisting of two very distinctive rooms with high ceilings. The first room is for clean work, the other one for dusty, grittier work: wood cutting and carving. The need for two separate spaces was a true technical problem until I was finally able to design my own studio near my home.

My process: composition, deconstruction, re-composition. I start with something that already exists, then I make it mine in that I modify the original essential attribute of the object and finally I create my piece by putting it back together. The original object could be anything, but for many years it generally has been wood. The two surfaces that I customarily work with are mahogany or Trupan (a light composite wood).

I begin with something that will have to be deconstructed or broken down. I could take a tree trunk and carve a sculpture out of it, but that is not what I do. I will use the tree trunk as my medium, but cut it in little pieces to become a new medium and from that I will make a sculpture. Or I will take a wood panel, paint it all blue and use that as a foundation. I have to have a kind of respect for the material, for I am going to offer it an adventure with me, not as spiritual as a

Blue on me 4

44x90’’, mixed media, may 2016

Native American hunter kneeling before an animal before eating it, but some kind of offering of gratitude, a “thank you.”

I do not draw anything ahead of time, but I do draw a bit directly on the wood without aiming for perfection (because it never

works that way). I somehow create a link between the medium and me. The long process commences, almost like a

constructive argument with a partner. I try to be as simple as possible with saying the most I can, pure and determinate, progressive or

safe. It all depends how I feel that day. When the drawing is finished I know I will not go back to it; it is never an option. I prefer to go right to the wall or to pick an elaborate detour to satisfy my need, but I will not go back.

Now it is time for the cutting and deconstruction. In the dusty area of my studio, using simple tools, I cut the wood in pieces following the trace of the original drawing. As with a puzzle, I put those pieces back together on a background. This process is not what I would call “creative time.” It is more preparatory work and focus on making those cuts as precise as I can. Now that I have my parts cut out, it is time to decide if I want to reshape some of them, where to create texture and the colors and patina options.

As do many artists, I would say that I create as I feel, but I often underestimate the opposite. With that I mean creating as I would like to feel. It is the difference between saying you could take a walk in nature because you feel like it or because you have the need to feel the walk. It is almost the same, but not exactly. After all the pieces are sanded and sprayed, after each has been marked with the colors/texture/patina information needed for the rest of the process, I bring all those pieces into the clean room of the studio. I display them in different areas for each different preparation of the final aspect. I work flat on tables to paint, spray, brush, varnish, wax, burn, etc. When all the pieces are dry and ready to be put back together on the background, it is always

an initial emotional moment. This is when I am happy or not, when the message is there or not, when I feel proud or disappointed. But I remind myself that this is a flat view and I need to wait to have the final real vision of it. It is only when all the pieces are screwed on from the back that I can see the piece on the wall – this moment is the moment of truth.

When I work on wall pieces, pieces that I mainly call “origines,” the process is different, but the beginning technique is the same – cutting sticks of wood individually and recreating a piece by regrouping.

The body of work that we have selected for this special edition of LandEscape has caught our attention in the way that you provide the visual results of your analysis with autonomous aesthetics: we have really appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances that saturate your artworks and especially the way they suggest the idea of plasticity. Is there any specific material you would like to talk about that could show us how you choose the material for a piece?

In the ‘90s, I turned some of my wood and plaster sculptures into bronze. I discovered that bronze was not necessarily making the sculptures better. This meant to me that material has a very important impact on the art work. It also meant that every sculpture calls for the best material for it individually, but the question is which one? Instead of approaching the subject on an intellectual level, I discovered that the most

harmonious material turned out to be a logical choice. I always believed that painters are much more intellectual than sculptors, who have a casual approach to the subject, a more grounded resonance. Since wood is my favorite, I had to accept that the way to select my material was to utilize the medium that most suited the end goal of executing my concepts.

Investigating the tension between the physical and the abstract, your artworks provide tactility and elusive notions of the imagination: would you say that the way you provide the transient with a sense of permanence allows you to create materiality of the immaterial?

Yes, I do. A few years ago, I wondered if I could paint only, doing a similar wall piece on a canvas without having to cut any wood, sanding anything or reshaping any surface –the result was totally different. I really believe that I talk about, think about, and approach my work with a 3D mind; this has a huge impact on the final interpretation. It is like having an accent when you talk or a scar on your skin – it is always there.

Another metaphor would be to compare a movie and a live play. Staging a live play would be much harder, but maybe more realistic in some way. So as in my work, the separation of two colors is different if a cut is placed between them; the cut is as important as the color differences. The material is a tactile statement of an abstract message. This is contradictory, but significant, in my work.

British multidisciplinary artist Angela Bulloch once stated "that works of arts often continue

to evolve after they have been realised, simply by the fact that they are conceived with an element of change, or an inherent potential for some kind of shift to occur..." Do you think that the role of the artist has changed these days with the new global communications and the new sensibility created by new media?

I totally agree with Angela Bulloch. I would say that what is changing is that art often has been a projection of the future, the avant-garde, a bit like the shooting star of our society. Now the new media are quickly taking up so much space in our daily life, so that art may be becoming the eddy in the river, the sanctuary of the mind. But it may also mean that art is evolving so much that we are at a point where everything should be rethought, reconsidered, reevaluated – even the definition of an artist.

For so long, one of the roles of an artist was to stimulate the general public, to help people to think outside of the box. The message has been received so well that global communications and new media are perfect tools to create a fusion between the common and uncommon, making the exceptional melded with the ordinary. Danger??? Yes, but interesting.

Never before in history has creativity been so prevalent in society. Maybe one of the artist’s roles today is to become more conservative with what we had previously been loosely spraying out, in order to preserve and distinguish the identity of the “artist.” How can we not consider the web designer, the advertising designer and entrepreneurs in general as artists in some way? The understanding of emotion is such an indispensable factor in any act of

constructiveness. Speed, fast speed, is pushing us to constant reinvention. Creativity’s sparkles handed forth by the influence of generations of artists is now speaking to and through everyone… an indispensable tool.

How do you go about naming your artworks? In particular, is important for you to tell something that might walk the viewers through their visual experience?

I personally do not have any rules concerning titling my work. Sometimes I name my work according to the piece and give it a title that will, as you say, “walk the viewers” a bit; sometimes it is just a personal reference; and sometimes it is totally private and very personal, given form by the experience during the construction process. Giving minimal information in the title is preferable to me; I believe more in the artist’s statement for a show then the title of a piece. For example, asking the name of a person I want to talk with would not be my first question. It may influence me when the person starts speaking and I prefer to have a totally free, uninformed first feeling.

As you have remarked once, you try to sculpt in a way that allows you to change your mind until the last minute: how important are play, spontaneity and improvisation in your approach? In particular, do you conceive your works instinctively or do you methodically elaborate your pieces?

That is the trick for me. Because I am using a sculptor’s approach for flat surfaces, I have to integrate spontaneity and specific methods in

a certain order. I sincerely believe that for an artist to be creative he has to surprise himself during the process. Building a piece that has been preconceived could end up being too much of a controlled process. Now, the “spontaneous, creative” moment might only be a few seconds and still have a major role – it is what is going on with my work. At first, it was a natural approach, then it became a necessity and even a vital point. For me, being able to change my mind at any moment, as a painter can do, is not possible. As I progress, the point of no return is more frequent. I start on a large open field and end up having to go through a little door. I have to accept that and since I know that, the little narrow door itself becomes an opening to a new large open field.

The power of visual arts in the contemporary age is enormous; at the same time, the role of the viewer’s disposition and attitude is equally important. Both our minds and our bodies need to actively participate in the experience of contemplating a piece of art: it demands total attention and a particular kind of effort – it is almost a commitment. So before leaving this conversation, we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. What do you think about the role of the viewer? Are you particularly interested in trying to trigger the viewers’ perception as a starting point in order to

urge them to experience personal interpretations?

A friend once told me to make art as if I was alone on an island, knowing that when I finish

the piece I will toss it in the ocean. At first the idea gave me vertigo, having to accept the idea of not using my art to say who I am or to project myself to the rest of the world –

this seemed an impossible view of what creating a piece of art would mean for me. But I thought more about it and kept the concept as a reference more than a real

act. What would a piece of art look like if at any moment the idea is to show it? Or would this process, the idea of tossing the work after I finished it, be the ultimate way

to see what is inside of me and wants to come out? Another question came to me…if it is only for me, why should I do it? Maybe meditation or just a walk in the public park is art for yourself, no need of materialization. I think there are as many answers to that as there are artists; everyone has a personal thought about the subject.

After 30 years of juggling in my studio with colors, pieces of wood, emotions, technicalities, art business and galleries, how could I ignore that the viewers are very important to me and that I will always need, in one way or another, a kind of fusion with the viewers. If I had a clear message I would need the viewers to understand my work,

but I do not want clear messages. I assimilate my work as text in an alphabet puzzle, then the viewer will see a novel, a poem or a word. The viewer is often interpreted as a person, a sensitive being, a collector, an art critic, a friend, etc. But to me it could be a mass of people. Can you imagine the Rolling Stones playing for one person? The Pope at the

Vatican window with one spectator? No. Would the Pope’s message or the Stones music be the same if they knew that it would be only one person there? Probably not. I feel the same way. I sense a larger timeless audience rather than a single viewer.

Confidence

96x96x48’’, steel, december 2015

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Pascal. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

There is where I would like to go and there is where I will end up going – we know that is

often a different place. If real creativity needs instinct, the future should be fed with adventures to nurture and expand the creativity. Since we know that the comfort zone is attractive but can very quickly become one’s worst enemy, my next project is always to gather the proper contents for my back pack and prepare for my next adventure. Like

many artists, I am looking for the essential –and essential means minimizing everything, but what for? Maybe it is like the four seasons and minimizing is the step before rebirth.

Land art is a direction I would like to take – for the challenge of it, the newness, the closeness of the sculpture and for my ego. I

also want to feed my regular work with new approaches, new questions and new challenges.

An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryders, curator landescape@europe.com

Evangelia Basdekis

Evangelia Basdekis studied MFA at Lincoln University and BFA at De Montfort University. She was funded by Artsadmin and participated in mentoring scheme with Franko B. Solo shows in AD Gallery Athens, Toynbee studio London, VN Gallery Croatia, Ladden Gallery Munich, Site Gallery Sheffield. Her work was presented in Performance week Venice, Arnolfini Gallery, Tanzquartier-Museum Quartier Wien, Plateaux Festival Frankfurt, 1st & 2nd Biennale of Thessaloniki, Ujazdowski Castle Warsaw, Museum of Contemporary Art

Thessaloniki, BIOS, Theater of Piraeus Athens, Museum of Contemporary Art Crete, also in: France, Switzerland, Turkey, Japan, U.S.A, Sweden, Israel, Serbia, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Estonia, Armenia, Argentina, Montenegro, Czech Republic, etc.

LandEscape meets

Evangelia Basdekis

Lives and works everywhere

Unconventional and captivating in its multifaceted nature, Greek artist Evangelia Basdeki’s work triggers the spectatorship perceptual and cultural parameters to draw them to such multilayered experience. In ‘silence of the Monkeys’ that we’ll be discussing in the following pages, she overemphasizes the ubiquitous* and unbreakable bond between the Human and Nature, providing the viewers with of the opportunity to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. One of the most impressive aspects of Basdeki’s practice is the way it accomplishes a successful attempt to show that another contract between nature and intellect could be achieved beyond any notion of catechism: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and multifaceted artistic production.

Hello Evangelia and welcome to LandEscape: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a MFA from Lincoln University and a BFA from De Montfort University. How did these experiences influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum due to your Greek roots and your current life in between London and Athens inform the way you relate yourself with your artistic inquiry?

Evangelia Basdekis: It is a priviledge for me that I can split myself between two countries, through both my continuous presence and my absence from them. This experience helped me becoming more acute. I began gaining an understanding about my personal story and my origin within this world. Paradoxically, in this way, I cultivated more of my critical position and political stance, the qualities, that is to say of the citizen, as conceived and set in the Athenian (participatory) Republic.

The fact that I travel a lot also helps me in becoming partly a comunicant of this world so I can hear it and partly an outcast who is able to exercise criticism, or –paraphrasing Park – a ‘cultural hybrid’. Being, let’s say a nomad offers me a great deal of independence.

I owe a lot to my studies, I always acquired the support of my proffesors and was faithfully to my ideas, which I learned to put in a short of order. I recognised the mportance of research and of the prsentation of an idea. It was given to chance of both space and time which I consider pretty important in the production of artwork. But what is to me the most important of all is that I set to myself, for the first time ever, the question what kind of artist would I want to be and to whom is my work addressed to.

Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would like to invite to our readers to visit http://contemporaryperformance.ning.com/profile /evangeliabasdekis in order to get a synoptic view of your work: while walking us through your process, would you like to tell to our readers something about the evolution of your style? In

particular, when you conceive a work, is there some conscious shift that addresses you?

Evangelia Basdekis: In my work my interest is in how can transgression be present within the artistic creation. I am concerned on how a transversal way of thinking can be established via art. The element of risk as a way of thinking- which is in contrast to the normative ‘narrative’ of the world-is a true temptation for me. It can in controversy and set anew our uniqueness. My art provokes, offense and even surprise from time to time. Perhaps my work is in equilibrium between the supreme and the grotesque, these qualities appear to a great extent in all my work. I believe that the (personal) idiom of a creator is his true virtue but at the same time it can act as his or her limit. What is sought in my opinion for the creation of a work is sincerity. It defines the artworks authenticity. I am intrested and constantly trying to set my idea in motion not via slaps and gems, but by witnessing the same brutality as it appears in the birth of a child through the bodily fluids and blood. At some point I would like to ‘set my work free’ from the automatic link between the signifier and the signified, so it will be able to abstain from all the mighty ideologies that retain and inflict the (formalists) standtards. In my recent projects I study how the absurd, the irrational, the ridiculous and the insane can surpass cautious reality by setting new ways of viewing and experiencing reality per se. I dont’ choose these elements at random, exactly because I believe that nature has a close tie with absurdity, ridicule and insanity. These very same questions at stake can also search and find answers in my previous works

For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected ‘The silence of The Monkeys’, as an extremely interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your successful attempt to close the gap between the narratives about human and nature is the way you have accomplished your inquiry into such unbreakable bond with effectiveness and autonomous aesthetics. While walking our readers

through the genesis of ‘The silence of the Monkeys’, would you tell us if you how did you developed your initial idea?

