© 2020 – 2022. 2chairs artspace
Dear Antoanetta, welcome to 2chairs! You describe yourself as a conceptual artist and literary scholar. Before we talk about the art, could you introduce yourself? Where are you from, and how did these two identities find each other?
I’ve been chewing over my name for as long as I can remember. I’d like to find something to call myself that fits me, or perhaps sets me free. Maybe a name in the plural – that’s what I was thinking today.
Where I’m from: I was born in Latina, in the Agro Pontino. The Latins, the Etruscans, the Volsci, and then the Roman strongholds around the place where I was born – an archaeologist
was explaining all of this to us just a few days ago. But more than geography: I come from my mother’s determination and courage in settling in a brand-new city full of possibilities, and from my father’s determination and courage – in the late sixties, he ventured beyond the Iron Curtain to become himself, and along our coastline, he first met a thief, and then found his new family.
Everything speaks. And I like to listen and understand. That is my love for literature. I also grew up with the smell of oil paint always nearby. I knew that sooner or later I would take my love for art – and the urgency to make it – seriously and officially. It happened in Freiburg: deep in radical literature, in the middle of a PhD in Chicano literature, I stopped everything again and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. For some time now, I’ve been calling what I do "Narrative Minimalism" – what do you think of the definition?
You studied literature for almost a decade in various places, and only then enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. What happened in between? Was it a conscious decision, or did literature simply run out of room?
It’s like water flowing through different taps. You can turn one on, then the other, or use a mixer. I used to draw little faces and sudden reflections in the margins of my literature books; I give names to the dust in my studio. At a certain point – when it came to choosing – it was a question of linearity: focusing first on one thing, which takes time, and then on the other. I hope to soon arrive at a clear coexistence of the two languages.
I’ve been chewing over my name for as long as I can remember. I’d like to find something to call myself that fits me, or perhaps sets me free. Maybe a name in the plural – that’s what I was thinking today.
Where I’m from: I was born in Latina, in the Agro Pontino. The Latins, the Etruscans, the Volsci, and then the Roman strongholds around the place where I was born – an archaeologist
was explaining all of this to us just a few days ago. But more than geography: I come from my mother’s determination and courage in settling in a brand-new city full of possibilities, and from my father’s determination and courage – in the late sixties, he ventured beyond the Iron Curtain to become himself, and along our coastline, he first met a thief, and then found his new family.
Everything speaks. And I like to listen and understand. That is my love for literature. I also grew up with the smell of oil paint always nearby. I knew that sooner or later I would take my love for art – and the urgency to make it – seriously and officially. It happened in Freiburg: deep in radical literature, in the middle of a PhD in Chicano literature, I stopped everything again and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. For some time now, I’ve been calling what I do "Narrative Minimalism" – what do you think of the definition?
You studied literature for almost a decade in various places, and only then enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. What happened in between? Was it a conscious decision, or did literature simply run out of room?
It’s like water flowing through different taps. You can turn one on, then the other, or use a mixer. I used to draw little faces and sudden reflections in the margins of my literature books; I give names to the dust in my studio. At a certain point – when it came to choosing – it was a question of linearity: focusing first on one thing, which takes time, and then on the other. I hope to soon arrive at a clear coexistence of the two languages.
At the Academy, you worked with three very different professors. The Academy structure in Karlsruhe is unusual – you work directly in the field from the beginning. How did this shape the way you think about making art?
For me, the way the Academy worked in Karlsruhe was, at that point, the only one possible for me. I was there to find things, and under the shelter of that protected space, I was free to do so. Do you really think the artists I worked with were very different from one another? I hadn’t considered that before. In my own narrative, one is the logical consequence of the other. Ernst Caramelle kept the door open for me; with Leni Hoffmann, I went out into the streets; with Silvia Bächli, I learned to place fragments of small things alongside fragments of large things. I’ll answer your question with another: what would I have done if I hadn’t encountered all of that – and all of those people – at the Academy?
You have been running Progetti – jects – jekte – performative daily written lines – since 2003. That is over twenty years without interruption. What is this practice exactly, and what does daily writing do that occasional writing cannot?
