Interview: Gunilla Klingberg

Mantric Mutation, 2006. Screen-printed stickers on walls and floor, laser-cut texts in mirror, surveillance mirrors, light tubes. Installation view at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Detail of Mantric Mutation. Swedish artist Gunilla Klingberg has worked with many types of consumer goods, even their branding and logos, combining them physically or graphically to a point where they lose their individual forms and become altogether new. Klingberg has used paper and plastic bags from supermarkets, cheap rice-paper lamps, surveillance mirrors like the ones used in convenience stores, neon lights, plastic flowers, fans, and in general any product that is readily available in a consumer economy. She often combines logos in geometric patterns so that they become pure form; distinct brands are only recognizable upon close inspection, their communicative role neutralized. Klingberg’s art is a poignant take on the pervasiveness of corporate persuasion in our daily lives, while at the same time it turns consumer products into beautiful, seductive environments that immerse the viewer. This interview was done via email. J. Roca.

Seven Eleven Twist, 1997. Paint on wall, surveillance mirrors.

Jose Roca: In your works you have taken different ready-made forms, patterns, and simple commercial objects, and through repetition you have done all-inclusive sensory environments. Print in its various forms appears to have been instrumental in your work as an iconographic source and also as a medium. Is this a correct appreciation? If so, can you elaborate why and how?

GK: Before studying art I was a graphic designer. The logos I use for my patterns are all taken from cut-price supermarkets or gas-stations around the corner and are not glamorous- they represent brands we do not identify with, but instead are rather part of our everyday doings and rituals. The logos, as well as the shops, are big chains that look more or less the same all over in the Western world, and often even have the same owners. Printing as reproduction is then a natural choice since both content and technique/medium have the same socioeconomic reference.

Brand New View, 2003. Laser-cut adhesive vinyl.

JR: In your installations, one is drawn in and seduced by the visual beauty of the ensemble, but on close inspection one discovers a more troubling matter in the form of logos of corporations and companies. Is this intended to provide a reflection on consumerism or globalization, or are you interested more in the loss of the communicative power of these images once they are subsumed within a larger composition?

GK: Both, I would say. I experience a lack of essential symbols in my own culture. In some cultures ancient symbols and images still play a vital role and I am interested in images used for spiritual guidance, like the Buddhist/Hindu mandala, a cosmological diagram used in meditation. My forms and patterns consist of the Western street iconography, and become images of how our daily rhythm of commonplace doings blends with the advertising and enters deep down into our lives, homes and minds. They are a link between our public and private spheres, maybe even to the collective unconscious. I work with the distant and the close details: the patterns fluctuate between the abstract and the recognizable, and the images almost dissolve. One could get lost in the patterns.

Cheap High, 2000-2003 (with Peter Geschwind). Plastic bags, tape, electric fans.

JR: Your work is an ironic commentary on the role of advertising (faith-enhancing, form-based strategies), underlining the pervasiveness of branding while breaking down the communicative clarity of the individual logo?

GK: In a way yes, but I think that pictorial language and color works in an archetypal way as well, where the actual message could be secondary. Many brands have a seductive and even psychedelic potential that I use to generate a clash.

JR: Coming back to the mandala forms, I know that you visited India and were struck by how many Westerners are traveling there seeking a form of spirituality, while at the same time Western companies are furiously peddling their brands to enhance consumption in one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. How did your trip to India affect your artistic output or your view of the world?

GK: It seemed evident that India is a place where spirituality and commercialism, rich and poor, old and new come together and merge in an almost brutal way. These travels were a starting point for the works I am doing now where the function of contradictions is often essential.

Cosmic Matter, 2007. Printed packing-tape, polished metal. Installation view at the 10th Istanbul Biennial.

What ideas do you have for Philagrafika 2010?

GK: I am planning to collect material on-site. In some way, the work will reflect part of the city environment.

Interview: Eric Avery

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Doctor, 1974. Black and white photograph.

Some of us who work with art, when confronted with a difficult situation, force ourselves to realize that, despite the magnitude of the problem, there are more crucial things in the larger scheme of life. Art is important, but it does not save lives.