Evangelia Basdekis: When you try to explain a work is like you are trying to explain life, the more you try the further you move away from the concentric circles. While listening to the radio one morning, which for a number of times reproached relentlessly through financial terms and mathematical acts indicating the remainder in repayments of Greece’s -my country’s- loan, such as product, detained loan, balance of monetary exchange, etc I found myself crooning the song, which the lyrics: ‘1-5-5 by 20 times is 18, 20 times is 15, 6 + 7 = 18’….only to realize that the world’s debauchery is executed in totally cynical manner and so is my everyday life, my own life. A reality that leaves no escape into magic.

I just wondered who is the one who knows –decides that I am neither interested in the mathematical acts on the amount of astral dust that felon the planet during last night and how much amount of this cosmic dust is attributed to my head? Various matters, therefore, took up my thinking such as to what extent has the body’s detachment from nature defined and created the disenchanted and alienated (political) body and how much has isolation contributed to its capitalization. How would a new relationship between the body and the nature create a rupture in the horizontally organized social body? How would a new relationship between body and nature look like?

The particular discourse led me to the decision to create a non-productive, rebel body, a noncapitalistic body – through its sweat, saliva, time and temperature, its energy and the space it occupies, it devotes itself to an incompatible act of an orderly society, in an act without any profit, an act that could be regarded by all means as an act of blasphemy.

I am not seeking through this project the archaic-primordial relationship within nature since a turning back seems impracticable the say the least. I am neither in search of ‘Arcadia’ nor am I trying to create terror by emphasizing

the ‘destruction’ of nature, which may well be used for air taxation, for the privatization and exploitation of water resources, for our isolation, for once more, from the lands.

Reminding us of Dennis Oppenheim’ ‘Reading Position for Second Degree Burn’, we like the way The Silence of the Monkeys triggers the viewer cultural and perceptual parameters by the use of objects with a strong connotative

reference: German multidisciplinary artist Thomas Demand once stated that ‘nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead’.

What is your opinion about it? Moreover, would you tell us something about the importance of metaphors in your practice and their relationship to memory?

Evangelia Basdekis: I use the word ‘silence’, in the title of my performance ‘The Silence of the Monkeys’, since there is more silence in the physical kingdom than the human. Silence is threatening and unfamiliar; In a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse, as Baudrilliard would say, the animals’ silence weighs more heavily on our organization of meaning. As I have already stated, I would like to make ‘the silence of the monkeys’ performance independent of any sort of –isms, metaphors and catechisms. Any attempt to explain the work via any cultural mediation, transmutation or particular vocabulary cancels automatically the work’s effort, the work itself since what I will reproduce once again the relationship between human and nature as it appears: alienated and mediated via conceptually-minded products.

I consciuosly know that this metaphor is unavoidable in a world that is semiologically oversaturated and the elaboration we do is automatic. So, for me the ‘dependence’ of an artwork is problematic. It is of great concern to me if a work would exist without its potential transformation to metaphors which tend to help the existence of the work of art and also within the art market and its fans. Probably it makes it tame, turning it ‘calmer’, digestible and ready to be interpeted. It can now exist as a narrative, which is the product of a familiar context of references and metaphor. A context in which the work of art is defined as familiar and interpretable within its era. Metaphor entails within its own lesson to be taught. My objection is that once the work of art enters the finite world of metaphor it can no longer adopt and realize its imaginary probability.

I would probably prefer for my work the patafor rather than the metaphor since pataphysics accepts that each act is unique, as each idea is unique and is

allowed of a life of its own. Pataphysics, as defined by Jarry, a science of the fantastic solutions.

As you have marked once, your approach seeks the reappearance of the ties between two seemingly distant worlds, that of human and that of nature, trying to remind us that the distance between them is constructed. Far from being an abstract work, The Silence of the Monkeys is deeply connected to life’s experience and speaks to your spectatorship of the need to protect the natural environment and that everyone has to take responsibility as part of his/ her own lived everyday routine: how much does personal experience fuel your creative process? In particular, do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience in order to communicate particular kind of ideas that goes beyond the realm of perceptual reality?

Evangelia Basdekis: During some evenings I ‘listened’ to the leaves of the gardenia tree inwind in the tunic and ‘listened’ to the moon stepping down from the horizon. I ‘heard’ my hair and nails grow longer in the silence of the night. And within my own body I ‘heard’ more of these quiet processes which my saliva, my blood cells and my new cells bore, while myriads of other cells were dying at the same time and the marrow was born inside the bone, perhaps this is the moment during which my works were born. This time is nature’s time, where creation is perpetual, while it looks still as if nothing happens, nothing moves. The work is also the outcome of my personal ‘rabies’; It contains anger against injustice, my passions and instincts, my idleness, the queried questioning of terrestrial answer. The work exist as a statement, as an action, it is a stance of life and a manifesto at the same time.

I can’t deny the fact that my experiences characterize me both as an individual and as a artist. My creations inevitably carry my qualities since everything is fermented through me. I’ll work on the ideas that concern me on a universal scale, that shape my stance on the world. I realize lately while growing up that during my childhood my games spread in the courtyards entail the same qualities as

my works, they endorsed the element of absurdity, humor and the element of violence. The performance that consider to be my ultimate, original ones are the ones that have given me the wildest pleasure of incompatible freedom as it firstly appeared in my childhood years through the games.

Of course, in order for a work to mature within it takes a long time. During ‘dead’ time all the sediments of experiences, reversals, images, of pain, settle down. What is there is our true self, the one that plunges between its trivial experience of the; everyday’ but also the one that exists within the intangible and the imaginative of our daydreams. We need time to really ‘hear’ what we are told. The works are vivid, altered within the years, they change with time together with us, the people. The works - just to paraphrase Roland Barthes, are not facts, they are just emphases. –epifaseis??? The truth is that as a creator I get to know my work through the passing of time, and I discover plenty, different, new and unknown qualities, meanings and concepts revealed to me continously in my work. There are unrealized works and ideas (at least up to this moment) and also works that urge you to realize them. If you don’t, they will never leave you in peace.

Your work is often pervaded with subtle still insightful socio political criticism and your insightful use of repetition indicates the power and violence of authority: Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, ‘the artist’s role differs depending on which part of the world you’re in. It depends on the political system you‘re living under’. What could be in your opinion the role of Art in the contemporary age? In particular, how do you consider the role of humor in your work?

Evangelia Basdekis: I am really happy you are referring to Gabriel Orosco, an artist I really love and I truly appreciate his work. I agree with the belief that the role of the artist is formed through his/her living environment and also with the notion that in a contemporary society the desperate, hopeless effort of all us in needed so as to express discourses for politics, for art. The efforts of a transgresive artist can appear as a parody because he is asked to exceed the limits, to subvert an orderly society. Even if all his attempts will

end up in a’la Don Quixote failures or in a show, the viewer always differentiate himself from the madman, the buffon, the blasphemous artist.

Humor holds a basic role in my oeuvre too and it is disposed subtly within the total body of my work. Humour pertains a revolutionary character in its roots and exactly like art it contains the intention to re-examine and criticize the cliche notions and facts, to disrupt the stereotype notions in thought and actions. I apply humour in my work because I cherish its disrespect in any rule; Progressive, radical art is equally disrespectful and provocative.

My work, made of neon light pan – sculprures, where one word negates the message of the next word undermines the meaning as only one of the letters is replaced by another, (for instance: ‘paypray-prey’ or ‘faker-maker’) is rather inhuman since humour is the only mean-s through which you can express the truths, which can’t by any means be easily communicated in a rather official manner. I believe that the ambiguity and the irony of my work is emphasised by the use of a clearly commercial language-the one of the neon lightwhich i include so as to create puns. It is a medium, a language fom which we are all accustomed of using since it negotiates lighthearted, compelling messages. Here its use is subverted; It looks as is not confessed truths are suddenly revealed and inner thoughts, consciously with held and hidden and its interpretation is precarious since it introduces the radical doubt and its oscilates in between totally antithetical dimensionally messages.

Your performative gestures seem to be very analytical yet strive to be full of emotion: how much importance does play improvisation in your process? Moreover, do you think that you being a woman provide your artistic research with some special value?

Evangelia Basdekis: Improvisation has an important role in my work, but definitely not

through the usual was that one would consider proper, through experimentations and personal prasctices, that is. For me improvisation is more to this, it is a talk with friends on my idea, observing nature, going on a trip, detaching from my work for my idea once in a while and engaging myself in completely different pracrices (trantlating, conducting interviews, organizing public actions etc.). In general via my absences and my distances and my ‘dead’ moments entail a special role in my work. It tooks as if I am tricking my subconscious, so as to make it reach the surface, to reveal it. All frills come to rest and so it becomes clear to me how I feel and should now express myself. It looks more like a personal, conceptual type of improviation but

the further I become embroiled physically, the more research seems to gain space and both play their initial role and seem to feed into each other in the process of the creation of the work.

But there also these works that have settled in the soul and the heart, and my mind has suddenly conceived them as the absolute and eternal. These ones remain as such, .. I tend not to interfere in these particular ones. I change nothing...they exist as initially conceived...they do not need further elaboration.

I am not a woman who does art. I am a human being first of all, a person who wants to express itself, someone who tries to communicate (far beyond the

notion of the gender) through an act that is called and we call ‘art’. The viewer frequently find himself trying to interpret in a different manner the qualities and messages of a work which is produced by a female artist. I really don’t wish to make references once again to the symbolic and semiotic ‘trantlations’ and similar readings, and edits which exist in any project; I believe I have replied on this issue in my answer on question 4. My primary and foremost role is not that of a woman but the role of the artist. I make art for the human being, not for a woman. ‘To what extent do the bodies of the women belong to themselves, really?’ I could ask this very same question every single man and citizen....Is his body, his city or his

life his personal posession? Does it really belong to him? Are our personal choices truly ours?

What is of great concern to me is the fact that thus our culture is moving us away from nature although it ‘cultivates’ simultaneously our insticts in our own body. This is a totally refined cultivation of all our primordial (our darkest) insticts takes place. This relationship leads us towards a voluntary acceptance of our roles and to a docile reconstruction of our bodies and our way of living. What this shows, is that we have agreed and accepted the discipline of a (of the) regulatory gaze (the authoritarian gaze).

Your work also allows an open reading, a multiplicity of meanings behind the main idea that you aim to communicate: how much important is for you that the spectatorship rethink the concepts you convey in your pieces, elaborating personal meanings?

Evangelia Basdekis: The idea of how the does an audience accepts a work of art, if it does at all, should not be really a concern of the artists, since it acts against the work’s process itself. If you want to express yourself and communicate through your work it is truly a matter of time finding the right way to express yourself. My work express a mood of shock, an attempt to break the limits, challenging the viewer to personal exposure in the same way in which I expose myself. My wishful thinking is that the spectator should not want to embattle himself against new forms of expression, ideas and discourses. He shouldn’t be afraid to disrupt whatever he creates and defines his own identity.

It seems really strange. It is all this tremendous effort and the formation of the expressive language and then comes the complete loss of control; the inability to intervene….the work commences its own discourse, a path which you are not able to follow anymore. The work is a statement. The artist is exposed via his work. He judges through it and he is also judged at the same instance.

Your works have been presented at a number of festivals and you presented the long durational performance ‘Regimes of Truth’ at the Venice International Performance Art Week: one of the hallmarks of your work is the capability to create direct involvement with the viewers, who are provided with of the opportunity to become active participants and are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience: in particular, we are wondering if the aim to create an event for a spectator is the reason why you transmit your ideas: do you consider the issue of audience

reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

Evangelia Basdekis: Let me tell you a few things about my work ‘Regimes of Truth’. It was not only Duchamp’s portrait which was created with the contribution of the audience (the spectators had the chance to paint on my body- my libido area during the performance). The portraits of Marx, Freud and that of Jesus are also the result of the contribution of the viewers. The performance lasted for 3 days and at its end the portraits of the four men (their photos) were placed high up on the wall of the room, as the icons of the saints appear in church of as an iconostasis in a home. These famous men, have constructed me in a sense. I am their result, their product, one would say.

The performance ends with my masturbation which I experience as a personal ritualistic effort of ‘vomiting’, of miscarrying, deleting ones identity which appears infected by my education and the indoctrinations of my era. My masturbation is an attempt...to ask/ demand back my body as ‘tabula rasa’ and inhabit it a new. This work is a commentary on these four (hegemonic-patriachal) figures which inspired/ influenced/ shaped and accentuated my personality as well as my later personal development as a thinking person and an artist.

I believe that every form of expression (creation) is an attempt for communication with the public, with the Other. The element of pain for instance in my works ‘Charlie-Charlie’ and ‘Art is Beautiful’ acts as a main element of my visual language, as a hint of exaggeration which I have consciously chosen as the most appropriate for my expression. In my work pain does not exist for pain per se.

I don’t cause pain to myself just because I find plea, pain has to be perceived in its larger socio-political context. Each viewer becomes a messenger of my pain and a withness of pain, therefore. The question or any question on how the artist will escape the

'

I am your worst nightmare' Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK 2007

danger or how much will he or she stand in pain becomes invaluable and rhetoric. When I embroider my hand I am in pain for sure. This does not mean that I characterize my self a masochist artist who wishes to offer spectacle to a sadistic audience. What happens is that both artist and viewer become exposed to physical pain and violence. What I discovered eventually, is that the element of pain within a performance can turn out problematic: it distracts the viewer’s attention.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Evangelia. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects?

How do you see your work evolving?

Evangelia Basdekis: My most recent field of experimentation, my discourse is my new work entitled the ‘Lament’. It can be described as the aftereffect of the loss of a beloved person. The ‘Lament’ unveiled from my own, personal need to incarnate or even resurrect the body of the absentee. I discerned that both pain and the lamentation are omnipotent; that lamentation’s public expression unites people, remorse becomes a natural, acceptable situation. ‘The Lament’ becomes a public wail, which denies any border, identity, order or time itself. So the lament surpasses, breaks away from subjectivity, it turns universal and thus political, giving way to loss, naming injustice and doubting the established ties of power.

The milestones that I have selected originate from various districts from all over the Greek peninsula as well as from other countries, especially, from countries of migrants who are now residents in Athens.

Also this period, I am working on the initiation of the artistic research team ‘Per Art Archive’, a team responsible for the creation of an archive on performance art in Greece and Greek performance artists, which consist of art theorist Margarita Kataga, performer artist Hara Kolaiti and myself. I quote here the Pres Release of the ‘Per Art Archive’ team:

Τhe artistic group PER ART is a newly initiated cultural organization which will be recording issues in relation t performance in Greece. Our primary goal is the creation of the visual project 'PER ART - An Interview Archive of Greek Performers'

Taking into consideration the fact that performance art in Greece is constantly evolving from the 1970s to the present, the interest of compiling an archive of interviews as a mechanism of information on the dimensions of performance emerged.

