And now that you’ve got the information, how will you use it? A series of interviews by #sublimeisnow. #1
And now that you’ve got the information, how will you use it?
A series of interviews by #sublimeisnow.
Camilla Crescini: Your work is focused on installations. Do you always work on a site-specific base? How important is the medium, the technique, for you?
Isabelle Andriessen:
I do not necessarily make site-specific sculptures or installations. I perceive myself as a sculptor. Having that said I find it very important, in my role as a sculptor, to take space and the experience of time into account. I certainly have a strategy, but as long as the technique or medium meets that strategy, I could use it.
CC: Perception and the role of senses are fundamental topics that you investigate with your work.
In the book Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty has said: “The body is our general medium for having a world”. Do you agree with this sentence?
Do you think that we know through our intellect or through our experience? Or both?
IA:
I train my way into thinking in a non-linear or biased way. Everything is connected to everything. This is a simple yet too complex concept to comprehend. I believe we know through our experience, intellect, skin, muscles, senses, DNA, neurons, molecules, atoms… maybe even parallel universes.
I intent to contemplate the central role that humanity and the human body plays in our constitution of ‘the world’ in relation to our environment. I think an ecological approach to modes of thinking complicates traditional distinctions between appearance and reality, between ontology and epistemology and between the empirical and the transcendental. I perceive a sense of disconnection to time and environment in my observations of my generation: a generation in which machines turned into our companion species. The dominance of vision has been reinforced in our time by a multitude of technological inventions and the endless multiplication and production of images. I believe that when our senses become more receptive to our environment and as this environment is interconnected and continuously changing, one becomes closer to an awareness of the present.
I’m very inspired by the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, who often refers to Merleau-Ponty, that claims that the growing hegemony of the eye seems to be parallel with the development of a Western ego-consciousness and the gradually increasing separation of the self and the world. Vision separates us from the world whereas the other senses unite us with it. One becomes detached from an incarnated relation with the environment through the suppression of the other senses, in particular due to the technological extensions of the eye.
CC: Your installations are often immersive experiences. For example in Tigerbalm Sensation (2014) you coated the walls of Inter Arts Center with a thin layer of tigerbalm.
Really often in contemporary art, critics and beneficiaries talk about the relevance of emotions and feelings (and I refer to emotions and feelings with a different meaning from the one that perception has).
Do you also have the intent of realising something hugely touching and emotional?
IA:
No, I don’t intent to create a work that is touching or emotional. I aim to draw the attention to the fleeting nature of the moment - the now and the passage of time. I believe that creating a work which is hugely touching or emotional would draw the attention away from the now. I aim to evoke a sense of desire to observe the work. Often times I’ve noticed viewers want to come back to see how the work transforms and changes. I aim to evoke some sort of ‘unique’ relationship between the viewer and the work. By unique I mean that the transformation that is performed by the work cannot be repeated, and sometimes not even be fully controlled. Inherently my works contain elements that are easily to be missed.
CC: Art is always an act of creation, is always giving birth to something. In The Mesh - strage strangers between life and non-life (2015) this seems to be taken literally: the artwork it’s a kind of “plantation” of mushrooms.
Can you tell us more about this work?
IA:
In my work the notion of creation or giving birth to something is not what I aim to do. Rather I aim to create something that is not supposed to last, or will only exist temporarily. Also I have to say that is highly important within my way of working to make a work that is not literal nor illustrative. But I will tell you more about the theory behind this work.
The Mesh – strange strangers between life and non-life, is based on the use of the mesh by Timothy Morton in his book Hyperobjects as well as many other books and lectures. A mesh is the threads and the holes between the threads consisting of relationships between crisscrossing strands and gaps between the strands. It functions as a potent metaphor for the strange interconnectedness of things. An interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless transmission of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences. Morton states that when an object is born it is instantly enmeshed into a relationship with other objects in the mesh.
When working towards this work I found myself asking how to reposition nature as we think of it, along the force of the Antropocene. I imagined an abandoned landscape made of materials that cannot be degraded, like plastics and metal, from which mushrooms would grow. I allude to a world in which adaption runs rampant: genes become open source, biology becomes software, and the distinctions between living organisms, information, objects, and products become irrevocably confused. All matter is vibrant, active and alive, in a continuous state of becoming.
The works in The Mesh contain mycelium – the vegetative, thread-like part of a fungus. During the exhibition mushrooms will emerge as strange invaders from the sculptures, slowly transforming their appearance. I approaches the mushrooms as a material of an 'extra terrestrial’ kind. For me the mushrooms are the embodiment of the uncanny: strangely familiar and familiarly strange with their cold, dead-like skin. Yet there is also a fascination in the fact that we’re surrounded with all these seemingly invisible living systems, that organise and stabilise our earth system.
I aim to emphasise the contrast between the alien and uncanny artificial but yet organic mushroom and industrial and plastic materials. In this work I research the encounter with the uncanny when the seemingly rigid boundaries between life and non-life, sentient and non-sentient and organic and in-organic become confused. Doing so I aim to emphasise a contract between the human body, mushrooms and systems. I contemplate on the interconnectedness that is involved with the Antropocene and the dissolving boundaries between machines of production and consumption and our finite biological nature in order to communicate my view on the uncanny road it is taking.
