009.
Nathalie Koger
Artist from Black Forest, based in Vienna, Wanderschaft.
Nathalie, your latest work is called Body in Culture. 13 Episodes. You seem to be interested in the movement of the body, how the body is applied in spaces and how this is expressed in different cultures and situations. Was this always a topic for you? In your early work it seems you are more into nature and locations. Also, when did you start with moving images as part of your expression?
There is some history. To begin with, I represent a lot of bodies, that is true, that’s what you mainly see so far, however the relations, the situational context or the spacial appropriaiton is my main dedication.
I am still discovering these issues as a kind of ethnography- and anthropology-interested artist, or as an artist interested in ontology, the energy of being and relations. And I cannot exclude myself from that materiality. This work is in tension between form and formless quality. And a rearrangment of phenomena — gestures, bodily expressions, situations, spaces and most important energies — I curate, so to speak.
An earlier, for some time ongoing project you hint at is Translating a Border. A work which I create with a friend and artist, Simona Obholzer, as co-author/co-editor. It is more about the tensions between visibility and creation of personal meaning of landscapes. Translating means that a number of people translate our choice of framing and gaze, read, interpret and translate, what has been captured and arranged as a moving image by us.
The circumstance that the landscapes we have chosen are also geographical borders have a different relevance, as this work is an appropriation of a work realized 20 years ago by the artist Christian Philipp Müller, and was given as an assignment, from him to me.
In the beginning, the landscapes didn’t have a special attraction for us. In contrast, we thought: what to do there? And what can be interesting for us, as creator, as viewer? As a work of art? However, the work is a gesture and started with a performative-poetic approach.
To answer your last question: my interest in bodies and body language is not the core issue. To better understand my approach you have to see that my filmmaking is grounded in site-specific installations, going back to my art education in Germany. This was in Münster, a town with a big exhibition in public space every 10 years, and I was inspired by it.
Early on in my studies I realized I have no interest in doing objects in a studio, to create stuff. I was more interested in going to places and to discover their architecture, social or built, their systems, identities, and later on to be in resonance with it. I used the site as material.
Locations in general?
Yes. I was interested to work with the site as a material. If I would take something away, or add something towards it, the system is somehow re-written. The communication starts.
I’m really sensible towards places. Whenever I come to a new place, I start to notice the people who move there, the materials, how it’s used, how it is constructed, what ist he language of the site or its expression, which also includes its energy. It’s more about the manifestation; what is there or missing in my awareness and what kind of qualities I can discover.
So you could say it has to do with semiotics, in a way?
Yeah, very much so.
Let me give you another early example: as part of a student exhibition in a small town I occupied — so to speak — the skittle alley, an old post-war, fifties vintage Scherenkegelbahn.
I liked the environment, an old inn, very few customers left, a group of regulars. My work started with the idea of a sound installation: placing 1,000 beer glasses on the alley, and the beer mats blocked the magnets of the skittles to get hold. That is the reason why they kept falling on the floor and the percussion created a vibrant sound piece, however it was soon vanishing.
DV, colour, 3' 15'’ | Beer mats, 1000 glasses
Soon I realized the sound installation turned into a work of relational aesthetics, as many people gathered in the inn to witness the absurd installation, in their eyes. It became a place of provocation, also to destroy the glasses on the alley, (laughs), arguments, stories.
In the end, the work came to be about communication because everybody were talking about it. They never realized it was a sound installation, a musical piece of a space, they created the sound instead (laughs). The sound piece ended up in a different form.
You reinvented the space somehow?
Yes, exactly.
So after this discovery, you kind of found your way of working with locations?
That’s true. Many of the projects that I have behind me… little shifts into the perceptions of places but also reinventing them, basically.
So my focus has been in the beginning to site-specific installations, as performance. I went from performance to moving image-based work, video installations and now on to experimental film. I am still trying to figure out the focus each time.
For example, the installation from my work Treffpunkt at the skittle alley: when I realized that something else was happening around it, I was thinking to myself: “am I now documenting the people… or not?”. At that point I was not sure what the work was about any longer. For me, the idea was about appropriating a space, sculptural, and putting myself into a relation to it, and then it turns out to be a piece of relational aesthetics.
At the time when I was doing this work I was doing sculptural work at the Kunstakademie in Münster — they focus more on the product, more or less — at that time I didn’t know there was already a history about this type of work, relational aesthetics, coined by Nicolas Bourriaud.
