Interview with Carlos Garaicoa

Interview conducted in Barcelona May 2006

Cecilia Andersson:
I wonder if you’d like to give a bit of background to the introduction of architecture and to ideas concerning the city in your practice.

Carlos Garaicoa:
My interest in the city started 1991. This is when I did a project in my street in the north of Havana and invited kids to make a large graffiti. Drawing in the streets with chalk was something I was interested in; the trace and the ephemeral. This was the beginning of my reflections about what an artist is, what you do with language by representing something and when you tell a story and make contact with people. It was questions of representation that put me in contact with the city.

CA: You’ve said that the city was your laboratory.

CG: Yes, it was in the beginning. I did my second piece in the house where I was living - a huge apartment building. In Cuba we call them solar and they’re built around a patio where the neighbours can see each other at all times. I proposed an object to the solar, an object which was meant to change relations between the neighbours. My idea was to cover the central patio by stretching a coloured sheet of nylon across, like a kind of Christo and Jeanne-Claude project. One week before the installation I distributed four different sets of information. One for the people in the neighbourhood, one for the people in the surrounding streets, one for the people living below the nylon and one for the people living above. And on that Sunday when people woke up, the red ceiling was in place.

CA: Meaning you were equally interested in how it was received as in the actual staging of it?

CG: Yes, what is it we’re actually saying with art? If you display an object in a building, in the street or in a museum obviously makes all the difference. These are questions about context, about language, about how far you can go with an aesthetic experience. In my building I very clearly staged an aesthetic experience. If I had said: I will place a red nylon above your head and it will be beautiful, nobody would accept it. But if I say this nylon will affect your life, or from now on your relation to the sky will be different. I believe you have to inform people in different ways to achieve acceptance for art.

CA: So your general proposal is that people will accept as long as you set up the experience adequately?

CG: In general I believe that art is not enough. What we call art, the experience of it, is a very closed and elitist idea. We really have to find different ways and several contexts for art to be analysed. For me it’s easy to put a piece of mine into a museum because by now I know how it will be perceived. If you have enough skills to install, audiences accept the work. They can say they like it or they don’t, but the audiences outside the museum and gallery contexts are much more complex. The experience of art is the experience of language, and language is to communicate. All the pieces I’ve done so far in city contexts are developed as results from what I learned by the nylon experience. Another aspect of my work is that I’ve been trying to find a way to create art from nothing, from a certain vacuum of the city, and from that point starts this relation with architecture where I disguise my work as architectural.

CA: Disguise?

CG: Yes, it’s a disguise. The first time I really worked with an architect was for Documenta 11 in 2002, but even then it was important for me to keep my vision entirely on a conceptual level. I never wanted to build even if I had all the plans and permissions to do so.

CA: But now something has changed. Your commission for the library in Castleford (Yorkshire) seems like it is actually going to be built.

CG: This is a new situation, still related to my early works. In 1991 when I proposed the nylon roof I tried to convince people that the nylon would be something different. What happens to a building when you change its routine? What happens to the community? What I’m proposing for Castleford is quite similar. I say: this is a piece of art and this piece of art can be turned into a multifunctional situation. You can have a building around this object but you don’t have to look at it as art. You can see it as a library, you can see it as dance floor, a planetarium, but you don’t have to refer to it as art. My responsibility in the city is not to make a Mark DeSuvero or Henry Moore sculpture. That could be beautiful too but beauty in the city and in public space is all about function. My goal is obviously not to become an architect but to stay in theory and close to space related issues making my work more credible. But at times I cross the lines and say ok, I will do a library but this library comes from an art piece. I want to prove that art can be useful.

CA: Is that something you otherwise doubt?

CG: No I don’t doubt it. I think it’s useful but it’s limited and I want to give it more range. I believe that many of my pieces are sculptures and unfortunately mostly only stay as sculptures. It can be a smart sculpture, but it’s still a sculpture. I’m against the idea of bringing artists to public spaces and tell them to do art. I’d rather people forget it’s art.