Well, sometimes it does: Eric Avery's is one of those rare cases in which an art practice is intimately linked with a life-defining situation. While often artists have another profession, it is rather unusal to have a practicing doctor that works with equal passion on art-making. In Eric Avery’s work, two professions that appear to be radically different come together naturally within the same practice. Trained as a doctor in a rather difficult time in American history, Avery started early to use his artistic output as a way to raise awareness towards pressing health issues. Ignorance can equal death, as one of the eary mottos by Act Up warned. Or, as he put it in a print done about a refugee camp in Somalia, “Food is medicine.” Some of his prints have a distinct political purpose. As we all know, the official treatment of disease is informed by political agendas that vary in relation to the social group that is endangered. Since the late seventies, Avery has been an active printmaker. In the last few decades he has done performances in art settings in which he tests visitors for HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, and other diseases. His prints hark back to the history of printmaking as a way to spread a message and to reach a larger audience in public space. His long career can be looked up on his aptly titled blog, DocArt.com.

This interview was done via email.

J. Roca.

Amnesty International Poster, Laredo, Texas. Xerox, 16" x 11"

Jose Roca: You studied Medicine and are a practicing doctor. How did you become interested in art? When did you start making artworks and participating in exhibitions?

Eric Avery: I was cutting linoleum blocks in Pecos, Texas when I was 13, printing note cards that were sold in a yarn shop on Highway 80. I'm still cutting linoleum 47 years later. Printmaking has been a curse. I majored in art at the University of Arizona. I had a terrific printmaking teacher/mentor Andrew Rush. This was the Vietnam War time. My draft number was 7, so I would have gone to the war if I hadn't figured out how to continue my education. Andy said I always talked about being a doctor. He suggested I give it a try. I didn't think it was possible because I was an artist. Andy said I would always make prints and suggested I go have an interesting life and that my prints would fall like dandruff on my trail.

I took some science classes. I loved Biology and didn't have to take Calculus. I did good enough to get into medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. This was during the early days in the development of Medical Humanities in the United States. I made prints all through my medical school years in Texas and then in New York City during my psychiatry residency training. In 1972, I silkscreened all 700 of my medical school's yearbook covers. My first exhibition was after medical school in 1974.

Las Dure Refugee Camp Certificate, 1980. Woodcut, 12" x 16" edition: unique.

My first real woodcuts were made in Somalia, in a big refugee death camp in 1979 and 1980. If I didn't make prints in that place, I think I would have cracked. When I returned to Texas, I left the practice of medicine. I worked through all the death with my printmaking and had an important exhibit, "Images of Life and Death," in 1982. During this time, I added papermaking so I could print from three-dimensional wooden templates.

I've been making prints and paper and exhibiting regularly since 1982. In 1992, I returned to practicing medicine and became a psychiatrist specializing in caring for people with HIV/AIDS. I would have cracked during the really bad AIDS times if I didn't make prints. Cutting wood and linoleum, hand-rubbed printing, beating paper pulp from my work shirts, pressing paper with my hydraulic press- all of these physical acts move trauma from the brain out through the body. Printmaking is good medicine if you've got a lot of distress and emotional pain. The prints can be hard to look at and live with. They are almost impossible to sell. I've made a lot of prints related to HIV/AIDS. A bunch of my medical-related prints are in the ARS MEDICA Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They are a part of the print history of the AIDS pandemic.

Healing Before Art: Public HIV Testing Action

Installation at Mary Ryan Gallery, New York City, 1994

A clinical art space to be used for the public HIV testing of art world representatives (artists, art dealers, collectors, curators).

Here, artist Sue Coe’s blood is drawn by Phil Muskin, M.D.

JR: Your work is often performance-based, doing medical tests in the context of an art gallery. Is the main intention of the work primarily to raise awareness of pressing health issues?

EA: I've used a lot of the print forms but I was always working to get the prints off the walls and connected to the life I was witnessing and living. After working in Somalia, I quit practicing medicine and didn't see patients for eleven years. I lived on the Texas-Mexico border and worked to help Central American and Haitian refugees fleeing for their lives. Their human rights were being abused by U.S. immigration policy. I made some really good prints about the war in Central America and about how I felt about my country.