So I was doing a few interventions into spaces at the time, I was interested in architecture and the semantics of the architecture.
My work “Westfälisches Ballett” was my first, so to say, performative intervention with the conception to create a piece of video art as outcome. It is placed in a shopping mall in Münster, built by the architecture office Kleihues+Kleihues from Berlin, and I worked with the semantics of the architectural space. The mall is constructed like a boomerang with an arcade.
Actually, Harun Farocki made a film in relation to this specific mall, Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten.
So this was the first time I realized that I’m doing an intervention, it’s a decoding of the space, but conceptually, I put the focus on the video image as outcome. This was the guiding principle. It’s a video work, working with different movement and time parameter in the actual space, and in the post-production footage.
I placed myself as a body in the visible center of the building and moved a whole day, 10 hours, slow motion around the center, almost like in trance. I dressed myself like a ballerina with my old ballett costume (laughs), moved step by step in a circle, for ten hours. But I went to the toilet in between (laughs). The camera is set from two perspectives. Then, cranking up the speed, the final video became 1 hour.
So from ten hours you got one hour of footage?
Yes. So in the video it looks like I am walking around in a normal “pedestrian” speed, while everybody around me is flashing by really fast in the shopping center. Like a musical box.
When did you make this?
It’s really old, like in 2001 or so.
And from this point on, you went on with doing location-specific performance/installation works?
I have two lives, kind of. I was studying in Münster and went on to do this kind of work. But I was also studying to become a teacher, although my main focus was on the art side. When I was at the end of my studies, I said to myself I should take on the challenge to become an artist. I was not so much networking at the time, and when I left art school, I didn’t know what to do.
Then you came to Vienna.
Yes, I came here and thought I wanted to go to some other art school. The approach of art and art mediation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna was different than I experienced before. So I left my work for a while and felt quite lost in the beginning, honestly. There are totally different traditions here also… but my new professor/teacher Dorit Margreiter was really patient and supportive and later on, I had the opportunity to work with the inspiring teacher and thinker Marion von Osten… anyway in the beginning after a while I discovered the international dance and performance art scene in Vienna, through the Tanzquartier.
People who are trained in the dance arts or self-educated are influenced by the relational aesthetics and an approach of semiotics from the 90´s, actually, like Xavier Le Roy, for example, also Doris Uhlich to some extend, I would argue.
Another line of tradition ist the work by Valie Export as well. She’s kind of a “grandmother” to me (laughs). Peter Weibel and Valie Export expanded the cinema and the theater, worked in public, with the audience, and reflected various media.
So all of this made me really light up. Like “what is happening there?”. I was visiting a lot of performances, presentations on and off the stage. I was then working myself into the contemporary practice of performance, basically. It was very inspiring for me to partipate at the gatherings of the Performing Arts Forum/PAF, a self-organized institution.
So I did a lot of private studying in Austria and France, and I got to know the Swede’s here in Vienna, the performance related network Inpex. These are all references for my artistic biography
For some time, I had the pleasure to work as a dramaturge, with a talented and devoted dancer and choreographer Alexander Gottfarb. Inspired by the collaboration and smaller performances I created earlier, I created later on a stage productions myself. Part of it was working with scores as well. So I was trying out different things. But I had to go away from it. I had to decide: do I go into the direction of performance and the dancing arts? Or do I go on as an exhibiting artist? Different medias, different families somehows.
Did you eventually find your “home” in art?
Hmm… not yet (laughs). But maybe I just have to create it myself.
Is it possible that you can distance yourself from the relationship between art/artwork/audience/self and see that you express something through a story that is being told, and not so much the different parts of the piece?
What is the story? I think that the place and the people I work with is already a lot to process, and I have to direct it. Some things become visible, and I cannot tell beforehand what it will be. It’s not that I make up something with the space. I’m looking at the quality of the space, and even more at the hidden agency, an agency of a dialogue, a rewriting, as I call it. This is important for me.
To see the dramaturgy of the space but also the qualities of it, how to interfere or enhance them further, without becoming too romantic about it.
Is that why you are also interested in moving more in the direction of documentaries/documentation maybe?
I realized that the nature of the documentary is to frame. There is no objectivity, of course, it is the question what and how you frame. I’m still interested in that idea, which is highly challenging. No filmmaker can however deny his/her resonance/presence/impact on whom is in front of the camera.
Personally I think documentary filmmakers are master manipulators of reality…
(laughs) at least to some extent the genre still has the hat of truth on as there would be no ideology in filmmaking and no manipulation.