Most artists who work intervening in real life provide a more egalitarian exchange between artist and viewer and open up a dialectical relationship. By thinking about the viewer with whom the performer is in dialogue, we compile and develop a record for every single ‘viewer’ of the art of performance Our record presents a series of personal interviews by older as well as currently active artists in Greece over the past 50 years.

Like any art archive, it aims to record the history and preserve the ideas of performance in Greece through the interviews of its most important exponents.

And on a wider level it will contribute to the recording of the social context surrounding the artistic discourse and its evolution. A second part of interviews therefore will be by famous museum directors, curators, gallerists, journalists and collectors who have been involved and have contributed in their own subjective way to the art of performance in Greece.

Our collective vision is to share widely the thematic, conceptual and social correlations that will be revealed by the personal testimonies. The on-going archive will be renewed and updated with new entries every 6 months!

Our aim is to make it a valuable archival material of Greece's performances artists for art schools, museums and organizations internationally!

LandEscape meets

Ess Beck

Marked out with such a captivating cross-disciplinary approach, artist Ess Beck's work deviates from traditional trajectory to operate in the field between music concrète and conventional compositions, which she combines with a love for lo-fi, unintentional noise, mechanical systems, and excessive use of effects: in her improvisational sitespecific audiovisual performance 3-Hour-Woman that we'll be discussing in the following pages, she triggers both the perceptual and cultural parameters of the spectatorship, to provide them with such multilayered experience. One of the most impressive aspects of Beck's work is the way it accomplishes the difficult task of challenging the normative conventions of the performer-audience situation: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and multifaceted artistic production.

Hello Ess and welcome to LandEscape: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. Over the years you have combined both formal training, earning a MSc Audio Design graduate from Aarhus University's Faculty of Arts and Communication and self-taught practice as an autodidact musician and music producer, active on the Danish experimental underground music scene: how did these opposite experiences influenced your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your multifaceted cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to art making?

My primary objective with studying Audio Design was based on my bachelor in Dramaturgy at Aarhus University’s Faculty or Arts. During my studies at Dramaturgy, sound and music were often quite significant components in the creative production and work we did, but on an academic level there was sparse critical focus in curriculum and applied theory, regarding the role of sound and music in performance. Some of the primary theorists like Patrice Pavis and Manfred Pfister deal do deal sound and music in performance and misé-en-scene, but on a simple explanatory level. They the acknowledge sound and music as effective components, but without proposing a comprehensive frame work for examining and discussing semantic potential - especially when it comes to audio sources and applied technology. I decided to explore this via the field of Audio Design which was a radical step since the approach to understanding the matter of sound and music in context was much more concerned with designing, anticipating and observing end-user response to measure and discus effect and affect from a technical point of view. In this field I began to feel that the view on human listening and

perception in context was limited too, because the poly-semantic variables present in constructed, controlled environments lacked the attention to detail that the dramaturgical approach offers. Over the course of the last 10 years, the debate regarding this problem has picked up, but when I started Audio Design it was difficult to get beyond discussing from a post-modern perspective; here the dominant belief was that because one responds emotionally to what one hears in the audiovisual context, it must be proof of effective communication and that the sound "works". This result would then be explained as a socio-psychological phenomenon, where we draw upon individual and collective experience to understand the meaning of sound - and further assert proper emotive response to our understanding. I don't consider this approach and theory wrong, but I find it too singular. It puts a lid on all the why's and what if's way to easily.

Being an active experimental musician and working so much with sound and music in front of an audience as well releasing music, it felt that neither approaches fully afforded the possibility to explore what creates the shared space of understanding, in sound performance situations. Looking at the type of performances I would do, the visual references were often only the instruments and the performer performing, yet coming off stage, the audience would propose various feelings and narratives attached to the abstract music and explain in details vivid imagery that they went through. To me, this shows the enormous potential - and power- of listening, and drives me to question what constructs such conditions and how this perceptual process works depending on context. When looking at the actual spatio-temporal features of a performance one might ask; what enables this process of listening, what obstructs and shifts it, and what does that mean in terms of the performers' role as a form of mediator opposed to being a just a musician?

I found that my approach to developing concepts I consciously, and unconsciously, draw on dramaturgical theory to examine how sound becomes meaningful depending on context. The dramaturgical approach affords the thinking that the same action has multiple semantic outcomes depending on context and that there is no certain truth to rely on.

Studying IT and interaction (Audio design is a part of Digital Design) I had a welcome reunion with cybernetics which I was introduced at Dramaturgy. Applying Cybernetics in it's original field afforded me a to-the-bone understanding of information theory, that opened up new perspectives to what creative production is, in terms of communication. I got quite interested in how humans seem to be perfectly capable of viewing and engaging in a time-space-action with seemingly dead objects. Through a sonic response to input, or simply an output, the subject is afforded a minimum sign -of -life, which

seems to be enough for us to react and steer our attention towards actionor the expectation of action. In short, a simple "beep" in a certain sequence, rhythm or tonality is able to convey meaning in a specific context. This is especially clear in interactive artifacts or machines that we come into contact with on a daily basis. Our ability to respond to very little information got me thinking about my own working process as an experimental musician and improviser; I started to think about the creative process as self-dialogical, and wanted to explore how my own imagination gets activated to produce meaning and new inputs with very little cues from the previous output. In this investigation I rely quite a lot on the concept of autopoiesis to understand myself as being in both a sender and receiver position, in process. On a practical level I rely heavily on my effect pedals to create delay, echoes, reverb, distortion and most importantly loops. With these I am able to revisit my output in the creative situation, and examine and change it through a recycling process. So the sound that has already happened will be replayed but slightly altered or enhanced. After a long time of doing this, it really messes with your perception of passed time. One aspect of creative production is inspiration, another is communication, but a third aspect is continuance - or flow. I found, through my experimental work with music and sound, that by examining this last aspect, we may understand some of the core conditions of how we keep attention and focus when faced with abstract aesthetic input. This is where music and sound is so unique in the performance situation, because it offers clean, simple parameters to play with. So, the way I have developed artistically is to apply my existing skills and theory with an intuitive approach, and eventually turned myself in to a guinea pig!

Your practice is marked out with such captivating cross-disciplinary feature, revealing that you are a versatile artist capable of crossing from a medium to another: before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit https://www.essbeck.dk in order to get a synoptic view of your work: in the meanwhile, would you tell us what does draw you to such approach? And in particular, when do you recognize that one of the techniques has exhausted it expressive potential to self, in order to express the themes you explore?

For a few years, I was merely focused on experimental music and sound, and experimenting with the cross-field between music vs. sound and how that is established and broken down, as a shared experience between to myself and the listener.

I have found that moving across different disciplines, media and platforms creates a fluidity that is fruitful when working with such a process-oriented approach. I work mostly on a conceptual level because it keeps me able to have an open discourse. By presenting concepts online rather than just performing IRL, I wish to propose that my work is linked it to a question of purpose; it raises the question to which level one has to experience something in person or whether cyberspace and imagination may just be sufficient in the future of performance. But this is just one level of my approach. I use the Internet as a nebulous fourth wall that I can either enforce or break down - or leave suspended in its own equivocality. Stepping in to the real world, then, becomes an action of enforcing reality and actuality. Being a performer in person versus performer in cyberspace impregnates the act - and function - of my presence with a new level of meaning and purpose, which references back to the original conceptual level. I like thinking of my works as never "finished", and never reaching a sublime state. I want my concepts to take on a different meaning and purpose depending on context.

Shifting in and out of forms of expressions and of media helps me develop a certain technique or way of thinking about the poetic potential of a theme, idea or material. I never really feel that something is fully exhausted because it can always be opened up again in a new process, and be remediated in to something else. The short video works, for instance, are

loops that I at one point apply in context with sound works or the other way around. And then I split them up and sometimes re-apply to get another view on either product. On a methodological level, what I am presenting (or exposing) is really my process and my raw material, which is being recycled and turned into something else. I want to avoid pretending that everything is original and exclusive, because it is not.

After having worked with music for 4-5 years I got really inundated with having to make "tracks" and confinement to linearity of time and bandwidth restrictions. Figuratively speaking it could be compared to wanting to paint outside the frame; I want techniques to exhaust themselves when there is no more space outside the frame. Even then, the next step may be to move to another room and continue there, until you get disrupted by natural causes.

Recently, I have moved on to the "real world" working with difficult fabrics like nylon, using tactile response and listening to the fabric's microsounds. I listen and touch for a long time and what happens, eventually, is that when the sound or sensation starts to become familiar, my imagination - driven by the desire to engage with the object - starts to work on its own merits. Suddenly the quality of the sounds may start shifting or simply feel different. This technique of "taming" a new material is quite similar to the way I work with various mediums and tools. The thing that exhausts a technique is really just the person handling it; Either I am not able to work any longer because of attention, life, biology - or I have simply no more ideas or space, or I keep getting the same result from the same action. It's perhaps a form of poetic and artistic actualism that permeates every aspect of my work.

My approach is quite entangled with the desire to expose process - with all that comes with it. I really love when things break or for some reason it glitches, because once you are aware of that feeling it exposes a form of behavioral economics attached to artistic practice; one may suggest that it shows how the Western rationalization of time and productivity hits us in the head - event in the field of arts. Here, one would think you would be sheltered by the fact that a creative process doesn't demand concrete results, but as soon as you start to think that you've spent a lot of time in process without any results, then you are prone to feel unresolved and unproductive. It can be quite exhausting to commit yourself to always being in process and not allowing things to be wrapped. I have chosen this approach because, eventually it will - and does - result in some kind of natural exhaustion of a technique, but understanding when that exhaustion actually happens, in this way of working, is something that is understood post-liminal, if at all. It's like trying to pin down a point-of-no return in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, where one may suggest that the point-of-noreturn may actually be the second the play starts, or the moment you step into the theatre, or when the idea of the play was born.

For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected 3-Hour-Woman, a stimulating improvisational site-specific audiovisual performance that our readers have already started to got to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your inquiry into the nature of sound as a spatial and sensuous phenomenon is the way you have provided it with such autonomous aesthetics: when walking our readers through the genesis of 3-Hour-Woman, would you tell us what did address you to focus on the notion of human psycho-acoustics?

3-hour woman is a concept-performance derived from my statement performance called 24-hour woman where I (among other things) wanted to examine the conditions of my own creativity and performance. I wanted to explore which degree the creative, producing self needs the ideal recipient or an idea of someone in the other end, potentially listening/viewing, to be able to motivated oneself, as well as, to transcend

various obstacles like one’s own biology. On another level, the performance itself ended up weaving together various themes such as gender, cyber space, distance versus proximity, loneliness, and the plight of the artist in a digital age. Questions like: If the value of craftsmanship is equalized in a reality where everyone can produce by virtue of digital aid, is endurance the next frontier in performance poetics? If so, what does that mean to aspects like gender, stamina, wealth, creativity and originality? Will there be some sort of bio-socioeconomical natural selection played out, and in which arena(s) would that be? And further: will acoustics matter in the future? Do we need to be in the performance space to understand the purpose of performance? If so, how long will we have to be there for it to be meaningful - both as sender and receiver?

In terms of the spatial aspect, the concept points back to my belief that “all conditions matter”. The more I practice this performance ethos, the more I lean towards the position that performance, as an art form, does not unequivocally allow us to transcend variables like gender, social standing, culture, body, time and space. Essentially this position has carved out my way in to the discussion about the potential of sound in performance, and what that even is, means and matters!

On a practical, producing level, I keep finding myself coming back to the unanswered questions: Why can I keep doing this? How long can I keep doing this? How long can people be in a room with me doing this? What makes them stay? What makes them leave? Does it matter that they know how long I intend to stay here? Does that reflect on their experience - and their mode of listening? When do they shift between listening to the sound in the room and listening to sound that I send out, and why? Does it even matter to my work that they are here or that I am here? Could I just pre-record the sonic output and pretend to perform, and what happens then if I leave the room?

Using a concert-like setting in my performance, affords me a way to signify to the audience how to listen and experience. I lean on craftsmanship and a shared, pre-existing understanding of what the musician-performer does. This relieves me, as a performer, of the “actor” role. In turn, this relieves the audience of the role of the “active” perceiver, because it allows them a more concert-like mode of being and receiving. I think this is really where the question of Psycho-Acoustics matter, because the simple communication that “I will be doing the work” in this particular setting, reliefs the audience of pressure to understand or to make meaning of what they are hearing. It offers the listening space to the ears of the listener. They are also perfectly able to leave whenever they want to - just like a concert. It grants total autonomy and no autonomy at the same time, for everyone involved. The work continues without them and they can continue without the work. And that is where the manifestation of sound, as a physical phenomena, becomes relevant because acoustics - as sound happening in space and time - is a unique situational experience, opposed to experiencing a recorded performance, or experiencing it streamed online. However, asserting this fact does not say anything about the quality of experience and reception, it rather suggests that each context is potentially different, and the outcome could vary. So as a performer and sender I cannot determine anything concrete, I can just provoke, observe and accept the differences. The only thing that I can say for sure is how the nature of sound works and how the ears should work in relation to this phenomenon.

Sound plays a crucial role in your work and as you have remarked in your introductive statement, only in the human perception does sound transform into music, and vice versa. According to media theorist Marshall McLuhan there is a 'sense bias' that affects Western societies

favoring visual logic, a shift that occurred with the advent of the alphabet as the eye became more essential than ear. How do you see the relationship between sound and images?

I have always been a bit opposed to this sense-bias assumption, because it is a retrospective view of audiovisual culture that is founded in academic circumstances. It wasn't before the invention of recording that it was actually possible to replay sound 1:1, so naturally it took much longer before we had something solid to study. Meanwhile the representation of sound has always been present in everything from literary works to - of course - written musical works and theatre. Those studying history of Aesthetics have naturally had a text-based body of work concerning visual works as solid references, and consequently, it could just as well be that this dominant production of research concerning visual artifacts, has led to scientists, to suppose, later on, that this must be proof that Western society historically must have had this 'sense bias'. I believe it is much more circumstantial.

I would much rather like to propose that both the audio and the visual aspects of the aesthetics have been present and understood as important, but for natural causes we are a bit behind concerning sound studies behind, because correct research methodology - or conversations about sound and music needs static artifacts as research matter. Ever since the invention of recording technology, the academic world has picked the subject up rapidly, and created various methodologies to study sound and music. With that in mind one could argue that we are just a curious and pre-occupied with the audio as with the visual, but we have lacked the right technology to do research.