Sixteen years ago, when my friends began to die in Houston from AIDS, my life turned back to the practice of medicine at my old medical school, The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. I've worked as a psychiatrist in the HIV Clinic and on the medical wards since then and my prints, print actions and installations have been about health matters.

At UTMB, the Institute for Medical Humanities had developed into a multidisciplinary humanities program. I'm the visual artist on the faculty. One day of my week has been protected for me to work on the connection between visual art and medicine- to reflect upon what I do in my clinical practice.

JR: A practice that involves art and medicine would seem a sleight of hand, but it seems to have come naturally to you.

EA: It might be so now, but it wasn't thirty years ago. I've always thought that the relationship had something to do with space. I used photography to look at the literal spaces of healing. As my artistic and medical practices grew, I was able to ask art museums wanting to exhibit my work if I could create healing spaces in their museums. I flipped functions. Printmakers are always working with reversals. Several anthropologist friends helped me understand liminality and the neither/nor.

Allen Kaprow's blurring of the relationship between art and life was an inspiration. Warhol did it. It's an old story. I just blurred the line between visual art and medicine. I used my prints in clinical art spaces where medicine was practiced in the aesthetic dimension. Doctors practicing medicine in an art museum- it's a subversive practice in liminal space. Each art/medicine action has had an educational and instrumental purpose. A number have been done on World AIDS Day. They also raise conceptual questions about the relationship between visual art and medicine. I'm really proud of the questions my art/medicine actions have raised about the function of art museum and gallery spaces. Wouldn't it be fantastic if you went to an art museum for health care? I have only a small audience, but the print form, historically connected to social content and information dissemination, works for what I've tried to do with art/medicine.

JR: Speaking of dissemination, we are on the verge of the first pandemic in the new millenium. What are your ideas for Philagrafika 2010?

EA: Your blog posting of the Poli/gráfica de San Juan was an inspiration. Miler Lagos’ woodcuts on tree stumps led me to propose text woodcuts on The Print Center toilet seats (that would imprint bottoms) perhaps something related to HIV risk reduction. Jose Carlos Martinot’s printers in palm trees- why not health-related information on toilet paper, or printed wallpaper in front of the urinals?

I'm also excited about my proposal of prints depicting wounded Adam and Eve on the wall of The Print Center. These 3'x6' linocuts of Adam and Eve (via Durer, Cranach's first couple) will have them being attacked by vectors and modes of transmission of Emerging Infectious Diseases. The snake will be coughing Avian Flu. Title of my piece might be: "So Who Needs The Snake In Our Garden Of Eden." From these key index images I'll have other printed and photographic images that relate to the various infectious diseases.

And I am trying to conceptualize a small booklet or pamphlet that will work with the prints. When I last wrote to you I remember writing that we were just one mutation away from a pandemic. Recently the World Health Organization officially moved H1N1 to Level 6 pandemic status. By next winter's flu season, we are afraid that H1N1 will return in a more virulent form. The worst fear of Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, is that H1N1 will mix with H5N1 (avian flu, but anything can happen with the influenza virus).

I'm trying to connect my prints to Philadelphia and infectious disease. In 1792, the Yellow Fever was so bad in Philadelphia that the United States Capital moved to Washington D.C. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson fled the city. One of the first water treatment plants was built in Philadelphia in 1811 on the Schuykill River. I've got a great photo of this federal building with the Philadelphia Museum looming in the background. I don't know if the water treatment plant still exists. There is an inverse relation between amount of water flowing through a house and infectious diseases.

Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2000. 2-color lithograph with linoleum block print on mulberry paper collaged into molded paper (made from used surgical green towels) woodcut frame. 44" x 31" edition: 10.

Philagrafika 2010 will be happening during flu season. There should be a vaccine by then. But I want my piece for The Print Center to do something to educate about flu protection- something as simple as cover up each cough and sneeze or you will spread disease, or about the importance of hand washing. I was amazed in my HIV Clinic that my undereducated patients don't know what a virus (HIV) is, so I made a printed book to educate them. I might make a book about the influenza virus.