Interview with Francesco Jodice

Interview conducted in Stockholm October 2007

Cecilia Andersson:
Please give a brief background to your work.

Francesco Jodice:
I don’t think I have a “usual” artist background, if there’s one. I started very late, graduated as an architect (urban planning) in my city of birth, Napoli, when I was 29. I never really worked as an architect. I starter to practice photography when I was 29, never studied theory or practice, neither of photography or art, but I had a great advantage: my father, Mimmo Jodice, is a photographer himself. In a way I was taught to observe things with care. When I was younger I was very much involved in American comics culture (Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and later Frank Miller,etc) and in mainstream cinema (John Carpenter, William Friedkin from U.S. and Takeshi Mike, Takeshi Kitano, and others from the Far East). So I do not really have an arts background in any traditional sense. Mainly, with a base in these popular cultures I started to apply my influences toward urban and social photography. I later started to work with maps, installations and films. I also have a disposition for collaborative works which in 2000 led me to become one of the founding members of Multiplicity.

CA: What is in your opinion art of today?

FJ: I could never focus on what I think art is today. It seems I cannot make a proper image of that in my mind. What I can tell you, though, is that I am interested in the social and political attitudes of art today. Political art signifies to me art that can be used as a tool that is able to investigate processes of civil transformation and eventually get involved in such transformations. In my projects I try to produce research for knowledge and to give evidence to alternative ways of social modifications. No, I haven’t got any precise idea of what art is today, but still I think I am daily integrating it in my practice. Art is changing so fast; Languages, contexts, contents and especially strategies for working. We have to get used to art that is made out of different formal aspects and that will often take place in unfamiliar places.

CA: Do you perceive of art as it being in any way 'useful'?

FJ: Difficult question, I don’t think we all agree that art should be “useful”. Personally I believe it should be this way, but there are lots of people in the field that think that art deals mainly with pleasure, beauty, emotions, creativity and that art has no, or very little, social and political implications. I respect and understand this position even though I am interested in art as a political tool, both in terms of content and formal shape. And I am getting more and more interested in shaping my art in order to act as an uninvited guest in different social contexts. One example is the Citytellers project, a series of docu-films on cities, where the film is shown simultaneously in a museum and on television. On this occasion television is involved as a modern prosthesis of the traditional art space. You can say I use the television system in order to reach people that would otherwise not be reached in a more traditional art context. From this point of view the actual form for the Citytellers project is equally important as its content.

CA: Continuing on the topic of cities – a context in which you have made many of your works - what is it with large cities that especially capture your attention?

FJ: At the start of the 20th century only 2% of the world’s population lived in cities. Today more than 50% live in cities. More than cities, I am interested in investigating the reasons of this unstoppable human exodus. The social Diaspora is also changing. We used to think that people moved to cities because it was easier to make a living there. Today people move to urban environments that we would hardly define as rich, such as Lagos, Manila, Lima. Something has changed here in the dynamics of societies and economies and I think that sometimes we, westerners are not always aware of what is actually going on.

CA: Well, the most powerful generative force of cities today is mass flight from rural poverty. And this brings up questions as to how we define richness when the only things we can measure are material possessions. The game Scenario which you developed with the group Zapruder touches upon this. Would you like to explain a bit more about this game and how to play it?

FJ: In practice Scenario is a game that intends to build an accumulative map of modified landscapes. It takes the form of a board game containing a performance kit. A series of “change factors” is at the disposal for the players. These are arranged horizontally at the bottom of a world map. Each player removes the factors he considers significant and places them on the map in order to visualise personal knowledge and specific relationships to certain geographical locations. The game is an interface for the arrangement of new geo political scenarios and an elementary tool for the translation of thought into image. It is an image of complex structures of the political world to which we do not passively submit, but in which we take active part. It is modified by the convictions of the participating players which means that those taking part can project their opinions and aspirations on the future world scenario on a map. To “play seriously” at Scenario is an oxymoron, which explains both its structure and its use.