I hope I don’t disappoint you: there was a period of about three years of intense writing – daily, even hourly – on the projects. That was the development of a method. The idea was to turn the fleeting nature of a thought into a project: I would say to myself, I’m thinking this and that right now – so be it. Let what I’m thinking at this very moment become a project. A sad thought, a cheerful one, confusion, disorientation – all of it can become a project. Through these pieces, I developed a kind of writing that suits me: a frame, a container into which I can pour ever-changing things. The first series was written in German, in the German I was learning, using it as material to shape. Over the years, they have become a solid tool I return to constantly. Recently, I have begun reading them aloud to audiences, in what I call a "Narrated Exhibition".
For me, the way the Academy worked in Karlsruhe was, at that point, the only one possible for me. I was there to find things, and under the shelter of that protected space, I was free to do so. Do you really think the artists I worked with were very different from one another? I hadn’t considered that before. In my own narrative, one is the logical consequence of the other. Ernst Caramelle kept the door open for me; with Leni Hoffmann, I went out into the streets; with Silvia Bächli, I learned to place fragments of small things alongside fragments of large things. I’ll answer your question with another: what would I have done if I hadn’t encountered all of that – and all of those people – at the Academy?
You have been running Progetti – jects – jekte – performative daily written lines – since 2003. That is over twenty years without interruption. What is this practice exactly, and what does daily writing do that occasional writing cannot?
I hope I don’t disappoint you: there was a period of about three years of intense writing – daily, even hourly – on the projects. That was the development of a method. The idea was to turn the fleeting nature of a thought into a project: I would say to myself, I’m thinking this and that right now – so be it. Let what I’m thinking at this very moment become a project. A sad thought, a cheerful one, confusion, disorientation – all of it can become a project. Through these pieces, I developed a kind of writing that suits me: a frame, a container into which I can pour ever-changing things. The first series was written in German, in the German I was learning, using it as material to shape. Over the years, they have become a solid tool I return to constantly. Recently, I have begun reading them aloud to audiences, in what I call a "Narrated Exhibition".
You present at 2chairs artspace a pair of milk bottles made in marble – a very different material from the found objects, twigs, and everyday things you usually work with. What brought you to Marble? And why milk bottles? Can you give us more details regarding the chosen artwork?
I was at the Friedrich Werdersche Kirche museum in Berlin. Have you ever been? It’s a luminous place – you can stand as long as you like, face to face with the statues. And there among them are portrayals of Eve. Eve, in marble. I like to think of artworks as something that can be salvific for human beings. The works of the Classicists are, in a way, a little like my magic wands. What magic do I offer? The realisation that there is enough for everyone. To each of us, our own magic wand, our own fragment of the world’s story. I hand out a few from time to time, but there are infinite numbers of them.
Returning to the museum’s statues, I was thinking about the fatal rivalry between Eve’s children. I was thinking about the violence of the powerful – the rulers of our time, though I would not call them politicians.
I was at the Friedrich Werdersche Kirche museum in Berlin. Have you ever been? It’s a luminous place – you can stand as long as you like, face to face with the statues. And there among them are portrayals of Eve. Eve, in marble. I like to think of artworks as something that can be salvific for human beings. The works of the Classicists are, in a way, a little like my magic wands. What magic do I offer? The realisation that there is enough for everyone. To each of us, our own magic wand, our own fragment of the world’s story. I hand out a few from time to time, but there are infinite numbers of them.
Returning to the museum’s statues, I was thinking about the fatal rivalry between Eve’s children. I was thinking about the violence of the powerful – the rulers of our time, though I would not call them politicians.
What monstrous traumas do they carry? My two milk bottles offer a kind of reassurance: “There are two bottles of milk.”
They are worked freehand, each different from the other, both amorphous. They are, in short, two breasts — of the mother and of Eve, who in the museum’s statues stands distracted, holding catastrophe in her arms.
Several of your works are autobiographical in a very direct way, e.g. Bride Walk began two days after your mother’s death, and Si lo voglio is literally subtitled autobiography of an education. How do you draw the line between personal material and artistic material? Or is there no line?