JR: It could be said that you are countering the dissemination of a contagious disease with the dissemination of information.

EA: You write so eloquently about printmaking as form. I think my work has something to do with what Philagrafika is about. As a psychodynamic psychiatrist, there is a natural connection between the unconscious and disease. Getting better involves connecting what's under to what's out. With prints, I'm thinking about Goya's Disasters as access to the worst in humans and his prints' dispersal and dissemination as connected to healing. A social worker gave me a line I use with my patients, "Getting real is the only way to heal." Emerging infections are a real problem. Avian flu is killing children in Egypt today. We are a mutation away from a global pandemic. As a printmaker I know a lot about the graphic and as a psychiatrist, I know a fair amount about the unconscious. Art as medicine: Why not?

Johnny Garrett is Dead. 1992. Woodcut on machine-made Okawara paper. 36" x 48" Edition: 10

Johnny Frank Garrett was just seventeen years old when he committed the brutal murder that sent him to death row. He was chronically psychotic then, a victim himself of unspeakable brutality throughout his childhood and formative years. Treated like an animal for most of his young life, he responded by behaving in the only way he had ever known- violently. Society should not be surprised; the priorities are all too clear. There is little money available to help abused children but plenty available to punish or kill them when they, in turn, offend by doing violence to others.

Now, the poor, damaged, confused life of Johnny Garrett was drawing to its end. What was he thinking, with just ten minutes’ existence left? What goes through a person’s mind at a time such as this?

We were some twenty Amnesty International members and other opponents of the death penalty gathered together. I like to think we were a dignified group with our simple handwritten signs, making our witness and our protest. Rain-filled clouds scudded by overhead and we huddled together for warmth, our candles flickering points of light in the gloomy night.

A few minutes before midnight, “they” arrived. A rowdy crowd of about 80 college students, mainly white youths in baseball caps. They had come to celebrate the death, to gloat over Johnny’s fate, and to taunt us. They taunted us because we cared, because we care about a man’s broken life and a bigger principle: that governments have no right to use the power we bestow on them to kill us.

“Kill the freak.” “Fry him.” “Remember the nun.” Their ignorance was extensive. Texas kills by lethal injection, not electrocution. They did not know Johnny’s history. And they did not know that the murdered nun’s convent community (together with the Pope and all Texas’ bishops) have appealed vociferously for clemency. They wanted their beloved Sister Tadea Benz to be remembered not with another murder, but with forgiveness and mercy. Their pleas for compassion went unheeded.

We stood in thoughtful silence under a stop sign. The mob roared its approval of Johnny’s murder under a dead tree. They counted down to midnight and the moment of execution. Voyeurs in the night, cheering as the hour struck.

Revenge is ugly. At least one death penalty supporter was so appalled at finding himself part of the grotesque display that he crossed the road and silently joined us. AI recruited new members that night.

Cameras flashed and snapped as the media came and went among us, seeking the usual superficial stories, bereft of depth or insight. I was asked what I thought of the circus under the dead tree. I said it epitomized so much that’s wrong with the death penalty. Executions encourage our most primitive instincts; they set a brutal and dangerous example to society. In short, they bring out the worst in people. The world is sick enough already, I told the reporter. Shouldn’t we be striving for a better way?

From "Witness to an Execution: Thoughts on the Killing of Johnny Garrett", by Mandy Bath ( A.I. International Secretariat, London, 1992.)

Interview: Carl Pope

A Celebration of Blackness, 2006. Letterpress poster.

Carl Pope, an American artist working out of Cleveland, understands the power of art as a tool for social change- his whole body of work deals with social issues, including but not limited to race and class. Because posters allow immediate access to the public sphere and enable conversation with a broader audience, he often chooses this medium for his work. Pope uses letterpress posters as both single images and large, visually striking installations. His interest in addressing the community has also led him to use billboards in public space: A Celebration Of Blackness, commissioned by the Mobile Art Museum in Mobile, Alabama, is one such project. Pope began by asking local individuals, “What do you think when you think about blackness?” Ten of the more than 300 answers ended up as single posters; five were selected for a city-wide billboard campaign.

