Underground Connections

‘The narratives appear and start to grow in good moments, moments that are actually unforeseeable. Sometimes I hear a rumour about a building, or I look at a postcard again and again, because I feel a magical transfer happening and the narrative’s traces become visible.’

‘When I was on a bicycling tour to the Mont Ventoux I desperately needed a Coke after reaching the peak, and I went to a restaurant. In there I saw a very strong black and white photograph of a building covered with snow. This made my legs even shakier. A few hours later, in the evening, one of these moments came to me and I thought of a connection between a fictional scenario and the photo I saw. It’s also about the mix of different places and how you’re mentally moving through them. The atmosphere of the unreal lunar landscape in the last meters to the Ventoux peak, the photo of the snow-covered architecture, getting back to where the trip started: this had all been stimulating, and created strange thoughts about a fictional scenario. In this case the moment found me, and often it’s hard to force it, to really find a moment, if you need one.’

‘Normally I start by working on sketches, collecting background information and searching historical photographs. Parts of that material might be the starting point for the storyboard. The elements, or rather, the fragments I create or find, come together and form a loose structure. The working process doesn’t follow a defined order; it’s more about an intuitive search.’

‘There is no such a thing as the story for me, in terms of one linear story. I’m interested in places that carry cryptical information leading to a world behind things. I use these places to create multi-directional, open-ended stories, using different media. Whether the fragments are put together in the viewer’s head in the exact same way as they are in mine, is of no importance. There are several trap doors you can fall through and this feels for me like an extension of space.’

‘Interesting that by diving into my work you come out in Baldessari’s living room. There is indeed this idea of the ink floor pieces being portals to other worlds. In Cabrini Green Forest (2004), for example, one could ‘travel in between’ by using these ink floor basins. But there you were in a Baldessari portrait, and him looking at you asking: What... ?! The moment when you are entering the ‘Baldessari-stage’ feels like a flash to me. Comparable to a déjà vu, for example. It’s only a split second that you get in touch with it, and you’ll loose it again. I feel something similar with cryptical moments that can unfold into a story. A slow motion version of the flash: you’re following a trace and a dense atmosphere develops, like a gas streaming out and after a time the images dissolve. Maybe the elements of my installations want to frieze these kind of moments.’

‘I first showed The Well at the South London Gallery. The starting point was a map called ‘the lost rivers and wells in London’ that I came across when doing research for the show. I was intrigued by this idea of lost rivers and wells, which used to also be in the neighbourhood where the South London Gallery is located. Developed for the show, the work is site-specific in a sense; but in another, it’s not as if one can travel to this place in one’s mind. The work is about the imagination of different dimensions: underground rivers in a city, the pipe system running through an architecture, and the capillaries of a human body. Taking the installation to another place means that you have to imagine one more layer. It's not about faking reality by making people believe that there really is a well under the floor of the South London Gallery or under the floor of the gallery in Karlsruhe, for that matter. It is a mental concept.’

‘Hmmm. Thinking about missing links, black holes in a row of film sequences…that’s interesting. Sounds like a project!’

‘Of course.’

‘I like your interpretation of my wall drawings as a modern update to Giovanni Piranesi and they could be read as such, as part of the mental concept. The wall drawings in The Well for example – appearing and disappearing depending on the spectators' distance towards the wall – I imagine like a rash on the architecture’s skin. The pipes running through the architecture are the capillaries and the wall drawings are showing images hidden inside the walls. You are able to read the work through different layers, the endless connections of a construction made by ants, a rhizome.’

‘Right. The thin lines have cost some photographers nerves. They are indeed very difficult to document. And I like the fact that a wall drawing also disappears in reality after a show.’

‘In 1998, on my way to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Vitoriale, the villa and park of the Italian poet who created a cabinet of curiosities, I stayed at a Pension Hohl, run by an old lady, at Lake Garda, that I found by accident. The nearby Pension Hohl, as the name implies, was a building that had to be filled with ideas. Two years later I created a scenario out of the connection between the Vitoriale and Pension Hohl: the installation entitled Pension Hohl/D’Annunzio (2000) was the result.

I always dreamt becoming the owner of that time capsule called the Pension Hohl, so I could turn the building into a foundation where the whole estate transforms into an artwork, a vision. A few years later a friend of mine came back from holidays in Italy and showed me a postcard of a nouveau-riche hotel; after a while I recognized that this building was the former Pension Hohl.

The loss of a beautiful place. Do you know about Richard Prince’s ‘second house’? It was a former policeman’s hunting hut in upstate New York. Inside, Prince was showing some of his work, quite a special place. Not long after the hut was acquired by the Guggenheim, a thunderbolt destroyed it. Very tragic.’

‘Remember us biking in peloton between Amsterdam and Utrecht? We were racing in a group of ten. It was impossible for me to feel the changing winds. Whenever these flatlanders changed the formation of the peloton, because of the wind, it came out of nowhere for me. I was struggling to find my way back into position, losing orientation in the wind and with all that skyscape around. This is what happens when you take the boy out of his country. And it proves that you can’t take his country out of the boy.’