Speaking Out

Virginie Bobin: After the financial crash in Iceland in 2008, a 2000-page report was published to analyze the causes and mechanisms of the crisis, the rapid growth of the banks and the responsibility of the government. The Reykjavik´s City Theatre employed actors and their own staff to read the entire text on stage over the course of three days and nights (broadcasting the reading live on their website). How would you relate this performance to your own work, especially pieces such as Constitution of the Republic of Iceland (2007-11)?

Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson: We started working on the Constitution… piece in 2007, before the financial crisis. It wasn’t directly related to the economic boom and bust, but rather to questions of identity and belonging. By appropriating and mixing the constitution with classical contemporary music – a surprise encounter, you could say – our project was an attempt to intervene in the public debate by using an art form, reaching outside of the art context to call the attention of the audience to public matters that should be, in our opinion, actively reflected – individually and collectively. The context of the Theatre reading was very different. It reacted to a situation that had already revealed itself. We also worked on two very different kinds of texts: a constitution, and a report. Theirs was a performance of pure distribution – an ‘emergency’ documentary reading – which isn’t to say that it wasn’t necessary and great that they did it.

Our project first took the form of a performance in 2008, then a video in 2011, which was produced in collaboration with the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service and broadcasted on TV, at a time when the writing of the new constitution had become a public issue. We both wanted to reach as many people as possible, but also deconstruct a standard TV programme by directing it ourselves. Our piece had a strong impact in Iceland. The soundtrack was nominated for best music composition of the year and the work was appropriated and referred to several times: in various radio programmes about the constitution, in a weekly comic TV show, in talks and the annual comic programme on New Years Eve.

VB: You often use music as a critical vehicle to either highlight a public issue (like in Caregivers (2008) or Lobbyists (2009)) or question the apparatus of the nation state (like in O, Holy Times Thousand! (2006) or Your Country Doesn’t Exist (2011)). You deal with loaded political topics such as human rights, labour, nationalism or immigration with tools inspired both by highbrow cultural forms (opera singing, Athenian theatre, philosophy) and pop culture (TV shows, disco balls, polka-dot costumes, street signs), sometimes verging on the carnival-esque and its upsetting principles of parody and reversing order. What do you seek to produce with this mix of references and tactics?

LC and ÓÓ: It is again about decontextualizing. Using music for us is also about using a method of conveying information, of transformation without the normality of the spoken language or a conversation. It is a way to transmit, emotionally and abstractly.

VB: By putting texts to music, you take them out of their usual context and render them inadequate. The emotion that we feel is also provoked by the discrepancy between the musical emotion and the content of the lyrics. You create a ‘suspension of belief’, forcing the audience to actually listen instead of taking the text for granted. Written text has a form of being truth binding, whereas your use of music allows for critical doubt.

LC and ÓÓ: Yes, although so far we have not been seeking to create an obvious contrast, but rather to create different layers so that you can’t really trust the piece. There are moments when the music and the text are contrary to each other and others when they might join. It is difficult to differentiate emotions from a critical commentary. When we shot Caregivers in Italy, we didn’t want to use the conventional procedures of dialogues, questions or voice-over. Setting a journalistic article into music became a way to convey language and information – a reflective commentary or a subtext, but also a verfremdung and a creative device. By avoiding the apparent truth of direct language, it is also poetry, in a sense, understood as a form of condensing. But the way we are using language is the same way as we are using the rest of the various elements. As you said, by juxtaposing things that wouldn’t necessarily come together and therefore creating new possible orders. Our work is often both a portrayal of something and an intervention, aimed at destabilizing a given order, not only in an art context but also in a broader public context.

The same goes with the combination of what you call ‘high’ and ‘pop’ culture. It is a way not to take things, fixed structures, for granted; of undermining them and the value relations between them, in order to show that they are constructions and that another construction is possible. It is a means for us to learn about those values and our perceptions of them. To learn about the world around us and within us, what it does to us, and of course also what it does to other people. At the same time, it is a way to learn about art, about the medium and the tools we can re-invent within it.

Most importantly, we cannot cope with exclusion, be it in art or anywhere. We seek to put elements in discord, to go against the beat, as continuous attempts to include the off beat: the asymmetries that are in the world. To acknowledge how difficult it is to include and confront the things that are difficult or conflicting. We use humour as a mean of subversion and transgression, but in a way that you maybe aren’t sure when, or if, to laugh – again, a way to disorder. It is interesting how humour is easily problematic in visual arts, unlike in theatre or film (but maybe theatre people would disagree). That is because of what has been and still is a role of the visual arts: as a form of representation and, to a certain extent, a creator of values. In the visual arts, even after Goya or Duchamp, humour is often misunderstood as bad taste. We like to provoke this misunderstanding.