Billboard for the Mobile Art Museum, 2006.

Poster for the Black Is Black Ain't exhibition, 2008. Letterpress poster, 24 x 18 inches.

Pope has also done more intimate work, like performances where he marks his own body. Last year, Pope produced the poster for the “Black is Black Ain’t” exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago which, in the tradition of his previous work, deals with charged subject matter by downplaying it with a bit of sarcastic humor. Nicholas Mirzoeff has stated that Carl Pope is “doing the hard work of imagining a future for the United States at one of the bleakest times in its history. His work is at once a form of geography, reimagining and imaging the forgotten histories, people, and places in America and a new psychology, creating a state of mind capable of sustaining the shocks of the present. It's soul food for the mind, in sharp contrast to the quick hit of consumer pleasure that dominates the art market, and it's all the more important for that.”

This interview was done via email.

J. Roca.

The Bad Air Smelled of Roses, 2005 (ongoing). Letterpress poster installation, dimensions variable.

Jose Roca: In works like Palimpsest and The Bad Air Smelled of Roses you use diverse forms of imprinting to address very personal issues. Can you describe those works for me?

Carl Pope: What do you mean by imprinting?

JR: I use imprinting instead of print to refer to a mark (potentially repeatable) that is made by a matrix on a support. In the case of Palimpsest, the imprinted surface was the body, whereas in The Bad Air a commercial form of printmaking (letterpress posters) is used to address personal questions. I just wanted to know more about the impetus behind two works, which, although apparently very different, I find profoundly related.

CP: Oh ok…

My attraction to text began as a child artist in photography. As a child growing up in the 1960’s, television, advertising and news media had an unparalleled effect on me in those formative years. As a result, text has been the only formal aspect present in the entire body of my work. Working as a commercial photographer for many years added to my understanding as to how to incorporate text with imagery or to form imagery with text. I realized after doing a number of projects that I am basically a storyteller, and that realization led me to consider many of my artworks as writing projects. Other things occurred in my practice in the late 1990’s; I split my practice into public art projects and private projects as I began to become more interested in text and narrative structure.

Palimpsest (1999) was my first private writing project where I used my body as a surface of writing and a contested space in terms of black history and identity. I wrote on the surface of my body using branding, surgical cutting and tattooing. I was and continue to be interested in why people in the West chose to construct and/or reconstruct their identities through body modification/writing. I felt it strange that black artists exploring identity in the 1990’s did very little work that used the body and I wanted to open the conversation up by returning to the body. Well, that piece came at a conservative, post-black moment where “identity” was dead and [for] black artists, using the body was “out-of date” and forbidden.

The Bad Air Smelled of Roses (2005 until now) is my second private writing project where the text provides the image. I was introduced to letterpress printing by Amos Kennedy and spent a year in York, Alabama making posters for this installation. Each poster is an answer to the question, “What do I think of when I think of Blackness?” The answers I printed referenced a variety of sources from Freud, Lacan, Ellison, Reed, etc. I wanted to make a “forest of signs” that articulated the concepts of Blackness much like stars articulate the blackness of outer space. The Bad Air has a narrative structure created from answers to a question [accompanied by] footnotes.

A Celebration Of Blackness, 2006. Series of 10 letterpress posters, 24 x 18 inches each.

JR: You are planning to do a project for Philagrafika that could be described as a branding strategy for cottage industries. Can you expand on this?

CP: I have titled it “The Philadelphia Cottage Industry Association Ad Campaign Project” (PCIA). President Obama’s administration has plenty of plans: The Economic Stimulus Plan, The Energy Plan, The Medicare Plan, The Environmental Plan, and the list goes on. There is an expanding network of interconnecting plans centered on a basic plan for economic recovery. While Americans are waiting for these plans to succeed, what can be done to inspire grass-roots economic vitality right now? What can be done to create and promote products and services in order to keep money circulating within neighborhoods and small communities? A revival of cottage industries may provide some solutions to the mounting challenges many are facing in this economic crisis.