It´s not only what you see maybe on a screen or in a projection, what you see should also be an expression of the relation the filmmaker had with the people in front and behind the camera … but now it becomes a bit abstract, I think.
I moved a bit away from this location idea, actually, but now I’m bringing it in again. Mainly, architecture was my impulse in the beginning, now the people are the architecture of the production in relation to space.
My most widely received work so far, probably because it relates to an Austrian context, is the one where I work with a circus artist, Annabel Carberry, in the Gustinus Ambrosi Museum — a museum in Vienna dedicated to the work of an Austrian sculptor — which I question, also the display of this exhibition space.
It is also a site-specific intervention but with no public audience, it was framed for the film.
Before we realized the work, I have been in contact with Annabel for over two years, we had met in a circus close to Florence. She was the impulse. I went to this circus mostly by an incident, in 2008. I discovered this whole circus world. So for me, I needed to find a place to portray her. But it couldn’t be just about being a circus artist. I wanted to show her and let her tell something about herself, in relation to a space. If I put something against it, a contrast. A contrast, but something that she could relate to. To understand also something what the circus life is about.
Texts: Sie steht nicht still and entrance
So the starting point was my experience of the circus. It’s not about her personality, maybe she’s more like a metaphor. During we met I realized that she’s also a sculptress. Compare it with the circus life and the hula-hoop; it’s a lot about shaping your body and being in the self, in dialogue with the object. By using the object, she is really sculpting herself. Circus artists are the most bodily articulate people you can imagine.
I dealt with the idea of sculptress and sculpting. The objects and the materiality of the film have, however, also references to socialism and fascism. The audience of the film was in dialogue with me about this reception.
And you were filming this with 16mm-film?
Yes.
Isn’t it a very expensive format to work with?
It was only five rolls.
Still, you have to buy it, film it, develop it, and so on.
True, but I developed it myself with assistance from Piers Erbslöh from filmcoop Vienna. It is a self-organized filmlab and very outstanding. The material itself was also present from an Austrian filmmaker, Josef Dabernig. Which is interesting also (laughs). It was excess material from one of his films.
I think this is how Jean-Luc Godard accidentally invented the style of the French New Wave cinema, he was given leftovers from other directors’ film negatives, some bits and pieces here and there, so the scenes became short and choppy.
That’s interesting, I didn’t know.
How did you cope with the limit of the material?
It was a great relief. Also, I conceptualised the process/dramaturgy according the number of the film rolls.
First I only wanted to work with the back part of the exhibition space, a semi-circle with busts. However, I wanted to give the performer the possibility of appropriating the space herself. For that reason we entered together, she and myself, the exhibition a day before shooting on the set to explore the dramaturgy.
Also, generally in my work, I become more and more prepared, with a camera script and directing instructions to the set, although I want to stay open to the dynamics especially when working with a small set team and people who like to play and explore. The film material is in this case therefore a document of the “private” performance, witnessed by the team. The set itself is the performance.
The space implies morbidity for me and the performer with its elegancy and concentrated observation creates a big tension and a space to observe the space in a detailed manner.
I think that my work was so far based on gestures and multi-layered images. I have been reluctant to narrate something specific in a timeline.
Why?
Narration always has to be from a certain perspective or be multiperspective (laughs).
But you have a perspective?
Yes and no. As a documentary filmmaker you always have to have a perspective. To have a position, somehow, or start with your own experiences, your process of thinking or research or so on and talk about it. Otherwise you cannot show something. So far, with my moving images work, I try to create a space, a tableau, where you can position yourself as a viewer. Guess that is my perspective. Rather than: I want to tell about this or that with a certain agency.
I could tell about the life of the circus artist, about various facets. Narrate something with the beginning of a sentence and an end of a sentence. But so far for me, it was about creating certain environments, communicate with environments and people. Where consciousness can be apparent. Where the viewer can project consciousness, his or her own. Film anyway has chronology. The question is, what do you put in the chronology, that is the narration.
You don’t think you have a narrative standpoint in your own way of adapting to chronology?
Hmm, I think my work is more about contemplation over something. I don’t understand your thoughts, therefore it is difficult for me to answer. I have to say I am also a very intuitively working artist. The freedom of video installations are to become spatial arrangements and open up the time chronology.
At the moment I am very interested in the “time-restricted” and one-time screening of a work. Also to work with the dramaturgy of a beginning and end. The concentration of a crowd. You can of course jump in the chronology-narration in other spaces … but …
The cinema is more inviting.