Technology plays a crucial role in your approach and a part of your artistic inquiry is focused on the exploration of the cross-field between analogue and digital technology: Multidisciplinary artist Angela Bulloch onced remarked "that works of arts often continue to evolve after they have been realised, simply by the fact that they are conceived with an element of change, or an inherent potential for some kind of shift to occur". Technology can be used to create innovative works, but innovation means not only to create works that haven't been before, but especially to recontextualize what already exists: do you think that the role of the artist has changed these days with the new global communications and the new sensibility created by new media?

In relation to previous question, and to the question of psychoacoustics, I find it really interesting that researchers and practitioners seem to be very little concerned with the implications of something as simple as amplification and what to what that means to our visual experience of the world. What does synchronization of the audible and the visible mean in different contexts? I do believe that the role of the artist has changed a lot, because there is not much we can offer in terms of audiovisual stimulation, that the audience isn't already constantly exposed to in one form of the other. I think it also paves the way for many desperate measures to have theatre and performance "keep up" with technology without questioning the purpose. Meanwhile, we are still far behind when it comes to just dealing with the poetic consequences of integration of sound technology in performance, to begin with!

In 3-hour woman amplification-technology is a key part of the sitespecific performance because without it, I would not be able to convey some of the effects that I do. When we think about performance in a more general way, we often think that a certain

treatment of sound is quite benign because it is used to convey something else (dialogue/atmosphere/ concrete sound), but how often do we stop and think about how it may distort or saturate the overall semantics, the same way live video projection of details happening in a performance, would be subject to deeper interpretation? Even though you as the creator may think that because a sound occurrence is dramatically anchored to a visual referent, or a musical soundtrack is anchored to a specific situation, it doesn't keep the spectator from isolating this sound in memory and attach a specific meaning to it, postperformance.

Audience today have a high literacy in terms of technology, and how we show or disguise techology in misè-en-scene, or, are seen using it on stage should matter. Currently, the hot thing in performance and sound art is Surround Sound and multiple channels, and however fascinating the technology seem, dialing up the stakes when it comes to psychoacoustics alone, should not be done in favor of considering the core context. You may get a fascinating techno-sonic experience, but just because something has a certain effect that doesn't mean it's effective in relation to context and intention.

I try to work a lot with this in mind too. Quite often I found myself thinking "wow, this device is ingenious!", but the audience was never able to distinguish or understand what it was, and although they heard the sound, it was not necessarily perceived as important in terms of their subjective experience. What I have gained from this is to keep focus on context and respect the power of the presence of technology, and how that alters perception with the receiver.

Trying to emulate a realistic sonic environment doesn't guarantee that the subject matter becomes more real and true to the receiver. On the contrary the more realistic something becomes, clearly without being it, the more of a distance to the subject matter one may create. This may also serve as an argument to use performance to actually understand the audience. What is the audience today? What are they capable of understanding? Is the audience actually, by virtue of living in a hyper complex reality, more flexible in terms of shifting in and out of concrete and abstract experiences?

When I perform, my experience is that a "shift" happens in the intersection between the hidden magic of using technology and the actual, audible result of using technology. For instance: when performing I will create sounds where it is obvious to the audience what the source is, as well as sounds that derives arbitrarily from the devices. Some are looped and distorted whilst others remain true to their original source. I believe this audiovisual dualism anchors the experience of listening and understanding to a simple real object, whilst allowing for another layer that is subjective production of meaning to happen, without demanding that the listener needs to attach the production of meaning to that said object. It's a nice way of splitting attention and immersing the audience in sound, without overwhelming or saturating the levels of experience that may happen in the performance space. This is why, at the same time, it is very important that the audience understands that I am improvising, because this mere piece of information may suggest that: "If I can make this make sense to me in this time and space, perhaps you can make sense of it too". I like to think this attempt to suggest an equal relationship in the aesthetic experience, could be seen as the role of the artist, because it is about wanting to make a connection despite of all the "noise" that we are faced with. It is a suggestion that behind the layers and demands that are made for our attention, we still have a say, because our individual experiences matter, because we experience. And this individual experience doesn't stop having value once the performance is over.

We have highly appreciated the way 3-Hour-Woman challenges the normative conventions of the performer-audience situation: Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "the artist’s role differs depending on which part of the world you’re in. It depends on the political system you’re living under". Not to mention that almost everything, ranging from Joseph Beuys' Jeder Mensch ein Künstler Auf dem Weg zur Freiheitsgestalt des sozialen Organismus to Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present, could be considered political, do you think that your works is political, in a certain sense? Moreover what could be in your opinion the role of Art in order to sensitize the viewers in our everchanging contemporary scene?

My works are very political! I have a great desire for politics to contain more humanism and that longing - or wishful thinking- saturates everything I do.

The concepts I create are formed around various parameters and one is the contrast between the systems that we have in the privileged parts of Western society like Denmark and how they operate for the better and the worse. On one hand, the Arts are tremendously free and thriving here, and on the other hand they have never been under as much pressure and threat of structural collapse as they are now. Without any such precedence, Danish Arts is seeing powerful right wing politicians in government trying to meddle with the way that arts funds are distributed, based on their beliefs of what is "good" and "bad" art. This is quite a concern because they are actually suggesting a form censorship by wanting to have the power to decide what can be granted funding on a case-to-case basis. The fact that they are even stepping beyond their function as legislative, and now suggest to become executive, is not less serious because the subject matter is art. But, the general public seems quite indifferent, and the vast majority buys in to the rationale that art must be able to pay for itself, or be "sell-able" to be justified as good and relevant. If this way of thinking gets normalized, it would not only turn the practice of art to become fully commoditized but also destroy the pillar in our democratic society, that the arts is. The fact that the outcry over this was absent, could signify that this reality may not be so far away.

In Denmark we have some of the best funding options in the world. The problem is that if you accept funding at any time, you may disqualify yourself from other systems like unemployment benefits or maternity pay and sick leave, because the unemployment system then views you as having entered a "professional" level and thus must be capable of always making money for the rest of your life. It is quite an archaic way of understanding the arts and how life as an artist works. This view defeats the purpose of even giving money to the arts.

This is a huge problem for equality, because especially female artists then have to choose between arts or children, and unlike Abramovich I do not believe that a woman should be expected to obliterate their specific biological qualities for the sake of arts. Although I identify myself as non-binary, I don't believe that pretending not to be a given biological gender - or just human - will establish equality. I stand by my biological gender! The problem with negating the "problem" of your female gender, is always going to require a shift towards male reality. How is that liberating? How is that changing anything for the better? It creates stagnation and normalizes the rationale that we should not try to fight for a better system, and that women should instead morph into men to fix the issue. We should have a system that recognizes the biological difference in a positive way, and give everyone the best possibilities to succeed. I am not impressed by Marina's suggestion, that she has made the ultimate sacrifice by having several abortions(.The independent, July 2017). To me it is just that kind of thinking I want to challenge: I want to challenge the idea that artistsand especially women become more "artistic" and free, proportionally

to either the extreme measures they take to transgress upon their bodies and minds, or by what they sacrifice - because the costs are often much bigger for women. Men are not sacrificing their biology or having to abandon their gender. They can much easier build a family around themselves without having to step out of their profession to do so. Equality is to insist that no systems - whether it being the arts system itself or the systems in the state should require of human beings to make transgressions upon their body and mind for their work to gain value or to have relevance. Choosing to do so is another story, but not having a choice is discrimination. As a young artist I am sad that in 2018, I am entering a field of work, where I have to be concerned about what happens if I get pregnant. The art world is the last place where we can both be free from our gender in praxis, and where you also become acutely aware of your biological gender. That is why I also want to challenge the notion that artistic practice can set you free; it can also make archaic structures very visible, and expose how we view the role of the artist in society - especially in relation to gender. This becomes very evident in the performer-audience situation, I believe. With a less critical view of Marina's ethos, she does expose that ambivalence masterfully. She exposes the audience's lust for blood, so to speak. My work is less antagonistic and radical, but I also want to challenge the spectator to a form of staring contest. The difference is that I make it very clear that I am the one likely to fail to keep up with my own concepts, and I want to share that part of the experience of being human, through my work.

Through your artworks you examine how tools and technology shape creative processes and the subjective production of meaning: we like the way your approach addresses the viewers to such a wide number of narratives: rather than attempting to establish any univocal sense, you seem to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations: when discussing about the role of randomness in your process, would you tell us how much important is for you that the spectatorship rethink the concepts you convey in your pieces, elaborating personal meanings? How open would you like your works to be to be understood?

I want to create a clear division between my perspective as the producing entity and the receiver role. Here, tools and technology help create that division by creating an ambiguous relationship between the spectator and myself; through technology and action I can establish a simple, common understanding of what I am doing. At the same time, I can also obscure this understanding. Through the recognition of a musical instrument, for instance, I am affording the spectator a visual reference to understand what may or may not take place in a performance. And the more complex my set up of instruments and gear gets, the more there is to "work out" for the audience. By playing or not playing, and swaying in and out of music and sound, tone, tempo and rhythm an acute sense of nowness forms. The audience will learn over time that there is no logical pattern in my performance, so "thinking ahead" by drawing on inherent musical understanding is not going to work. They have to let go a bit.

In Turbulens (15 minutes performance) I use two oscillating fans to do the work for me when it comes to creating the key input, what I call "first noise" or "acting noise", and then I treat the sound and organize it into a different rhythm of range of frequencies. Eventually it accumulates and turns chaotic, but when speaking to the audience afterwards, what I found was that this build-up of complexity over time, created more space for reflection and wandering thoughts.

So, the shift from repetition and pattern to destruction of pattern, almost seemed cathartic, and it seemed that I was creating this sense of relief with the audience, a moment of controlled chaos and freedom from repetition. Again I introduced the work by stating that I had no idea

what was going to happen because I was improvising, and I think that created some fear-based tension, which was further conditioned by the first 5 minutes where not much happened. One audience member said he was very relieved when something did happen and then his mind started to wander. I believe this contrast - or shift - is necessary minimum for the experience. Mind you the entire performance output was primarily white noise and roaring sweeps of frequencies! Although, I had totally different intentions on a poetic level, what I experienced from the feedback with "Turbulens" was how that little shift from one state to another was really what the audience was concerned with. They were listening for the changes, rather than trying to understand what the changes meant. To me this shows that when it comes to sound performance, of this sort, compared to any other form

of performance, the sound could actually be considered as the performing entity. It can be seen as capable of occupying the entire mode of perception and understanding.

Everyone seemed to have created different narratives that they had attached to the experience of what they had just heard, more than what they saw. The fact that a work, that I assumed to be quite closed, would open itself up based on the sensuous quality of the performance, and not the quality of intention, is just kind of result I hope to get with my work. These type of experiences are important, as they undoubtedly loop back to me as a performer, and naturally alter the work in a new direction; my way of thinking about the performance has been destroyed indefinitely and I will never be able to produce the same

thing again! On the other hand, if the audience mirrored my perception and understood what I was trying to do 1:1 it would have entirely different consequences.

The important thing is that one outcome should not be viewed as "better" or "more useful" that the other. Outcome is just a part of process and so is interpretation. Randomness is a ubiquitous thing that I allow to happen at all levels; it can be present in the creation of sound, just as well as in the construction of meaning. By thinking this way, ideally no part of process becomes more important that others - not even reception or interpretation, they just happen, the same way that the phenomenon of sound happens.

I am aware that this distinction seems to draw a line between approach, subject matter, craft and technology, theme, message, philosophy, but to explain in simpler terms: I use the method and approach as a solid core to anchor the fluidity of the more abstract matters such as theme, message and poetic intention. So this is the process-orientation I mention earlier. Process is to me a vessel of consciousness for everything that I do, and my framework of examining and understanding what I do in various situations as an artist and human being. It is there to pose questions, rather than finding answers.

Another central theme of your artistic inquiry is gender-identity and it's important to remark that apart from your project based work, you are currently researching and developing open teaching programs to encourage young women to play/work with sound technology and experimental forms of sonic expression: how much does this teaching experience inform your vision about Art? In particular, would you tell us if you think that your being woman provided your artisic research with some special value?

With 24-hour woman and 3-hour woman, the titles' reduction of me to a "female" definitely creates a certain setting; I give just enough information to create the understanding that in order for me to be able to improvise for 3 hours, I will have to draw on some kind of ability to perform - to deliver something aesthetic, artistic and beautiful during this timeframe. With the title I point towards my body and my gender and draw that in to the work - because it matters. That is where things get suspended and where one of the messages I want to convey is made apparent; The concept becomes a frame work where society's celebration of human stamina crosses paths with artistic integrity and gender.

Creative and biological failure becomes a potential reality. In other terms, I may just fail as a performer and turn out to be an ordinary person, who has to go to the bathroom, take a break. It should be remarked that in the given situation with these time-constrained performances I absolutely allow myself to do anything I want to. I try not to, but I also try to make it clear that I am myself and I am not acting, and I am not creating an illusion. I want the audience to understand that I am a human being in a specific situation, but it's the same human being that also exists in various other situations. It's really a refusal to be reduced as a human being by virtue of the performance situation. So, there is the question of power over expectation; who gets to decide what constitutes a performance? Is it the sender or receiver? Do we somehow negotiate it under way, and how does that negotiation take place?

When I did 24-hour woman people were asking me how I could continue to do produce something good for 24 hours, and how I could avoid bathroom breaks and falling asleep. My answers was that I never claimed to be able to do so, and that no matter how much I would like to have super human powers in art, this was and is never going to happen. It's the act of doing and not the judgement of the action that drives the purpose of my work. That said, I expected and wanted these questions to come up because they expose our common views of what we expect from a performance situation and from artistic practice. Playing with the parameters of timeframe and setting with this concept, allows for an exposure of new questions: for instance how would 6-hour woman differ from 3-hour woman? and what would happen if it was called 3-hour human?

I think the fact that I do consider myself non-binary, or rather as "not having a gender", I have through my 20s become so much more aware of exactly what the differences are, in terms of how we carve out space for each other in an arts scene or a profession.

There are so many misconceptions or misinformed beliefs that just seem to foster solutions, especially in teaching, that don't seem to actually solve

the problem. Being met with these misconceptions, and being on the female side of the argument, I get frustrated to a point that I feel an obligation to try to change conditions for the young women that are, hopefully, sitting at home experimenting with technology and sound. I am totally committed to my biological gender but not being able to "see" it myself, is a huge benefit because I have had no problem - or hesitations - stepping into the music scene or to my studies at Audio Design where I was the only woman. However, speaking to other women my age, I realize that to do this, to be able to even ask if they can join in (whether it being a band or a situation where technology is being played with), can be quite a threshold to cross.