A cottage industry is a small business where the creation of products and services is home-based, rather than factory-based. Many people operate cottage industries in addition to full time jobs or depend on it as their main source of income because of the current recession. Home-based businesses can create stability in their neighborhoods since their income is usually derived from the communities in which they reside. Communal bonds are strengthened and trust is established through successful and affirming business transitions between members within a community. As a result, the circulation of money and resources will revitalize and support those living in the neighborhood.

The Philadelphia Cottage Industry Association Ad Campaign Project will consist of a series of billboards of various cottage industries in two areas of Philadelphia. An outdoor installation of them will be displayed in each side of town to promote home-based businesses in that area. An indoor [installation] will be exhibited at the Tyler School of Art.

The goal of the PCIA Ad Campaign is to heighten the public visibility of the city’s cottage industries, to generate new customers, and to create a trend to support home-based businesses as a way to strengthen the economic and communal vitality of a neighborhood, town, or a city.

JR: This dovetails beautifully with the ideas put forward by the founder of Temple University, Dr. Russell Conwell, who in his famous speech “Acres of Diamonds” said that you need not have to look for opportunities or resources far or abroad, but rather realize that they can be found in your own community. His famous motto was "dig in your own back-yard!" Were you aware that the original intent of Temple University was to educate primarily the working class, and was located in the North Philly district as a philanthropic strategy to revitalize that part of the city?

CP: I understand that Temple University is a socially engaged institution and Philly has a long history of commitment to humanitarian causes, but I didn't know about Dr. Russell Conwell specifically.

The dedication of individuals like Dr. Conwell can influence a community for generations. In one of his last lectures, the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida announced that 9/11 marked the beginning of the Age of the Individual. Our ability to affect the world has increased, as evidenced by the horror of the destruction of the World Trade Center. If we are living in the "Age of the Individual" where small groups or an individual can wage war with an empire, then a small group or an individual can usher in tremendous healing and transformation, right? One of the goals in my recent work is to inspire and challenge those individuals whose destiny is to be an effective catalyst at this time in history like Dr. Conwell was in his...

To "dig in one's own backyard" has become a necessity for Americans since the economic collapse has signaled the decline of the American Empire. The corporate consumer mindset made Americans believe that we want the same things in the same way, no matter where we live. Digging in our backyard will cause us to discover our uniqueness. It leads us to experiences of authenticity and to our true selves instead of being unidentified cogs in an imperial/corporate machine. The current economic collapse is influencing people to create new relationships and alliances in their local community that are rebuilding [the community's] institutions. America has experienced the freedom and independence that money can bring, but our humanity suffered because it caused us to conduct our relationships with people and the cosmos with a market-driven, consumer/manufacturer consciousness. This creates misfortune because human relationships and communities are built through an active gift economy and not through viewing people as consumer items. It's no wonder why divorce is so high in Western countries. Therefore, this new trend of "digging in one's backyard” fills me up with gladness and despair. On one hand, I've seen communities improve and people recognizing the need to work together while breaking through historical boundaries of separation. On the other hand, the predatory elements in big business and government have turned their eye from world domination to a surreal post-post-post-colonial/disaster capitalist vision of bankrupting the national treasury. If Dr. Conwell was here to today, I am sure he would be surprised at the web well of meaning and complexity his famous slogan has accrued by those who are for and against his vision of social justice and balance.

Interview: Christiane Baumgartner

Skyline, 2007. Woodcut on Kozo paper, 57 x 73 inches

Christiane Baumgartner has garnered international attention with her large-scale woodcuts which are done entirely by hand, and which often attain spectacular proportions. Transall (2002-04), one of the better-known works, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and was one of the highlights of their 2006 “Eye on Europe” exhibition (listen to an audio file of the artist talking about this particular work)

Transall, 2002. Woodcut on Kozo paper, 61 x 171 inches

Born and raised in Leipzig before the reunification, Baumgartner studied traditional printing techniques at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. She earned a Master’s degree in Printmaking at the Royal College in London, and soon started to work in video. Coming back to Leipzig afterwords, she decided to merge two apparently incompatible mediums, video and woodcuts, effectively mixing two types of “cutting edge” technologies, that of the gouge and the computer. In her extremely labor-intensive works (a single print can take as much as a year to be completed), Baumgartner achieves a slowing down of process that imbues her haunting images with an aura of concentrated presence. It’s no wonder that her preferred subjects are speed, movement, and translation, literal or metaphorical.