During my research into mushrooms I stumbled upon the provoking but fascinating lectures of Terence McKenna, a thinker, lecturer and author. He speaks about mushrooms in relation to the question of extra terrestrial penetration of the human word, in his attempt to assign it as potential aliens or an extraterrestrial life-form. According to McKenna, the mushrooms bares looking at from this viewpoint for two grounds. One physical argument is that the mushrooms contain psilocybin, a connection of molecules that unknown be found in any other organism in nature on this planet. This notion would be going against the logic of nature, where over evolution genetics are being passed on. Secondly he claims that spores are one of the most electron dense organic material known, making it as strong as metal. It is for fact that mushroom spores happen to travel outside of our planetary atmosphere and they happen to survive the environment of outer space.
The alien might as well be so alien, one might not recognise it as such.
CC: How is your creative process structured (from the idea to the work in your atelier, from the work on the site to the realisation)?
IA:
That all goes pretty liquid. I do research all the time, meaning 16 hours a day. But research can mean many things. In my case this means reading, watching lectures and documentaries, losing myself on YouTube. In this process is highly influenced by serendipity. This is one of the moments in which I experience that everything is connected.
Most of the work takes place in my studio. I intend to produce as much of my work myself, either in my studio or in a workshop where I can use machines to work with metal and wood. Though more and more it is so that I have parts of my work produced by other companies.
Depending on the circumstances I prefer to know what space the work will be presented in, so that the work can be adapted to the space or adjusted. But this is a luxury. Eventually its not always possible to control where you’re work will be situated or exhibited.
CC: Would you say that there is a common thread in your overall work?
What is it?
IA:
In my installations and sculptures I apply different techniques and media in order to explore the paradox between the beauty of transformation and the continuous loss inherent within, both material and perceptual. It is exactly this paradox that keeps me fascinated along my research. A term for this state is used in Japanese philosophy and literature as Mono No Aware; the sad beauty of transience, an awareness to impermanence or the passing of things. The physical experience of the viewer is at stake in my complex installations, which I approach as ‘parallel environments’. I aim to orchestrate time. By employing elements like smell, light, sound and time I investigate ways to evoke a highly sensory and bodily experience that contributes to a sense of disorientation. Through the use of perishable materials and natural processes I draw attention to the impermanent nature of the present in order to address the attention to the Now.
In my research I contemplate the paradox between emphasising finitude and the desire for immortality. I aim to reflect on what is between being human and non-human – between living and non-living.
CC: What and who does (or did) influence you and your work?
IA:
Science-Fiction, death, Buddhism, Pierre Huyghe, bacteria, deep-time, environmental change, Donna Harraway, Gaia theory, HP Lovecraft, James Lovelock, cybernetics, Anthropocene, posthumanism, animism, adaptation, transformation, Giles Deleuze, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, capitalism, Memento Mori, John Cage, Kepler 186F
CC: You have recently graduated from Malmö Art Academy. Do you think that art schools are well connected with the art world?
Have you learned a method or a way of thinking?
IA:
I don’t think art schools or institutes are there to teach you a method or a way of thinking. I think the benefit of being connected to an art school is to be part of a platform. To be connected to other artists, to a generation of artists and to have a spot where one can develop and concentrate.
What do you define as ‘the art world’? Weather an art school is able to connect you to the art world is most over depending on the individual artist. I perceive being an artist of our generation an act of self-organisation. An art school is more of a place, it is a space where one can develop, reflect, discuss and grow. It provides a shelter. I don’t believe anything is to be learned, since there are so many different ways of working.
CC: As last question, I’d like to know if there is -and what is it- your biggest obsession in your work as artist.
I perceive a compelling paradox between the fear of finitude and the longing for immortality. The longing for immortality comes along with a parade of vampires, zombies, clones and living machines - the miscellaneous undead- who take place in today’s mass culture. In this context these non-human beings and others will appear in different ways. I feel the necessity to create a field of discourse around these 'side-effects’ of facing finitude within the art institute - a context where creating becomes an act of prolonging life. How can I orchestrate time, duration and modes of finitude within the context of art in order to stress the above addressed subjects?
How can I challenge the experience of time in the format of an exhibition? I investigate ways to produce work that performs in the here and now; works that are in a constant flux or transformation along the exhibition. I aim to confront the viewer with something that is not supposed to last: something that might vanish, collapse and disappear. I aim to place the viewer in the role of a witness of a process which will partly be missed. I intend to research ways to direct time and so the way it is experienced. How can I evoke a sense of longing or desire? What is the role of durability and presence according to these short-lived, present and sometimes even performative works?
Isabelle Andriessen lives and works in Amsterdam.
http://www.isabelleandriessen.com
Pictures: The mesh - strange strangers between life and non-life (2015), Isabelle Andriessen
Photographs by Lotte Stekelenburg©