Drawing upon my own praxis, I want to examine gender division in teaching, which is happening quite a lot with various initiatives at the moment. Doing a teaching program to encourage women to take part, doesn't necessarily mean taking men out of the equation. If we take a gender out of the teaching situation, we may miss the opportunity for everyone to experience girls as equally interested and capable. At the same time it enforces a narrative that boys and girls have different social and cognitive learning capabilities, and that may not be unequivocally constructive.

At the same time, if the schooling system is not ready to invent new ways of teaching the arts, and especially music, where they take on a pedagogical responsibility to ensure that we develop both teaching methods and the right conditions for inclusion, then it makes good sense to just divide to make sure we don't loose any more great female talents along the way, because we fail to encourage and see potential for inclusion.

In my opinion we should be looking at the matrix of pedagogy, didactics, tools, technology and setting, and also start questioning what musical understanding is! Why not do sound art in music class? Why adhere to notation and conventional instruments? In my opinion the conventional way of teaching music creates reproduction of what already exists, it's like asking kids to paint by numbers and think that this somehow will develop creativity and skill. It teaches kids to only draw inside the frame to be "right".

I try to examine this discourse in my own in the praxis; to understand how to create conditions for understanding, reflection and development - individually and collectively. So far, my experience is, evidently, that some of the factors that either enable or hinders creative learning, understanding and development could be down to quite simple elements and conditions. It's about finding that fine line between chaos and order, and understanding how various modes can produce concrete and absurd artifacts and experiences, that may not need to be understood to be purposeful. Learning to exist and to think in both very dynamic and very static sensuous conditions is tremendously important. That is where working with sound has a unique potential in a disruptive methodology; its a very flexible material and once the basic understanding of how it works is asserted, the potential for experimentation - as well as learning how to be experimental - is huge.

In theory, the more unconventional and abstract we can make teaching situation (and still keep it substantial), the less likely the participants are to be concerned with using their socio-cultural learning to navigate in the experience. E.g.: If nobody has any preconceptions of who is more eligible or who has specific skills from the get go, then that normalizes the creative, collaborative situation. Experimenting with this approach, however, really make high demands of the teacher and the setting. From my own experience it takes time and patience to build up literacy when it comes to working with improvisation and to be able to experiment. Particularly when you have to unlearn playing an instrument. Asking adults not to play music when they see a guitar or a set of keys, and instead to examine the sounds coming out, can prove quite challenging! So I am currently experimenting with different

approaches to equalize, so to speak, a group of students with varying levels of musical skills and technological literacy, to get them to focus on staying in process and collaboration, rather than the quality of their end products.

3-Hour-Woman fosters conversations on the interplay between the sonic experience and the space it inhabits, urging the viewers to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

I would much rather just consider it "a component" among other components. I would like to resist placing audience reception in any hierarchy of creative production. The question of the role - or importance - of the audience reception is still an open one for me. But I consider it a crucial issue in my decision making process. Although, I would much rather insist that it's because medium and context matters. Works like 3-hour woman and 24-hour woman, are, in relation to the matter of the spectatorship, attempts to ask if: Perhaps in the future, the audience could become redundant? Then one could ask if we even need to actually perform? If we could just talk about performance on a conceptual level, might we be able to just relive or imagine a performance? Or at least appreciate it through the context of chosen medium, without having to experience it in real life?

Doing 24-hour woman, already when I announced it, it created attention, and lots of questions and discussion in relation to the artistic and political point I wanted to make, but nobody would actually watch the whole thing for 24 hours straight. I am the only witness to what happened!

3-hour woman is basically the same, but the question of time and place creates a different conversation. The crucial difference is the audience and whether or not we share the same space. Will a streaming of 3-hour woman opposed to a site-specific performance change anything for me as a performer? Is the idea of the audience and receiver just as valid in real life as it is as an imagined entity? What is comes down to is a wondering if the act of performance may turn out to not belong to any specific spatio-temporal sphere. It gives grounds to discuss what performance versus performing means, and if just the act of performing to one self, may just as well constitute a form of praxis and art-form, the same way that the potential existence of an audience does. Maybe the just the intention of art will suffice, in the future? I feel that Krõõt Juurak & Alex Bailey's "Performance for Pets" could also be considered as posing similar questions; suggesting that we may be moving towards a post-human performance poetic.

This line of thought and ethos leaves a somewhat dystopian view, but hopefully also consolidates how we need each other and our sensuous mode of being to make some acts meaningful, in certain ways that differ from virtual and conceptual reality.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Ess. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

I am working a lot with different kinds textiles at the moment, examining movement and micro-sounds. I am building up quite an elaborate concept that is going to be an installation piece. Thematically, it is an extension of my existing political and feminist work. The biological body is still an important factor, and I still existing in the work as me, as my actual performer-self, but as a ghost in the entire machinery. I guess it is the next chapter in the matter of the future redundancy of the performer, where she only exists on a conceptual level!

LandEscape meets

Estefania Valls Urquijo

IDEAS = SYMBOLS = CULTURAL IDENTITY

How ideas become symbols and symbols - ideas.

My interest: the symbolism in the the world cultures, their ideas and elements that represent their identity.

My technique: I always use ceramic because I need to work with my hands, in an exercise of feeling without thinking. Ceramic has its own life, clay and glaze react at will and speak in my work, almost deciding...

Ceramic’s fragility and complications challenges me continuously.

In history, ceramic has been the most accurate tool in the study of civilizations, it is eternal and universal, a dictionary of symbols.

I work in ceramic together with other materials - metal, wood, glass. I tie everything; tying as joining pieces respecting their own individuality, tying to unite, and staying one when released.

I have always been fascinated with the old way of signing by the means of sealing, using symbols instead of signatures, so I sign my works with a stamp, a symbol that becomes part of the peace itself.

Hello Estefania and welcome to LandEscape: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a MFA Art Direction, that you received from the ESDESIGN in Barcelona. How did this experience along with the number of workshops in Interior design and Drawing that you have attended over the years influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum

inform the way you relate yourself with your artistic inquiry?

I strongly beleive in ACADEMIC TRAINING. Not just because of receiving knoledge, but to map, to recognize, to discover what and where are you going with what ever you do.

My Interior design studies gave me space dimentions, Drawing the capacity to pre-view an idea, the MFA Art Direction how to focus a Project… all you learn will serve you some day.

As it has been said: Nobody invents anything, all has being done, we just re discover and re invent. There is where I go- discovering,

admiring and redoing IDEAS, SIMBOLISMS and CULTURAL IDENTITIES. I feel that with time we are loosing property and map location, because of globalization, not bad nor good, we are mixing and loosing, joining and gainig at the same time.

Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit http://www.evuart.com in order to get a synoptic view of your work: while walking us through your process, would you like to tell to our readers something about the evolution of your style? In particular, when you conceive a work, is there some conscious shift that addresses you?

AN OBSESIVE IDEA.

All my work starts with profound questionairs, with IDEAS that get stock in my memory. And as ideas are abstract and symbols concrete, I travel trough words to conect miself with them. I start writing words, frases, poems in an exersize of clarifying, adopting and making them part of myself or at least part of my brain. How do I select the ideas I will work on?- WA! Beleive me they all mix, I´m allways working in various of themes, as in various techniques, as reading various books, and working on my various social projects at the same time. Its amazing how the brain works, how it conects and organizes, stores information and finds its way to the exact archive when you need it. I´m very constant and organized, my rutin is diferent everyday, but as the order of the elements doesnt afect the result, the order of my ruting doesn’t eather.

For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected OUR FOOT PRINTS IN THE WORLD, an

extremely interesting project that our readers have already staterd to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your successful attempt to close the gap between the narratives about human gestures and the materic essence of objects is the way you have accomplished your inquiry into such unbreakable bond with

effectiveness and autonomous aesthetics. While walking our readers through the genesis of OUR FOOT PRINTS IN THE WORLD, would you tell us if you how did you developed your initial idea?

Living in a third developed country you are every day confronted with realliyties so diferent from your own. As I realted in a

Creative Morning conference I was invited to talk about CHANGE ( Creative mornings Guatemala ), “ Maslow piramid” talks about the levels of consiuosness innerent to the level of opportunity, covered necesities and education you have. Only 5 percent ( or less ) of the worlds population have their basic necesities, education, health, roof, rights and

opportunities covered by birth right – What did I do to deserve them, if I dont even remember? So if I didnt do anything to deserve them, I most owe them to life at least. Then, what am I doing to give it back?

Two choices I have- Choose where and how, or wait until life takes it back.

Experimenting on giving and connecting opportunities for others, got me consiousness of how every step, every

desition, every word, every intention we give, or do leaves a mark in someone elses life.

How to represent this? How to show wothout words but in a form of

ceremony, where others could feel in their own skin, stamp with their own energy this marks they leave, and not only the marks they leave, but be aware of the marks they follow. Because we all follow others marks, nobody acts alone, even in the most solitude of spaces, there is allways a reference, an example -allways a path.

In OUR FOOT PRINTS IN THE WORLD your performative gestures seem to be very analytical, yet strives to be full of emotion: how much importance does play improvisation in your process? Moreover, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value?

I had ballet clases seens I was 5 years old until 42. Only for the love of movement, for the necesity of music felt, seens I do not have the priviledge of playing music. I´m sure this conection between music and body expresión manifests in me, at least in a very small way.

YES! Thank you for asking- A WOMEN, Do we really need to make a remark on gender? How actual all this is… art has no gender, but artista do. Yes, I think it is important; in this life I´m a woman, and I have lived this side of gender profoundly.

MUÑECAS( one year reserch on the roll of women through human history and arround the world) appeard in my world after starting PODEROSAS movement.

MUÑECAS poems are all based on realities, sadly actual realities steel. If we want change we have to work beetween uswomen for women, I have no dout about it.

As you have remarked once, you always use ceramic because you need to work with your hands, in an exercise of feeling without thinking. American art critic and art historian Michael Fried once stated that 'materials do not represent, signify, or allude to anything; they are what they are and nothing more.' What are the properties of ceramics that fascinates you the most?

OH how remarcable this topic is! “Materials are what they are” and how perfect they are! Its our energy through their “materia” what develops to a meaningfull object, and even then they manifest. Ceramic speacks, decides, manifest allways. Every time you take out a peace from the oven- you find life manifested on it; a surprice, a unique piece on its own; magic or tragedy, many times a tragedy with a lesson on it. Ceramic is the most ancient code of symbols, first cuneiform writing was invented to mark the work of an specific artisan over a set of bowls used to messure payment for workers. In origin a factory code that developed in writingamazing!

Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative process. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once remarked that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": as a multidisciplinary artist involved both in Photographer and Dance how would you consider the relation between the abstract nature of the ideas you

explore and the physical act of producing your artworks?

They leave together in me- “it is only a matter of seeing, or maybe a matter of feeling”. It takes a master to have the ability to separate the body from the soul.

Thats what makes death so impresive, death does it, but how do you do it without dying? Meditation. I´m only a student in meditation, I use it to find silence, to find peace in myself, and as an instrument for peace in the jails I work in Guatemala- I have been working in 2 guatemalan jails for 5 years now- giving yoga

and meditation clases to inmates, showing them how noice or silence can only come through teir own minds. God is so inteligent! He made us come alone, and takes us alone. Your travel trough life is yours. Nobody can see for you, nobody can hear for you, no body can feell for you- your sences are yours, your

instruments for living life. I use my fisical instruments to manifest my soul inquieries.

Your artistic practice focusses on the symbolism in the the world cultures, their

ideas and elements that represent their identity: we like the way The Marionettes triggers the viewers cultural and perceptual parameters by the use of objects with a strong connotative reference: German

multidisciplinary artist Thomas Demand once stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead". What is your opinion

about it? Morever, would you tell us something about the importance of metaphors in your pratice and their relationship to memory?

Its interesting to talk about narative with the médium, because the strongest visual element on the marionnettes is that they are all naked and their only cultural elements are on their heads and feet- this elements are so strong that even though you see them all equaly naked, with their bodies exposed, this closing elements of belonging diferentiate them instantly and separate them from each other. They are only elements, disgaises that talk about their stories without words. This disgaises are symbols of identity, symbols of belonging, but at the same time, symbols of control, limitation and lost individuality.

Visual imposure is the strongest of controls, and they afect our emotions and our intelect so strongly that before questioning, we realte, instantly, our brains conect those images with the stories learned. And changing it, opening to other posibilities is so dificult, takes so much energy and intention, that only the smallest group of people do it.

Far from being an abstract work, Kefalonia

Mural is deeply connected to life's experience: how much does personal experience fuel your creative process? In particular, do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience in order to communicate particular kind of ideas that goes beyond the realm of perceptual reality?

YES for sure, that is the magic of creation- its an instrument of manipulation. You can creat a direct dialoge, or creat complete disorientation. Even though life experience will allway talk and memory is there,

in the creation process you use it or leave it on the side.

The Kefalonia Murals are in contrast with each other, one shows clearly a story known, The God Helios, the mithological dolphins, the fruits of the earth, the fruts of the sea, the island and the Trireme; The other side shows two simbols realted to their cultural tradition, the Greek eye who protects, and the code of arms of the city in the pupil- both abstract, both symbols of identity.

You are a founding member and director of Poderosas: Leave Your Mark movement poderosas.org and Peace Agent for Peace Revolution: not to mention that almost everything, ranging from Caravaggio's Inspiration of Saint Matthew to Joep van Lieshout's works, could be considered political, do you think that your works could be considered political, in a certain sense? Moreover, what could be in your opinion the role of Art in the contemporary age?

Political no, but a call for human rights yes. This is my most higest intention- HUMANITY. Moral and Ethics are universal, rights and wrongs are universal. We all come and go the same way. The known and recorded history of the wrold is arround 5,000 years old, of this 5,000 years we are here only 90 – and only the lucky ones who arrive to that age!. How is it posible that we all live this life as if we were eternal? What am I doing so when I get to where ever it is, and who will be there for me asks me- What did you do with what I gave you? I can answer with a clear and proud mind- THIS.

Over the years your artworks have been presented at a number of festivals, including Art Expo Toronto, Institut International de la Marionnette and The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park Artist Studio: one of the

hallmarks of your work is the capability to create direct involvement with the viewers, who are provided with of the the opportunity to become active participants and are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience: in particular, we are wondering if the aim to create an event for a spectator is the reason why you performor is if it's a channel through which you transmit your ideas: do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

I manifest, I créate, but rarely think of what the public will experience, or of their expectations. Even, maybe as a realist or a masochist, I love it when they don’t undestand, when they don’t aprove, when they don’t relate… giving or talking about what they allready know and aprove feels like lost time and effort- Questioning, confronting them with this blind spots infront of us, asumed just because they where all ready there, or they dont touch me… that is worth doing, worth working for.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Estefania. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

I would love to have the opportunity of getting to peolple who are moved by my thoughts and questions, who are tolerant or shocked, but who will use my art manifestations for THINKING, QUESTIONING, TALKING through it. My art being not only an instrument, but a vessel for dialoge.