Bride Walk! – and even now I don’t quite know how – began on the very day my mother passed away. The series of walks arose from a need to create a personal ritual for that moment of rupture I was living through, and then it turned out to be entirely inscribed in my work all along, a natural evolution of what I’d been finding up to that point. Bride Walk! follows earlier serial works like "Joining", "Darf ich mitleben?", "I wish you all well for nothing", and "Kaugummi". It is the artist making the ordinary extraordinary, mixing herself in, wanting to walk alongside people she doesn’t know, just for a while.
I would say the line between the personal and the artistic is wavy – like the teeth of two interlocking gears. In my work, I am always entirely present; in recent years, more openly and explicitly so. It feels like gathering and naming everything I know so far.
They are worked freehand, each different from the other, both amorphous. They are, in short, two breasts — of the mother and of Eve, who in the museum’s statues stands distracted, holding catastrophe in her arms.
Several of your works are autobiographical in a very direct way, e.g. Bride Walk began two days after your mother’s death, and Si lo voglio is literally subtitled autobiography of an education. How do you draw the line between personal material and artistic material? Or is there no line?
Bride Walk! – and even now I don’t quite know how – began on the very day my mother passed away. The series of walks arose from a need to create a personal ritual for that moment of rupture I was living through, and then it turned out to be entirely inscribed in my work all along, a natural evolution of what I’d been finding up to that point. Bride Walk! follows earlier serial works like "Joining", "Darf ich mitleben?", "I wish you all well for nothing", and "Kaugummi". It is the artist making the ordinary extraordinary, mixing herself in, wanting to walk alongside people she doesn’t know, just for a while.
I would say the line between the personal and the artistic is wavy – like the teeth of two interlocking gears. In my work, I am always entirely present; in recent years, more openly and explicitly so. It feels like gathering and naming everything I know so far.
Your most recent project, In Womb – im Hinterkopf, was a response to Carlo Battisti’s photographs. You translated your perception of his work into objects, texts, and movement. How does reacting to another artist’s vision differ from starting alone?
It gives you handholds. It’s about deciphering signs and composing new ones in response. The gallery owners at Dr Julius Art Projects asked me to react to Carlo Battisti’s work, and what a surprise it was to find there, in doing so, the very origin of my own artistic practice: I was a child when I used to look at images of artworks in our family encyclopaedia and see stories in them. That is what I did again in the gallery, with the audience, during "Rétina – before the brain": I staged, through my own stories, gestures and objects, what happens inside us when we look at an image. The first part of the title came to me during a lecture on the human body and the discussion that followed; the second part responded to Romantic theories of perception I was studying at the time. Everything speaks here. And I act by listening, understanding, and reacting.
It gives you handholds. It’s about deciphering signs and composing new ones in response. The gallery owners at Dr Julius Art Projects asked me to react to Carlo Battisti’s work, and what a surprise it was to find there, in doing so, the very origin of my own artistic practice: I was a child when I used to look at images of artworks in our family encyclopaedia and see stories in them. That is what I did again in the gallery, with the audience, during "Rétina – before the brain": I staged, through my own stories, gestures and objects, what happens inside us when we look at an image. The first part of the title came to me during a lecture on the human body and the discussion that followed; the second part responded to Romantic theories of perception I was studying at the time. Everything speaks here. And I act by listening, understanding, and reacting.
You make art, you write books, you do art mediation, you publish editions, you run a studio programme. What holds all of this together? And what are you building towards?
It’s an island. A moment in which, in solitude, you are inside the world and apart from it at the same time. I never finish – there is always another piece to bring out or to integrate. And when I show what I do, it is almost like setting an example: saying, I have found this and that – what about you? Let’s talk, let’s compare, because these things are good for us. And perhaps one day – even if the news and the media suggest we are running out of them as a species – perhaps one day.
Thank you so much, Antoanetta! It was a truly layered and generous conversation. We wish you all the best with your work – and look forward to seeing what comes next.
It’s an island. A moment in which, in solitude, you are inside the world and apart from it at the same time. I never finish – there is always another piece to bring out or to integrate. And when I show what I do, it is almost like setting an example: saying, I have found this and that – what about you? Let’s talk, let’s compare, because these things are good for us. And perhaps one day – even if the news and the media suggest we are running out of them as a species – perhaps one day.
Thank you so much, Antoanetta! It was a truly layered and generous conversation. We wish you all the best with your work – and look forward to seeing what comes next.