Or black box more suitable for concentrated viewing in my opinion.
I once experienced an immersive installation projected on all walls of the exhibition room, it was looped, but you couldn’t notice it, there was a very simple story in which you were feeling like a participant. This type of video installation felt way more inclusive than many other video works I normally see on art shows, just a TV on a pedestal or such.
I know what you mean, but this is not the direction where I am going into now, too immersive for myself if the total space is turned into a screen,
However, I am still very interested in spatial multi-channel projections or massive single-channel projections in exhibition spaces with the only spatial dedication and you can drop your body to the floor and immerse in it. I really like, in this regard, the work of Sharon Lockhart, to name a reference. But the type of work you are describing, to do that as an emerging artist is really difficult because it involves a lot of technology. Platforms for emerging artists usually don’t have this type of technology available. People who see these works are usually more fascinated by the effect, also. But it has also been taken over by the creative arts industry, you know. Concert halls and so on.
Which directors in the documentary genre do you appreciate to the point that it inspires you to work in that direction?
There are a few that I can mention. Probably there are a lot more out there that I don’t know of yet (laughs).
Like I mentioned before, Sharon Lockhart has been very influential on me. She’s also interested in body expressions, she also has a somewhat anthropological view of people. She works with minimal camera involvement and a precise focus on a small number of settings. One of them is called Double Tide.
As far as I can remember, only 1 or 2 camera angles are in use. You can observe the person whose work is potrayed in real time. Usually I don’t like works with a lot of editing, I like her minimalistic style. I also like James Benning and others based on the West Coast of USA.
But we were talking about narration… I am not only thinking about creating environments, even if it’s important to think about it. Representation can also be narration, in a way. The question who you or what you are representing is very crucial. Most likely the the most crucial (laughs).
Just to come back: what I find also fascinating in the work by Sharon Lockhart is that there is no voice-over. You can witness it all by yourself guided by the camera as witness. And the choice of camera perspectives is the storyteller.
There is one work by Harun Farocki, it is called Zum Vergleich, which also is very inspiring for me.
With his small production team, he was visiting different sites of brick productions in Africa, Europe and India. You can only eye-witness how people produce these bricks in different countries and you have to make a conclusion or somehow a comparison yourself. I like the work because it’s so poetical in a way. People are connected to a common object which is used everywhere that also looks the same. It’s the production technique and the social dimensions which differ. From the analogue to the automatical. It’s also a history of industrialization. And they are also linked through the grain of the film.
As I have been stuck to specific places in the past, it gave me an impulse to open up myself; how can I put different sites together, which communicate or relate together, then this Translating a Border-project came out. Body in Culture. 13 Episodes, from 2014, is one result. At the moment I have a new project about the olympic sites on my future agenda. I haven’t been so mobile in my 20's, in a way. I have to learn that now (laughs) and find means to create.
But you have been moving around, as far as I can tell?
Yeah, I have been moving around for the last two years, but I have to figure out how to work when I am somewhere new. I have been working with really specific situations before where I could prepare and communicate. Mostly as a documentary filmmaker, if you want to work on many sites, with many different people, you have to place more effort in communication with people (laughs). If I am not able of the language, I have to solve new challenges.
Body in Culture. 13 Episodes, for example, is a product of my stay in Indonesia. I developed a few works, while I was staying on Java and Sumba. My impression from the society is that there is a really big tension existing between the older generation, working in manufacturing, with their traditions, and the younger generation that are more connected to the global market, using the same products.
The art scene is really brilliant there. They are looking on how to be independent and how to produce everything, how to be hackers, in a way.
Body in Culture. 13 Episodes could be seen as a diary of phenomena I experienced in the local culture. Indonesia was a bit of a shock to me, there are so many problems with environment, the remainders of colonization… I wanted to show rituals and cultural techniques which are — most of them, as far as I can judge — pre-industrialized, and in my point of view an attempt to resist trends in the social (body techniques and language) and product, moreover economic and hegemonic, development.
If I wanted to give an overview of a certain situation, contemporary situation on a specific topic in Indonesia, this film is not adequate. But it’s adequate in that way that it shows situations that I encountered, and I was asking people if I could capture it. It’s made in different episodes, in alignments in the end. Some cultural techniques and rituals filmed become very rare.
Because of colonization?
Economic-, or industrial colonization.
So this is your documentation of this culture then, right? Preserving, saving or archiving what you see.