An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryder, curator

landescape@europe.com

LandEscape meets

Eva Dabara

As a multidisciplinary artist engaged in visual arts, poetry, performance and dance, I am interested in the interaction between images, text and the body. My work is basically minimalist, and my artistic endeavor is to create a critical view of the individual and social circumstances, sexuality, stereotypes and human relations. Using photographs, text, video, performance, objects and ready-mades I create a syntax which reveals a conceptual yet personal drive, merging the universal with my biography and the local reality I live within.

Zigzagging between the different elements and mediums I strive to create a multi-layered experience of the senses while exploring an eclectic world of diverse existence which is at times dramatic, absurd, humorous, hallucinated, poetic or mundane.

An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator land.escape@europe.com

Tel-Aviv based multi-disciplinary artist, poet, performer and dancer Eva Dabara's work deviates from traditional trajectory to explore the interaction between images, text and the body: in her captivating audiovisual performance BLACK & WHITE that we'll be discussing in the following pages, she triggers both the perceptual and cultural parameters of the spectatorship, to walk them through multilayered experience. One of the most impressive aspects of Dabara's work is the way it accomplishes the difficult task of challenging the normative conventions of the performer-audience situation to create a critical view of the individual and social circumstances, sexuality, stereotypes and human relations : we are very pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating and multifaceted artistic production.

Hello Eva and welcome to LandEscape: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you studied Philosophy and English literature at Tel-Aviv University, art, photography and video at Camera Obscura and performance art at The Performance Platform in Tel-Aviv: how did these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your multifaceted cultural substratum dued to your Israelian roots inform the way you relate yourself to art making?

To begin with, apart from the university studies of English Literature and Philosophy which gave me a very broad perspective and outlook - I didn't really have a solid formal training in the Arts in terms of the traditional 4 years academic study graduating with a diploma, but rather annual courses I chose (although for 5 years altogether), and I'm happy about it as it helped me maintain a kind of freedom which is essential for me. Instead of detailing my background cultural roots which apparently

influenced me as an artist – I'd rather cite a poem which better answers your question: "As much as I thought about the thing/the thing sealed itself from me and laughed./A given concept is written in the sand/only a high tide will wash away its opacity into foam". (from the book "Not In Vain"). In more prosaic words, in my art making I extricate myself from my melting pot, shifting from the familiar to the non-familiar and vice-versa so that one of the end results is to make the murmur of the waves be heard again.

Your approach is marked out with such a captivating multidisciplinary feature, revealing that you are a versatile artist capable of crossing from a medium to another, poetry, performance and dance: before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://www.fb.me/eva.dabara.artist in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your usual process, we would like to ask you if you think that there is a central idea that connects all of your work as an artist. In particular, how do you select a medium in order to express a particular idea?

My work has always been multidimensional and multidisciplinary, following what Richard Wagner established as Gesamkunstwerke which means an all-embracing artwork that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so. By nature I can not be restricted to a single idea no matter how important it is. I feel my art should reflect the world as I perceive it which is eclectic, heterogeneous and multifaceted.The means I employ are ordinary materials: a bowl, fan, mask, paper stripes, pieces of fabric or paper cups. Ephemeral substances. And my body, of course. I don't use any advanced technology. "Regular things were yawning themselves to sleep/others were yawning to release/tension in compressed tunnels" (fragment from the book "Casino").

Sometimes the idea is the core of my work, sometimes the idea is obscure and the aesthetics take over in terms of images, accessories, sound, dress, movements, all of which eventually create a message. In the latter case the idea comes from unknown sources which present themselves as accomplished works of art although completely immaterial. I keep myself open. I start the process in different ways. Sometimes an idea strikes all of a sudden. I welcome it. And I carefully watch it evolve when an outfit is added, demanding certain movements, a sound added, an accessory which further develops the movement and hence the meaning. Sometimes a piece of music is the one that starts the ball rolling, in other cases a single image or a certain object. The perspective of how to situate the images on stage serves as a door into the world of emotions. A series of images then accrues allowing me to act my vision, my feelings, playing in a cinematic way with the visual elements, like performative collages. "Outside, a wild wind is carrying/tropical summer yearnings away from me/One day, I know, fright will take over pride in me" (fragment from "Casino").

Various artistic components are merged in order to set the desired atmosphere. If it comes out successfully – it creates that "magic" moment between the performer and the audience. The titles I choose are often metaphors for the idea "Twice Fuji, Please", "Honey", "Crush:, "Add A Piece", "Mind The Gap", "Feed", "Iron Dome", "Runway", which for me they serve as a standpoint or perspective to a wider meaning and potential. I prefer not to define the concept of the narrative in my works, rather the structure itself is what is ultimately important to me. And the MEDIUM itself IS the MESSAGE.

For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected BLACK & WHITE a stimulating performance that our readers have already started to got to know in the introductory

pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your artistic inquiry into the interaction between images, text and the body is the way you have provided it with such autonomous aesthetics: when walking our readers through the genesis of BLACK & WHITE, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?

Based on the universal human need for narratives and stories to elaborate our concepts, the performance Black & White aspires to examine the complex relationship between image, text and the body. It is an interdisciplinary and multilayered performance, consisting of a recorded soundtrack, live sound, images and movement on stage.

In the background soundtrack I recorded myself reading short poems overlapping a repetitive recorded sound of my breathing. On the empty dark stage, except for a bowl with white sugar in it, I am covered with black veil having wireless headset microphone which I use to react live to the recorded poems, echoing and breaking the words at the same time. Each verse doubts the self-sufficiency of images and the whole performance moves between the narrative sequence of the recorded poems and the sequence of the body gestures. Text is time related whereas art is space related. However I am blurring these boundaries by shuffling the traditional roles of both. The words are not just the background against which the performance happens, they are part of the narrative material, the thinking material, the subtext of the production as a whole. On the other hand, the images on stage are not spatial objects as they create a sequence of narrative on the timeline. This dual information is dribbled on stage, causing the audience to reflect on the ways we interact with, behave or consider ourselves –whether it be diverse, inclusive or otherwise.

not approach/No sailing. No diving /A

"Condemned to silence in the green lobby./Sea winds do

waitress is serving him coffee without sugar./Cold not bold." (from the book Not In Vain).

For me, the inspiration came entirely from the words. The poems were written many years ago, published in my first book "Not In Vain" which won a literary prize. They sound like generic poems, skeleton-thin. Nevertheless I immediately connected with them while producing genuine movement language. The choice of the minimal movements on stage is a statement. There is a clear reason for everything happening on stage, a sense of personal journey through words, images and movement. There is also an element of psychological search in this piece exploring deeper aspects which permeate slowly into the spectators. I am playing between extrovert presentation and introvert impact of emotional contents.

These two parallel narratives, the one of the text and the other of the visual action, both with equal importance, creating a relationship which is not hierarchical but simultaneous. They are confronting each other and being unraveled in an original interplay while subverting the complex relationship between image and language through the centrality of the body. "I don't mind you were silent/most of the time and just looking/ how I'm singing alone/love songs./Damn, someone has to be looking". (from "Not In Vain").

As you have remarked once, you aim to create a critical view of the individual and social circumstances, sexuality, stereotypes and human relations: Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "the artist’s role differs depending on which part of the world you’re in. It depends on the political system you’re living under". Not to mention that almost everything, ranging from Joseph Beuys' Jeder Mensch ein Künstler — Auf dem Weg zur Freiheitsgestalt des sozialen Organismus to Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present, could be considered political, do you think that your works is political, in a certain sense? Moreover what could be in your opinion the role of Art in order to sensitize the viewers in our ever-changing contemporary scene?

In the age of global communication and artists exhibiting everywhere around the world it doesn't

necessarily matter where you actually live. It depends on what kind of role as an artist you take upon yourself in terms of whether the place you live or born in is important as to determine the nature of your artwork. As for me, I'm not interested in politics per se, however in the process of my art making I am well aware of political aspects which manifest themselves whether I

pre-planned it or not. The video Shelter, for instance, addresses both the politics of personal relations and the politics of the state. The video consists of a series of photographs I shot at a neglected domestic bomb-shelter in Tel-Aviv along with fragments of poems taken out of my different poetry books and when put one after the other they create a new narrative of a vague,

dubious relationship. It is a security shelter versus an emotional shelter, neither of which provides its purpose.

The two parallel stories and the tension between them question the human condition in a modern city constantly threatened by war and by emotional alienation. "Here, precisely here, 7 sqm. of the promised land/the entire world is brought under my

nose/and all I have to do is put punctuation marks/between calamities" (fragment of a poem from the book "Casino").

Another example is my performance Iron Dome. I created it in 2012 immediately after operation Pillar Of Defence during Gaza-Israel conflict where the Iron Dome (an air defense system) was used by

Israel. The performance was presented in ZAZ International Performance Art Festival, and it was site-specific in an abandoned shop at the Central Bus Station where jute sand bags were piled up in two corners of the space. Although I had a feminine concept in my mind for which I constructed a huge wire bras over my breasts – the space evoked inevitable war associations. So starting with merely sexual image and the nature of relationships - I ended up integrating the local political war aspect to produce similar codes of power, struggle, helplessness, fear, threats, victims, temptation and death.

Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative process: how would you consider the relation between the abstract nature of the ideas you explore and the physical act of producing your artworks? By the way, do you like spontaneity or do you prefer to meticulously schedule every details of your works? how much importance does play improvisation in your process?

"Indeed, the wind justifies its existence/in cold winter.There is a totality in its/lucidity which isn't there in growth/for instance, or in hair./Not in vain I blew onto the mirror/out of spite" (from "Not In Vain").

In my performances any idea starts naturally with something tangible and concrete such as the body, a certain movement, a dress or a piece of music. Once I have these basic materias I then develop the piece. If I choose a sound track of either recorded words or music then I have to be very precise in choreographing the movements in order to be synchronized with the sound like a piece of dance which also has a specific time limit. By nature I am not a long-distance runner, rather a sprinter. My performances are short, dynamic, evolving and therefore they demand the full attention of the

audience from the beginning to the end otherwise one might miss the whole idea. However, I do like, and it's also important to me, to leave room for improvisations, especially in those wild parts where I let my subconscious take over and express itself in unexpected ways. My performance FEED is a very good example for this combination between planning and improvisation: in carefully choreographed movements I use 21 pink memo notes each having a word which I read out loud and then attach it onto my body (words like: fear, power, mystery, war, chains, gamble, desire, fragile, loneliness, etc.). Then, stripping my upper T- shirt it becomes a primeval object for an improvised uncanny ritual while I'm producing wild Gibberish sound around it. The Idea behind this performance is that in the age of Facebook the virtual Feed Wall is the body longing for real connection and touch whereas things become disrupted. "It caught us in the rain season, when the sea/was crushed like a spoilt whipped cream" (fragment of a poem in "Casino").

It's important to mention that you are also a poet and that an adventurous year in the Caribbean Islands was followed by the poetry book "Paradise Episodes" which eventually formed your second solo exhibition "Bermuda Triangle" - a minimalist installation confronting the stereotype images of a tropical island: what does encourage you to create your poems? And when did you recognize that traditional poetics exhausted its expressive potential?

Strange as it may sound, words which are abstract in nature each defining an object in the world - while being constructed in a poem they seem to be more mysterious than a normally elusive image. That is to say, I'm triggered to write about something when I wish to give it an open, unraveled dimension, where I find photographic image or my performing body would be too concrete for that purpose. "And it is possible to phrase a thought/according to a cloud and light./I know the difficulty in reading a thought/when the light falls on my lashes/diagonally and strange colours/create verses of malicious possibilities." (from "Not In Vain").

As for traditional poetics exhausted its expressive potential I reject any conventional classification but I do think that in poetry today everything is decentralized, dispersed,

fragmented. Reality is too aggressive to allow for a lyrical expression of a sensitive, nuanced self. All in all, words are not enough for me. I'm focusing on the way to direct energy by means of form and rhythm. I try to articulate feelings, emotions, moments connected with my research through visual language and offer them to my audience in the shared moment of the public presentation. However, the overlapping point between writing and visual art is consolidated into my biography and my personality which unite all the parts of the puzzle.

The year long adventure in the Caribbean Islands was a life-changing experience for me which produced artworks throughout the years in all the mediums I employ: a poetry book "Paradise Episodes", a literary radio program, a solo exhibition "Bermuda Triangle" and a few years later also a performance at Jaffa Theatre where music, words, objects, drama and dance came together to a degree of a total experience in a moving visual spectacle. "But, the wind is not always a storm of waves/ and horizon. Sometimes, crossing roads, we are surprised/by a single, burning wind which tortures/ the delicate mane of the horses./ Someone starts breathing heavily and a huge crowd /of horses and pigeons gather near the sea" (from the book "Paradise Episodes").

We appreciate the way your work addresses the viewers to the point of convergence between the concrete and the imaginary: how do you see the relationship between reality and imagination playing within your artistic practice?

Some of my works are an opportunity to depart from a realistic representation of narrative. In two of my solo installations "Bermuda Triangle" and "Mind The Gap" both comprised by photographs, objects, text and sound I used the diverse mediums in a way that one merges into the other, challenging each other and reversing their roles. Sometimes the text is concrete and the images imaginary and vice versa. The same goes to my performances. Following Marina Abramovic who stated: "to be a performer you must hate theatre", I think that in performances there is an expansion of time very different from the naturalism of theatre, which allows interpolations of images and thoughts. In such cases I

reconstruct a new and imaginary reality flirting with the borderline between narrative, form, sound, movement, space, place and time. I doubt the existence of one monolyte and permanent identity. The essence of performance lies in the idea of execution. It's the performance of self where the subject is dismantled and its identity is fabricated, or rather invented. I focus on blurring the boundaries between the self and the persona, between the real self and imaginary self. I play with truth and illusion. All in all, my work exists ephemerally and mostly documented in the viewers' memory. "Suddenly, it is assaulting like a dictator's/secret police, in an unexpected visit and/the innocent heart is seized for a night/arrest, stunned" (from "Paradise Episodes").

Your work walk the viewers to such a wide number of narratives: rather than attempting to establish any univocal sense, you seem to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations would you tell us how much important is for you that the spectatorship rethink the concepts you convey in your pieces, elaborating personal meanings? How open would you like your works to be to be understood?