CA: You mentioned earlier in regards to Citytellers your wish to act as an uninvited guest in different social contexts and that you use television as prosthesis to distribute art. I find this a very interesting position. Perhaps also a strategy for you to manipulate the economy of dominating values?

FJ: What I am more and more concerned with today is to build proper “corridors of communication” in my work. Good artists always have total control over the integrity of content in their work but sometimes they lose control when the project gets channelled into the art system. For example the film I made, Sao Paolo Citytellers talks about certain aspects and conditions of the lives of the18 million inhabitants in the city of Sao Paolo. If I show this work in a gallery it will be “used” by approximately no more than 500 people. This is a paradox to me. Recently I started to think that the way I bring my projects to the people, meaning anyone, not only a selected audience from the art sphere, is part of the theory of my research, and therefore also integral part of the artwork itself.

CA: Yes I remember you expressed a concern about projects that in your opinion would add up to nothing if all they did was to stay within the art system. The very tricky question, as you mention, is how to transfer artwork to an audience outside the established art channels and still have artistic control over it. I guess it has to do with who you define as your audience and who you want to address.

FJ: Yes you are right, but it also leads us to another questions: What is an artwork today and what is not. When I started making documentaries years ago there were people telling me that these works were not video art, therefore not art at all. Today most people finally agree that a documentary might be art, but when I move it from the museum into the television medium they get suspicious again. So we are all very confused about what art is, which languages belong to art, where art can be placed to maintain its properties. From my point of view art is a necessity, the necessity to investigate the reality we belong to and share this perception with everyone as distant or different as they might be. To do this any material, language or place is good to me.

CA: Apparently your way of relating to the people you want to reach has a lot to do with methodology. In that I see you as a bit of an expert - you build your own methodology depending on each project, if I understand correctly? Have you to a certain extent become methodology yourself?

FJ: I think this started with the Multiplicity network that I co-founded with Stefano Boeri and other researchers in 2000. We were all very concerned about how to process our ideas in an independent area between art and architecture. We didn’t want to be identified, we wanted to be free to make our own strategies in order to build new tools for research. Maybe it also depends on the fact that in Italy there is a lack of public money invested in contemporary art so either you hand yourself over to private foundations or galleries, or you have to make your own strategies to prevent your research from getting too “mild”. Yes I think that I still like to belong to an independent area and be an independent artist. That is why I am still so concerned about methodology.

CA: I construe from your comments that today, society often do not possess adequate tools in order to relate and engage with the pace of changing realities. You seem able to observe things from various points of views, and in this you actually invent not only new jobs for yourself, you also invent ways to visualise the results of your jobs in your own and unique language. How do you shape the focus of what it is you wish to communicate? Or the poetic quality you aim to convey?

FJ: Paul Virilio once said that we are extremely capable of understanding which parts of reality we lose when a massive change takes place in society. But we are not equally able to predict what will come as a result of that change. I try to focus on how society is changing and what languages to use in order to talk about this. And this is more or less what I would call “poetics”. I am convinced that the aesthetic is a consequence of the function, of the meanings.

CA: By this you are saying that the structure of the project is equally important as the project itself?

FJ: In a way. It is the structure, the project and the process that brings the project to its “users”. I think that all these phases are one, and I think of the art-process from the first conception until the very end, until the work is installed as one single body. But going further I would say that I perceive no interruption in between the thinking, the making and the installation of the project. Also, I always try to assume the point of view of the spectator during all these phases. I am equally concerned with what view other people will have of a project. I want them to feel engaged with it.

CA: Would you like to say something about your current projects?

FJ: I am working on the continuation of Citytellers, to film and edit both a Stockholm and a Los Angeles version. These are very slow processes and I like it for that reason. I am also finishing a book on the relationships between “camorra” and society in Napoli. Camorra is the name of the local mafia in Napoli, the city where I was born. It is a book made up with different materials. Ranging from photographic atlases, interviews and maps. The actual core of the book will present the results of a road trip I will be doing together with other researchers thru the territories and the communities involved in this phenomena.