Yes. But with people actually using it. Not maybe consciously as a “protection” or weapon, sometimes just because it’s their reality as there is no other choice or necessity, and they preserve it, luckily. There’s a woman in the film. You can still see a few female street vendors who produce what they sell. They are mobile, they basically carry their kitchen on their head. They are very proud and tough merchants and I respect them a lot. When it came to the point where I wanted to film them, we couldn’t see them anymore! They usually were coming and going, we were asking the locals if they knew where they were living, nobody knew.
We were riding with a scooter and passing through a village and suddenly we saw one of them. But I didn’t have my camera with me (laughs). We asked if we could film her and she didn’t make any fuzz about it. She was passing this street on a special time of the day, but she didn’t have a mobile phone. We then watched this spot for three days, but she never passed. She must have passed and we just missed her.
On the fourth day she was passing, and she was communicating with my local assistant, she said she would not stop for us, we had to go with her pace. I was both nervous and really happy that she was there. So I had to be really fast. She was preparing the meal and I was capturing it. I used to work with storyboards before to direct participants, so this was new to me, but I liked that on her, that I had to adjust to her, she wouldn’t wait for me.
We bought a meal from her, and she walked fast away. I wanted a full picture of her walking away, so I had to run after her and try to capture the moment (laughs). You can see that this episode has a different quality because I had to be fast, it’s sometimes out of focus, a bit blurry and so.
And this is one of the 13 film parts that together make up Body in Culture, correct?
Yes. It’s not the result of research, it’s more the result of what I discovered when I was moving in the city, basically.
Also on Sumba, I met a woman and I was invited to see her relatives… so it’s somehow about private encounters I experienced. But there are three scenes that are arranged, and I think you can see it easily; it’s the dancers. The are arranged by myself and the settings are fictional. But I think it was important to have this, it’s the first time you can call this material documentary (smiles). All the other scenes I try to represent something which is there. From my POV — because I was really focusing on body gestures and rituals — but it’s in their environment. I don’t take them out of their custom place.
I move into their space, I don’t interfere in their practices, hopefully.
So it’s more then about how you present it later.
Yes. It is a collection for the viewer in the medium of cinematic language.
I have shown this work before as a test at the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart on different monitors, but I realized this is against the work. I presented it as single projection in an exhibition space in Seoul. Further, I have been trying to show it on festivals, but haven’t been successful yet. For me it would be ideal to show it in cinema, because so many of the details get lost on a monitor.
One curator from IFA (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) was skeptical about the work because she claimed it’s told in third person. I think what she was making aware of is the historical complicity of film in “documenting” the “other”. I think this is a misunderstanding as the film also plays with some of the traps of an exotic representation and display of others.
There is for example one chapter called My Fantasy, a situation I arranged and directed. I understand her point of view, but she didn’t see the whole work. But I hope you can feel through the film how the people worked with me for the pictures and that I respect them and their cultural techniques. Actually I even admire them for many.
Of course, the question in documentary filmmaking, which I raised in the beginning of this interview, is “what does the film do to the people? What do the people gain? And what is my voice or my agency”?
Martha Rosler wrote a long time ago on the perspective of the documentary portrait (in, around, and afterthoughts). From her perspective, it’s important what people can gain through you, or with you.
For the people that I have filmed, I have to be honest, I don´t know. However, it was a very respectful encounter. I hope the audience of my work gains some awareness of cultural techniques which are important to preserve. For me, the people are also to some extent role models, to resist the industrialization and privatization.
Do you agree that it has to have a higher purpose?
What is a higher purpose? (laughs)
Healing.
Many artists and photographers see themselves as giving attention to different facets of live, especially the “so- called marginalized” and to hegemonic structures in order to sensiblize or educate the awareness of people … or sometimes, it happens, by pure attraction, which can be exploitation the same time.
Martha Rosler wrote a really important essay about the Magnum school, about the photographers who were documenting the fringe of society. She was questioning the effect of doing that. It can also enhance the remnants of bougeois people to actually distance themselves. You say: “I am superior to it”. Ultimately, it could be so. Or it is an attraction to bare life, by people who are in affluence or boredom.
But if you document, say, homeless people in Vienna, on the one side it doesn’t mean that it changes peoples’ idea of homeless people, or that they will get shelters in the end. It maybe doesn’t look at the reasons why they are homeless. But on the other side, it might create consciousness and has a positive effect on the people documented or on the viewer for some reason.