It is indeed important to me that the viewers encompass as many layers of my artwork as possible, interpreting them yet enjoying the immediate images on stage. As far as spectatorship is concerned, although I sometimes draw from autobiographical and psychological sources, nevertheless I need to be communicative. First and foremost the visibility of my work should be captivating, sometimes even spectacular to look at. And then I'm glad if at least some of the viewers have either interpretations or associations of their own. I strive for a reflective relationship with the audience allowing each viewer connect to or even identify with some of the emotions raised in the piece. I aim for the emotional connection which should be accessible. "He touches me for a moment and withdraws./Might be scared his right hand will dry/and won't be returned the way it used to be" (from "Not In Vain").

The structure of my performances is clear, stylized and I

believe also communicative as to facilitate a dialogue with the audience. I have this vain desire that the viewers will be captivated, immersed in my performances. Instead of just seeing the artworkexperiencing it whereas all the senses are involved. However, there is always a risk of failure since the production of the performance cannot be completely determined beforehand. The piece is evolving and changing during its presentation on stage. Moreover, it depends on the specific space, the audience, the physical conditions and the atmosphere. Therefore it is never the same each time it is presented and I can never tell from the outset whether there will be "electricity in the air" during my performance as I wish it to be.

Over the years your works have been exhibited in solo shows of installation and participated in many group exhibitions, video screenings and performance events, locally and internationally, including your recent performance Time Is Love/Liaison at Art Space in Tel-Aviv. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

That's a very good question which I have been thinking about for quite a long time. My poetry books were written in Hebrew which is my mother-tongue and therefore the poetry performances in Jaffa Theatre were naturally in Hebrew.

However, any other artwork integrating text, be it a video, photographs, installation or performance - I make it a point to use English for the sheer purpose of being understood anywhere in the world. Such was the performance FEED mentioned before in this interview and which was presented within the International event Time Is Love/Liason at Art Space in TelAviv, the performance CRUSH, the series of photographs Lollipop etc. As a contrast, in Twice Moon which I presented in SofiaUnderground

Performance Festival, the sign language I employed intensified the muteness of the performance and challenged the viewers understanding in a completely different manner. Furthermore, the dissociation of this performance was expressed in repetitive acts while the body was hiding its own redundancy, its own femininity. "Suddenly it becomes so close/like my dirty panties/and soon there isn't enough room to/hide them away from him" (from "Not In Vain").

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Eva. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

Thank you very much for your thorough and insightful questions. It was a pleasure setting into a journey throughout my artistic life. I have recently participated in SofiaUnderground International Performance Art Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria with my performance FEED at the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the performance 'Twice Moon' at the Electro-Control down The National Palace which was an intriguing location. Later in the year I will be participating in a group exhibition in Chicago, USA with photographs integrating words "Over My Dead Body", with a performance in an international multidisciplinary event "Beyond Words" at Art Space Tel-Aviv.

I will again participate this year in ZAZ International Performance Art Festival celebrating 30 years of Shelter 209 with numerous events both in Tel-Aviv and in the Israeli desert, and I'm working on two site-specific projects in which I try to subvert the notion of space juxtaposing the public with the private. It is hard to predict how my work will evolve but I do aspire to an all-encompassing pieces that will merge all of the mediums I am engaged with. And I'm also looking forward to participating in more performance festivals/events throughout the world.

An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator land.escape@europe.com

LandEscape meets

Stephen Cohen

I use whatever tools are available to me to create specific pieces of art and music. My working creed is: music is art and art is music.

Hello Stephen and welcome to LandEscape: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. Are there any experiences that did particularly influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself with your artistic inquiry?

Thanks for taking the time and thought to interview me. I think of a stream of daily life experiences since childhood that have influenced me, including listening

to a variety of musical artists, seeing a wide range of visual art, interacting in the natural world, and interacting with other people. I feel that my cultural substratum, which comes from my parents and their values, and the people I have been drawn to in my life, informs me and my artistic inquiry with a respect for learning, a respect for questioning, and a joy in expressiveness.

Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit https://www.3handstephen.com in order to get a synoptic view of your work: while walking us through your usual set up and process, would you like to tell to our readers something about the

evolution of your style? In particular, when you conceive a work, is there some conscious shift that addresses you?

An idea for a work usually comes spontaneously in reaction to a thought or experience that speaks to me. Sometimes this leads to immediate creative action, resulting in me playing music on one of my instruments, writing a song, or making a piece of art. Sometimes I just let the idea grow in my mind, while I let the creative possibilities develop, and a single act of a creation may take weeks, or even years.

For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected I Went Down, an extremely interesting project that our readers have already staterd to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your work is the way you have accomplished your inquiry into such unbreakable bond with effectiveness and autonomous aesthetics. While walking our readers through the genesis of I

Went Down, would you tell us if you how did you developed your initial idea?

The initial idea of I Went Down came when I was doing a series of creative residencies at Centrum, an art organization in Fort Worden, Port Townsend, Washington. Fort Wordan is an old army fort that is now a state park. While exploring the grounds I came across a covered underground cistern and found out that Centrum artists could reserve time to go into the cistern and explore the possibilities of sound deep underground. I made 2 descents into the cistern with a team of musicians and artists, resulting in a 15 minute film/work of art called the Cistern Symphony that I produced, using music, photos and video. I wanted to put the experience into a shorter, more direct and concise form, so I got on my laptop at home and created I Went Down, using parts of the longer piece.

Your performative gestures seem to be very spontaneous and strive to be full of emotion: how much

importance does play improvisation in your process?

Improvisation is very important in my process, as I like to create in the moment and try to capture the immediate emotion that I am feeling.

As you have remarked once, your working creed is: music is art and art is music. You also built a custom made cigar box guitar, that you often use: what are the qalities of cigar box guitar that fascinates you the most?

Cigar box guitars have a primal sound and look, and a simplicity that can connect us to the origins of why we make music.

We like the way your approach addresses the viewers to such a wide number of narratives: rather than attempting to establish any univocal sense, works as the interesting Where Do We Go seem to urge the viewers to elaborate personal associations: when discussing about the role of randomness in your process, would you tell us how much important is for you that the spectatorship rethink the concepts you convey in your pieces,

elaborating personal meanings? How open would you like your works to be to be understood?

I like to start a lot of my work with the personal, because that is what I know and experience. But I feel any good work must move into a universal meaning for it to be appreciated by others, and I am open for my work to be open for others to find their own personal meaning in it.

We appreciate the way Garden of Bees speaks both of reality and urges your audience to excite their imagination, walking them to the point of convergence between the concrete and the imaginary: how do you see the relationship between reality and imagination playing within your artistic practice?

Good question, because reality and imagination meet at a misty border, and I feel I am walking on that magical boundary as I live inside the creation.

German visual artist Gerhard Richter once remarked that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the

physical act is unavoidable": how would you consider the relation between the ideas you explore and the physical act of producing your performances?

The relation of the ideas I explore and the physical act of producing my performances is a chicken and egg kind of thing, a topic that I could explore endlessly.

In 2017 you were Music OMI fellow and you did a residency with collaborative performances at Art OMI in New York State, with 11 amazing musicians from all over the world. It's no doubt that collaborations are today ever growing forces in Contemporary Art and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project: can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between several artists from different backgrounds and disciplines?

Since my first record album, I have always collaborated with artists from a variety of backgrounds, including folk, classical, jazz, and experimental,

and this has helped me make my artistic vision come to life, sometimes in ways that I did not expect. Everything I do, from collaborative pieces created with a team of artists, to solo pieces created in my home overlooking the trees, are part of that dialogue.

One of the hallmarks of your work is the capability to create direct involvement with the viewers, so before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience: do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of kind of language is used in a particular context?

That is an age old question, how does the issue of audience reception figure in the artist’s approach? For me, there is a balance: I do think of the possible audience when creating, and but I am mostly engrossed in the work itself. I find that if I can feel and be entertained by the work I am creating, than the work will find its

audience.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Stephen. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

I am now working on a performance piece called Baggy Red Pants and Other Stories, in which I will use voice, acoustic guitar, cigar box guitar, beer-can guitar, a miniature guitar, a five-foot playable musical sculpture I made called The String King, along with an accordion player, a double bassist, 2 singers, and 2 dancers, to create a show of musical stories. And I will continue to create new music, to make new pieces of art, and to do solo performaces and collaborative performances, to stay home, and to travel. I feel my work is evolving in 2 ways, stretching out, but simplifying at the same time.

Michiel Alberts is a Visual artist working with the media Performance, Film and Photography, Painting and Drawing. The artist relates through

his physical presence to a given space or surface, leaving behind traces, resulting in different types of work.

‘My physical presence functions as a performative tool to question human conditions and its relations to cosmic order, time and landscapes. Through forms of abstraction I bring my content from a specific happening, or a specific social context to a larger existential scenery.’

Michiel Alberts has participated in several group exhibitions: Deel 1 en 2 De Inleiding, at S.M.A.K. and CC Dendermonde, curated by Philippe Van Cauteren and Ben Benaouisse, Dendermonde, Gent, Belgium, (2015, 2013); Magicgruppe Kulturobjekt at Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany, (2012) and at Extra City Antwerp, Belgium, (2012); A Serpentine Gesture and Other Prophecies at FRAC Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Lorraine, Metz, France, (2011). The artist also participated in the Group exhibition El Manifesto De Santiago at Matucana, curated by Philippe Van Cauteren, Santiago, Chile, (2007).

Solo presentations and projects: Salutations, Gallery Eva Steynen Deviations, Antwerp, Belgium, (2014); Project DeSingel, a one year trajectory at DeSingel, Antwerp, Belgium, (2009-2010). During the project Michiel Alberts performed without audience in the new building, while under construction. At the opening, the artist presented a selection of his photographic material and gave a six hour live performance; Preparation for Leave-taking, in order to complete the project. Michiel Alberts performed three hour live performances at Gemak Art Institute, The Hague, The Netherlands, (2010), Playground Festival at Stuk Leuven, curator Eva Wittocx, Leuven, Belgium, (2008) and Croxhapox in Gent, Belgium (2007), Mystic Properties, Art Brussels, Trust is not a mood barely an emotion, ING office Gent, Trust in the Unexpected, Governors Mansion, Gent, curated by Elena Sorokina, (2018 / 2017)

LandEscape meets

Michiel Alberts

Unconventional and captivating in its multifaceted nature, artist Michiel Alberts' work triggers the spectatorship perceptual and cultural parameters to draw them to such multilayered experience. In his body of works that we'll be discussing in the following pages, he proovides the viewers with of the the opportunity to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. One of the most impressive aspects of Alberts' practice is the way it accomplishes a successful attempt to question human conditions and its relations to cosmic order, time and landscapes: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to his stimulating and multifaceted artistic production.

Hello Michiel and welcome to LandEscape: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your multifaceted background. You have a solid formal training and after your studies in Theater in the The Netherlands and in the USA, you earned your MA from the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam and you later specialized from the Higher Institute for Fine Arts HISK. How did these experiences influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself with your artistic inquiry?

Yes, originally I was trained as a classical actor. So the usage of my body as central instrument and the usage of movement can be traced back from here. However I became more interested in what I call the inner drama, and recognized myself more in the ritual and physical

performative state described by Artaud. I continued investigating in Japanese Butoh movement and aspects of the Japanese Noh theater. This long research became an important influence upon forming my own language and upon my work. While western storytelling takes on a linear live/conflict/death approach, the Noh plays start from the perspective of death: A spirit goes back to the place of conflict (or lost love) in order to become purified and set free. After this, the spirit is able to continue its way. It is not only a different dramaturgy, it is a complete different view upon space. As well as a different experience of it. This connection between space and time or space and movement, are key elements in my work. In Noh plays the manifestation of emptiness is called ‘MA’. It is the moment where presence in emptiness affects you. The beauty in emptiness or, I should say, through emptiness is a are returning element in my work.

During this research period I shifted from theater to visual arts. I first worked upon the medium

Photography and later upon Film. After I graduated from the HISK I continued combining different media usage.

This research was displayed for instance at my ‘Project deSingel’ in Antwerp. During one year I worked in the new building of deSingel, while still under construction. I created performances without audience in the raw and empty spaces of the building. These performances were photographed. Not in order to document but in order to create independent works; Photo series. During the opening of the building, a selection of these photos was presented as posters which visitors could take home. Also I carried out a sixhour live performance: ‘Preparation of leavetaking’’. The performance took place outside the building on a long and small pathway. I walked back and forth with an extreme concentrated slow movement back and forward the pavement for six hours, until it was time to leave the campus ground and continue the walk back home. Leaving behind emptiness, marked the end of the project.

Your approach is marked out with such a captivating multidisciplinary feature, revealing that you are a versatile artist capable of crossing from a medium to another, including Performance, Film and Photography, Painting and drawing: before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://www.michielalberts.com in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your usual process, we would like to ask you if you think that there is a central idea that connects all of your work as an artist. In particular, how do you select a medium in order to express a particular idea?

Ok hmm, First of all I have to clarify my position upon ideas.

For me an idea is interesting as a starting point for a creative process or for the purpose of

forming boundaries of a formal esthetic language. In other words, in how I work as an artist. I create a frame where I step into with only a direction. As soon as I step into creating, the Process itself is important for me, it is the artwork. I oppose to communicating ideas. I am much more focused on the unknown. In the unknown lies real tension, lies the dramatic. It surpasses the thinking level and connects directly to an emotional and instinctive level. This ‘direct art’ is very essential in my approach. Therefore I place my artwork more in the history of European performance in visual art. In the line of Ben d’Armagnac, Beuys, Bas Jan Ader, …where process is more of importance than concepts. Instead of the American performing arts which tends to be more focused on communicating ideas and concepts.

In that sense, it was quiet a question for me when asked by Philippe Van Cauteren en Ben Benaouisse to relate to Wall Drawing Nr.36 / Intersecting Bands of four Colors (Black – Blue –Red – Yellow) from four Directions – 90 cm wide (symmetrically)’ (1970), from Sol LeWitt, for the performing evening ‘Part 2 Introduction’, at S.M.A.K. in Gent. Sol Lewitt represents conceptual art by writing his manifest. (Sol Lewitt, " Paragraphs on Conceptual Art “, Artforum 1967.)

I personally tend to be more connected to work that communicates not merely to a rational level, but more to an emotional or even better an intuitive level. I agree with Susan Sontag that we ‘aught to see and feel more in front of an art peace, instead of wanting to squeeze more content out of it’. (S. Sontag Against Interpretation) I do think the outcome of Conceptual Art is lost of common ground. Or if I describe it in other words; the body never lies, the mind does.