VB: In French, ‘voice’ also means ‘vote’, the official participation channel of a citizen. In your work, do you envision voice as a tool to transcend national boarders (such as in Your Country Doesn’t Exist) and powerlessness, or what T. Hammar coined as ‘denizenship’ (ThE riGHt tO WrOnG (2012) or Avant-Garde Citizens (2007-ongoing))?

LC and ÓÓ: Voice is a complicated thing. We are indeed very busy with it and its connections to subjectivity, identity, meaning… In Avant-Garde Citizens, we sought to convey the storytelling of undocumented immigrants with as little mediation as possible. In the videos, we use a reductive, minimalistic approach: you look at most of the people from the back, in a fixed frame. Instead of seeing their faces, you are actually looking with them at the changing landscape. For us it was very much about de-objectifying the subject. In 2003–4, when we did the first audio recordings with migrants and refugees in the Netherlands, we could not think of an appropriate way of filming or photographing them, so we worked with audio sculptures and installations. We also didn’t want to edit their stories, cutting out mistakes etc.

In Living Room Reading – The Episode of Hrut and Mord Fiddle (2006), we asked an Afghan refugee in Iceland to read Njálssaga out loud, which we recorded in a studio. Njálssaga is like the literary bible of Iceland, a national cultural heritage. Instead of asking this person to tell his own story, we had him read that ‘world treasure’, with his accent, to the Icelandic people he wanted to belong to – challenging the way culture is used to sustain nationalism and construct identity. Like in other pieces, it rendered the alienation of the voice visible and changed your perception of both the text and the voice.

VB: You deal with global issues in local contexts such as Iceland and Spain (where you come from), The Netherlands (where you studied and live part time) and Berlin, your new home. Each of these cities/countries embodies a series of issues in your work, from the financial crisis to immigration, the rise of right-wing nationalism to the nomadic life of the immaterial cultural labourer. How do you situate yourselves as artists (whose way of working is often associated with the vanguard of neo-liberalism’s freedom for precariousness) and citizens?

LC and ÓÓ: We are probably the number one case study! As artists, we are of course strongly related to these things, but we also look carefully into what other people are experiencing in relation to the way the economy organizes our lives. Artists are of course very good examples of the flexibility, international mobility and precariousness dictated by post-Fordist neo-liberalism and immaterial labour. It may be hard to sustain yourself as an artist if you don’t travel extensively. We have been asking ourselves a lot how people could combine all this movement and engage with the place, or places, where they live. For instance, we do not have the right to vote in the Netherlands or in Germany, where we live. There is a huge floating mass of citizens who are not recognized as citizens, who are engaged in the city but are not being able to make that engagement representative. How can we envision a flat or democratic structure for all those people, beyond a representative one? We would need new ways and tools to be taken into account in the institutions.

We must also keep in mind that this is not a common reality: on the contrary, many people – these ‘denizens’ that Hammar talks about – are still prevented from moving around. During the opening of this year’s Venice Biennale, we were struck by the – of course well-known – fact that the audience is so ‘white’. Of course, it is a specific audience, at a specific moment, but it is also quite telling about the so-called ‘internationalization’ of the visual arts.

VB: In 2011, you represented Iceland at the last edition of the Venice Biennale and you recently had an important solo show at Tent in Rotterdam, curated by Adam Budak. How do you consider the exhibition space as a medium in its relation to the public sphere?

LC and ÓÓ: We always understand the exhibition space as a public space, or a space made public. In the art context, ‘public space’ is often understood as an outdoor space, and we also work outdoors. Through the work and the questions that we pose ourselves in the exhibition space, we always try to remind ourselves, and others, that it is actually a public space as well. As much or as little as the outdoor space, which is itself questionably ‘public’. The gondola performance we did in Venice was also a way to infiltrate and intervene in the outdoor space without having to pay tonnes of money, or go through an impossible bureaucratic nightmare, because Venice is a very private outdoor space, or very regulated public space as a museum (or should we just say opaque)? In Tent, we also created ThE riGHt tO RighT/WrOnG debating space, which was the core of the exhibition. The exhibition was shaped around this space for debate and exchange, where public and performers, performers and performers, public and public, could meet.

Speaking of representation, in the Venice pavilions you often see art works that are produced in the countries they represent. We wanted to transgress that. First, we thought about doing a follow-up to Caregivers in Ukraine. In the end, things happened quite naturally, with one piece produced in Berlin, one in Iceland and two in Italy, which were quite representative of our way of working, but also of what we think of ‘representation’ in itself.

VB: Your main work there, Your Country Doesn’t Exist, already undermined this question of nationality.

LC and ÓÓ: It was also installed at the boarder of the pavilion, on the façade, as a neon written in Italian. Because this question of the outdoor/indoor or the public sphere also relates to borders, exclusion and inclusion, identity and nationalities. It reflected our idea that the space should be a breathing space, whatever it is, a space of porosity between the internal and the external, linking different contexts and spheres. Our whole work is an attempt to create this porosity.