Could the first be a misdirected goodwill?
Yeah. Their intentions might be good, but you have to question yourself. What do you give to the people, what’s the exchange? Then there’s the other side. Rather than being an observer, you can be an observer-participant. Where you actually work with people. Work on the voice. The question is: who has the voice? Voice could be also expressed through body language.
In the situation of Body in Culture. 13 episodes I am at first sight the observer. I am convinced you can also visually communicate with people. Allover, I also think the work tells a lot about my needs and compensates my own wishes and practices by means of collecting documents of what I aspire and respect. I realized also for my work, that archiving cultural practices is also a method for me to learn and integrate some of them later on in my own practice. It could be also that I am integrating the attitude in my own system.
I documented situations with manual work and manual activities, practices maybe I’m not capable of, with high performativity, so I put myself in the weaker position, I think.
Of course, I have the power to frame it. So it’s also telling a bit about skills. If they have a skill and I don’t, the question is: who is more independent and more powerful? Not powerful over the image, in all situations, even the female vendor, for example, very much directed me instead I directed her.
And on Sumba, most young boys learn to climb a coconut tree for the harvesting of the coconuts, they climb like 20 meters up. It’s about in which environment you are powerful or not. If I needed to survive on Sumba, I most likely wouldn’t so easily. So it’s about showing scenes where people are showing their specifically high skills. For me the practices symbolize activities of emancipation. I read resistance into it.
I am more critical about me filming them, then they are towards me (laughs), I have the impression.
What are you doing now, are you setting up something in Vienna?
I am looking into opportunities to get a studio in Stuttgart. But all my colleagues are in Vienna, my base is here (in Vienna). As I spent a lot of time at other places over the past two years, I need to take up the challenge again to settle artistically in Vienna at some point again. The Golden Pixel Collaborative is my dedication in Vienna/Austria. We just started to create this platform for exchange, presentations and education in film & art. More activities will follow up.
And right now, there are two art works I am busy with, and some future visions. One is dealing with the genre Roadmovie, travel film and embedded moments of initiation, turning points, Kippmomente (tilting points) or epiphany.
I relate the footage with experiences I made in the past 2 or 3 years and experiences of people I got acquainted with. Also, the visual moment of traversing is important. The work is still in creative development. In this context I like to discover films of Kidlat Tahimik, for example.
The other one has to do with when I was in South Korea. I went swimming in the former olympic pool. I was fascinated by the body hygiene culture; also the swimming culture is totally different. Now, I am going to Athens, and I have the possibility to go to towns where the olympic games have been. I want to look at the architecture, but it’s not about the history or what it became, the function etc., it’s more about how it differs from the perspective of the olympic games.
I was so fascinated in Seoul that at a given time everybody can use the swimming pool there. And in South Korea, there are a lot of elderly people in the park, everybody goes to the park early in the morning to do gymnastics. A lot of them are really fragile, cannot walk properly anymore, but they all do this fitness.
And in the swimming pool there were some old women, who barely can walk, but in the water they become like fish, they’re swimming! Like fish in water.
Tai Chi practitioners?
In water (laughs). I didn’t see Tai Chi in the park, but it comes from this attitude, I guess. In Indonesia, they practice massage widely, but they have a different understanding, traditional point of view of the body, the meridians, energy points. A different health practice than generally the Western medicine. It’s very fascinating for me, maybe I can do a series about it.
I am going to Athens hopefully in spring. I have to see what I can find.
By meeting many people from different cultural backgrounds the last two years, I realize that mediation between cultures became an important standpoint in my work, therefore looking with refreshed eyes, also inner eyes, will be the exercise for me once I cannot or don’t want to travel anymore or far. In that case, I have to discover what is available for me, in my reach. There is a lot!
Since you have a background in dance and the performing arts, after I read about your work Internalized Image, I thought about the mystic sufi dance as something you would have thought about to examine in your art. Did it cross your mind, too?
Actually, no so far, but it is an interesting idea. Maybe it is connected to my stay in Iran.
So I have many ideas… I realized I am not an artist who does a lot of research into a topic, somehow. It’s more about things that I discover, come across, that I want to have a dialogue with. It’s not like “oh, maybe I am interested in sufism”, I kind of step over it first. My work is kind of a result of a roadmovie, maybe, my own (laughs). I believe in intuition and the need to follow intuition.
Links to Nathalie’s projects
Interview by Anders Khan Bolin, @strayl1ght