At the performance evening in S.M.A.K. I placed ATO Nr11. parallel to Sol Lewitt’s Wall drawing Nr36. During a one and a half hour slow and

concentrated movement I left behind a black ink line, a trace over 35 meters and then disappeared, leaving the drawing trace behind. ATO is a Japanese term, it means trace or wound or ruin, or after, or later, refering to both the topic of the Arab revolutions of the first part of Deel 1: de Inleiding, as well as to Sol Lewitt’s Wall drawing. My ATO Nr11. was the outcome of a process and communicated through my physical presence and it’s absence.

The selection of a medium arrives naturally in my working proces. My starting point to create, always relates to an inner urgency. Most of the time the usage of different media is connected and follows up in time That is why I speak in the end more of ‘projects’, although I don’t invent it on forehand, it seems to find it’s way. So, a performance can result in drawings or in photographs, or the performance results into a film. Every medium has it’s specific qualities and a specific working method. Performances relate to each other medium in an other way. It could also work in the opposite direction. For instance, in my recent project ‘Ice Age’ (2017) where I started to draw and paint on cardboard. These own drawings became the input for inner pictures. From these inner pictures I created my movements. These movements served for my film ‘The inner Proclamation of Ice Age’ (2017). So I tend to work in projects which result in time and into different outcomes. With the ‘Catastrophe Project’, I only created endless series of drawings. Drawings in different sizes to be put in different sizes of black wooden boxes. One box with 1000 drawings the others 200 and 100 drawings. The ongoing repetitive drawing movement was here the performance.

Most important for me in choosing media usage is inner urge. If I have to draw, I draw. I should not start to think about it. I should only stop when the body tells me so. Sometimes I use this example during my visiting lecture at

Art schools, when artists are blocked in their working process and ask me what to do. I advise them what I tell myself; do what you feel like doing most right now. And if it is sleeping, it is sleeping, as long as it is in your studio. There will arrive a moment, a movement, an urge, a need to start working. I am often in my studio waiting for this urge. It needs to be physically urgent to work. I have to wait for it. The body never lies, the mind does. Or as F. Kafka wrote; 'Beyond a certain point there is no turning back. This point must be reached.'

For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected OH OH, an extremely interesting project that our readers have already staterd to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your exploration of the relationship between human conditions and cosmic order is the way you have accomplished your inquiry into such unbreakable bond with effectiveness and autonomous aesthetics. While walking our readers through the genesis of OH OH, would you tell us if you how did you developed your initial idea? Moreover, how much importance does play improvisation in your process?

In The Photo series OH OH, I am looking for iconic images of a current human condition, floating in void. The large photos relate to human attempts and a failing humanity. With long capture time I capture my performative actions with the camera. The different layers of my falling movement become visual into one image.When I press the camera I have a length of time (long exposure) in order to fall and move in different positions. If I change position, it will be layered into the image; if I move fast it will give a grey trace, If I move more slow the trace is more visible, If I make in between stops, the position will become more clear. So In this way I can draw with my falling movement. I focus upon how to move and when to move, in order to create an image, a physical drawing so to say.

I only work with natural light in my atelier space, bringing more depth in the traces/shadows. The photos were made during wintertime; I waited in my atelier to have the right darkness/light in order to work with long exposure. Between 3 PM and 5 PM was the perfect time with the right amount of light. I do not work with a camera connected to a computer, which means for every shot I have to press the button myself and hurry back from the high ladder to be in the right position in order to move with full concentration, shot by shot. So, it is all in one shot, one movement, and one outcome. In total I made 100 of these photos with this working method called: OH OH SERIES.

Later on I started to work on the ‘OH Series’. Here I combined the falling movement with ink drawings. The drawings relate to the ‘OH OH Series’ as well as the 110 ‘OH OH Aleppo’ drawings. The ink drawings I made form a black abstract background, a dark landscape. Here one can see references to calligraphy, drawing as a performative repetitive action. The word improvisation cannot be applied here. In my work I step into a ritualistic process into a frame which is esthetically formed by me.

Another interesting work that we have particularly appreciated is entitled HOORAY HOORAY, a live Performance at the official residence of the Governor of the province East Flanders, in Gent. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative process. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once remarked that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": as a multidisciplinary artist how would you consider the relation between the abstract nature of the ideas you explore and the physical act of producing your artworks?

In my preparation for a performance I tend to narrow things down, peal things of, search for only the necessary. Mostly I bring it down to one essential action composed out of one repetitive movement. My live performances tend to have

long duration of 1 and a half hour, 3 hours or 6 hours. This duration is important in order to give the audience the opportunity to forget me as a performer and forget themselves (with all the thoughts we have as audience (What is this strange performance about? What does it mean? I still have to buy some milk before tomorrow, where can I buy it,? those kind of

thoughts). After some time both me as the performer as well as possibly the audience enter a state in where you can experience. A state, where you can start to see and feel in a direct way. So the repetitive movement serves as a parameter bringing forward one essential image. The HOORAY HOORAY performance was a 3 hour turn with a small flag, a whistle for

parties and confetti on the floor. A three hour long Hooray Hooray moment in silence. Due to duration and concentration on full precise slow movement, another new layer arrives. Physical fatigue and the solitude in the image start to form an existential layer. The duration leaves me behind as an individual artist, and refers only to me as a moving body. Here abstraction takes

place, a shift is made from a performing individual to mankind in general. Although I use my own body as a tool, I search to communicate from a larger existential scenery about mankind throughout time. I am stepping into a ritual setting and come out of it when it is done. Duration is essential. For me, as performer in order to let go and step into the movement, and also for the audience in order to become attached to something in the performance. Duration makes it possible to experience. And because of it the experience does not go through thinking but directly towards the senses.

And last but not least my performance HOORAY HOORAY was also celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Gent, Belgium.

We like the way Sand Drawings T2 addresses the viewers to such an open reading, there is multiplicity of meanings behind the main idea that you aim to communicate: how much important is for you that the spectatorship rethink the concepts you convey in your pieces, elaborating personal meanings?

Yes, I bring in Sand Drawings T2 multiple meanings and then leave them open. I hope to create a tension strong enough for the viewer to keep on watching. I focus on the image itself for having a strong impact. At the same time, I do not give any more than an image, no answers. Something keeps on hanging in the air, unresolved. I hope it resonates and people keep on wondering. And hopefully everyone gets something different out of it, something that is important to them. I hope it is something to difficult to describe. (ha!) No really, it would mean it is incorporated on a level without words…

Take the performance Salutations and Salutations on Paper, for instance. It started some years ago when I looked outside my old house in Antwerp. On the opposite side of the street was a large window with a grey thin curtain.

Every day an old lady appeared in the window and looked in my direction. I waved, she waved back. This waving continued in time and even extended to a morning Salut and an evening Salut. The old lady did not leave her house anymore and this waving moment was her only contact. This waving was crucial. Perhaps this waving was a reinsurance she was still there. I wave, so you exist….I felt. A year later the old woman had passed away and I was asked to do a performance. I did not know the address and found out it was at a new art location right in front my old house, in the house of the former lady. The performance I created for this space was SALUTATIONS. I continued with SALUTATIONS on Paper. With a slow movement I made an imprint with my body on large sheets of paper. An imprint in bolster, a Salute to the other side, to someone on the other Side.

A salutation can be interpreted as a form of a signal in which the receiver of the salutation is being acknowledged, respected or thanked.

It is difficult now to start talking about the shamanistic and ritual elements in my performance, I hope the work itself carries it all. What is important to me is that my work is not about me. I am not interested in diary art. Even themes like identity, I don’t find interesting… Although I do find my work extremely personal, or I should say personal involved. What I am looking for in my work is a personal involvement so far stretched, it becomes universal. That is one of my working methods. Keep on pealing of layers of yourself. In this sense I do give a clear direction. I do give a personal language and an estheticall frame. It is not something I should be talking about. It can take away something instead of clarifying. Personal meaning is forming layers in my work, however as an Artist I use personal meaning to empower the image itself. I want it to be communicated through the work, not through words.

The Ongoing Battle refers both to the text Hände by F. Kafka and to the current ongoing battles and

present state of the world: as you have remarked in your artist's statement, through forms of abstraction you bring your content from a specific happening, or a specific social context to a larger existential scenery: Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "the artist’s role differs depending on which part of the world you’re in. It depends on the political system you’re living under". Not to mention that almost everything, ranging from Caravaggio's Inspiration of Saint Matthew to Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present, could be considered political, do you think that your works is political, in a certain sense? Moreover, what could be in your opinion the role of Art in the contemporary age?

In my work I focus upon a large time span relating to an existential state, more so then on a specific political situation or a specific momentum. However the input always arrives from what is affecting me here and now. When I saw the images of the endless and ongoing bombing of Aleppo on tv I was devastated. An enormous drama and suffering took place. How to relate to it, as an artist? The same question I had when I stood in Hiroshima at the place where the A bomb fell. How to relate to these forms of total destruction in time? I relate by posing these questions, through my work. It enforces me to create work. As I described earlier on I am looking for, or rather, I am waiting for the right connection. I wait for the right urge. With Oh Oh Aleppo it resulted in a continuous, repetitive, drawing performance, creating 110 drawings.

My latest film work AMOR FATI for instance refers to a quote from F. Nietzsche. It points to an active approach in dealing with good and especially dark times: Love of Fate. It connects a personal state with the universal. How to embrace the inescapable? How to relate to personal dramatic experiences? How to deal with the daily images of global suffering?

AMOR FATI also relates to my working method: Reflecting upon strong impressions and

transforming them into an abstract universal frame, searching for humanity in dark times. The attempts of embracing can be found both within the artistic working process itself and in its outcome: the paintings, drawings, performances, films and photographs. The film AMOR FATI refers to a story of Nietzsche embracing the neck of a horse while sliding towards insanity. The film seems to point to both a desolate state as well as to a form of proclamation.

At the moment I do sense we are heading towards this insanity. I hope people will connect and start searching for beauty and question on how to preserve it. Then art can and will be placed central again.

Over the years you have participated to several group exhibitions and you have had a number of solos, including your recent participation to the group exhibition Trust is a mood, barely an emotion, at ING Bank, in Gent: one of the hallmarks of your work is the capability to create direct involvement with the viewers, who are provided with of the the opportunity to become active participants and are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience: in particular, we are wondering if the aim to create an event for a spectator is the reason why you performer is if it's a channel through which you transmit your ideas: do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

TRUST IS NOT A MOOD, BARELY AN EMOTION, at ING Bank, curated by Elena Sorokina, took place in the main ING office building in Gent (2017-2018)

Elena Sorokin wrote a beautiful and strong text regarding art and the current banking systems. Questioning the parameters of profit hunting and it’s dehumanizing consequences, proposing slow human gestures, artworks, to counter. ‘Thirty-four

illustrations for Dante’s inferno’ 1958-1960 by Robert Rauschenberg were placed central in the exhibition.

My work OH OH nr.6362 was placed in a large open staircase, where the bank employees and other visitors audience are moving up and down, passing by the image of the falling movement. The empty space around the work enlarged the impact of falling physical movement in the image. The empty walls around gave space in all directions to the fall. The presentation enlarged the impact in a physical way for the audience.

Very rarely I do live performances. The tension and the communication in the here and now between audience and performer remains a strong happening. Although it is important to create the right conditions for a live performance. Duration plays a vital part. My performance could work as a parameter in a central space, so that the audience can re-connect in time with my continues presence. Or my performances work in a sharp setting where the audience is invited to experience the entire performance in one time. Not an easy task while

performance nowadays tends to be used by musea or galeries as an entertaining opening moment, like a clown’s act in the circus. On the other hand, we

see that performance in visual art nowadays starts to take in a more profound and independent place. Most of my performances however are alone, me

with a camera or pencil, without audience. For instance, during my ‘Atelier Antwerp’ period, 20112014 I did many performances without audience in

the empty building of my atelier, an old bottlery site. It resulted in photographs and series, including the ROOF series. With the ROOF series I continued my

search regarding space/time/movement. On the large roof of my atelier, with a view over the city of Antwerp, I focused upon positive and negative space and how to connect it into one image. It resulted in a white serie, void with movement relating to abstract traces of a city landscape in the background. When I printed the result on large rag paper,150cmx100cm, the photographs almost appeared to be like chalk drawings. The rag paper enlarged the fragility of the subject and enlarged the aspect of my physical drawing at the roof space.

The essence of art is that it wants to communicate. In a Masterclass I talked about performance and the difference between theater and visual art in terms of communication. You refered to Marina Abramović's earlier on. She once made a statement on the difference between theater and performance in visual art: ‘Theater is fake while Visual Art is real’. I can agree upon it to a large extent. For me the essential difference lies more in the form of communication itself.

Theater communicates from a second position. Meaning it is occupied with the other, the viewer. It is therefore a director sits on the audience side during rehearsals, to see what is being displayed and how it is received on the other side. The art work is constructed from this 2nd perspective. It implies a lot, since you have to do what is right and necessary for the other.

Visual Art communicates through the first perspective, not the other, but I, the artwork itself is central. Even where and how the artwork should be displayed for instance depends on what the artwork needs, not on what the audience needs. Sometimes with full consequences, for instance work that is destroyed or buried or burned. Originally theater and poetry, movement and visual art where much more connected. Somehow they turned into separate worlds without wondering about the other.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Michiel. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects?

How do you see your work evolving?

I am in a state of transformation. I am not sure about it all yet, I am trying to find out more. My latest work, the film Amor Fati, connected to my personal artistic state. I think the film announced the end of episode 1 in my work. At the moment I left everything behind and I am gone for 5 months. I gave up my atelier space and stored all my artwork. When I come back a new episode starts.

To give the right answer what exactly I will be doing, I am not sure yet. ..

It makes me think of this story: Once I was preparing an exhibition and the artists were together in a bar discussing the right form of the presentation. It was urgent, time was running short, just some days to go before the opening. Then one artist wrote a text on a paper beer mat and passed it on around the table. Every artist looked at it and passed it on to the next one,.. ..Then the paper mat came to me and there was written: ‘If you still don’t know what you will be doing by now, you are lazy!’ I had to laugh and picked up a pen and wrote underneath it: ‘If by now you already know what you will be doing, you have become lazy’. So it is good to be prepared and still dare to not know. Keep on questioning with an inner focus.

When I return I’ll first focus on creating new work. I like to continue teaching masterclasses. A documentary film is being made about my work, by Robbert Kiem What So. It would be good if I can place all my work at a gallery in the near future when I return, until now I did it all by myself. Some exhibitions are planned and I hope my work will keep on finding it’s way out, as it does now, in this

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