This interview was done via email.

J. Roca.

Deutscher Wald, 2007. Woodcut on Kozo paper, 28 x 35 inches


Jose Roca: You were trained as a printer in several traditional techniques. What attracted you specifically to woodcut?

Christiane Baumgartner: I was attracted to woodcut based on a conceptual reason and not just on the love of the material. 10 years ago I was working nearly exclusively in digital media. This was the time I was studying at the Royal College of Art in London. When I went back to Leipzig it struck me how far I had come from the tradition I was born out of. I wanted to find a way to reconcile these two traditions.

Compared to nature, the digital system is a calculable system. Digital information provides the means by which to order and to simplify and enables the production of endless identical images in different mediums.

Woodcut is the earliest technique to reproduce an image. It is very simple and you don't need more then a sharp knife and a piece of wood -which could even be a kitchen board. And in a way, digital video is the quickest, latest, and most developed reproduction technique.

For me it seemed only logical to combine those two techniques. By creating woodcuts of digital video stills I simulate this standardized information by cutting a line grain by hand on a plate of wood. I am interested in the hand-made aspect in the work, with all its inaccuracies and mistakes. A further important aspect of the work is the relation between materiality and immateriality. The "original" image is one of several thousand digital images, not yet defined in size, color and frequency of the screen. Through my selection and transformation I create a unique woodcut.

JR: In video (at least before the advent of the digital format) the image is formed by parallel lines. When and how did you make the connection with xylography?

CB: Actually I did not use the existing monitor lines for my woodcuts, although many people do think this is the case. I created my own raster.
I was looking for a possibility, how to print a grayscale photograph just in two components, in black and white, and so I came to use the line grid.

JR: Oh, I did think that the images were based on the lines from video stills. Someone told me that you don’t use the usual tools to carve the boards, and that you make one line at a time in a continuous gesture. Can
you describe some technical aspects of your work?

CB: The actual creative part is the choosing of the image, size and frequency. This all happens on the computer. Until then the image exists only virtually. Then I transfer a computer print on to the wood plate.
The cutting process is more something like a meditation, where I am concentrated but still have my mind open. I use an old specially sharpened kitchen knife.

View of the artist's tools in her studio

Lisbon II, 2001. Woodcut on Kozo paper

JR: The depiction of movement and ways of communication seem to be a constant in your work: planes, windmills, roads, tunnels, or the walks you proposed in your artist book Detour; why this interest in velocity?

CB: I was reading Paul Virilio and thought about how we live in a time when things speed up so much. There is so much more movement in our physical lives than 20 years ago. But also the time of information and communication has sped up in an extreme way. Because we are expecting such quick responses to our communications we miss the time for the thinking process and also to really prioritize.

Installation view of Fahrt II, 2004. Series of 8 woodcuts on Kozo paper, 57 x 73 inches each

Windräder II, 2003. Woodcut on Kozo paper, 57 x 73 inches

JR: So your prints, which take a long time to make, effectively slow down time by extending the moment of the constitution of the image from a brief second (the video frame) to entire months…

CB: Yes, this is one aspect of my work.

Luftbild (ed: under consideration), 2008-2009, Woodcut on Kozo paper, 102.4 x 137.8 inches

JR: On one of your last prints, titled Luftbild, there is an interesting pattern that resembles a moiré effect...

CB: The moiré at Luftbild is in the work. It happened when I filmed the TV screen with the video camera and has to do with the interference of those two medias. Here some additional images, which show the proof-printing in two parts and the final print on one sheet of paper.

Letter from San Juan

Dear friends:
I traveled to Puerto Rico for the opening of the II Trienal Poli/gráfica de San Juan (I was part of the curatorial team of the first Trienal in 2004) as a gesture of support for a project similar to Philagrafika, and with the intention of reporting for this blog. The second incarnation of this important event was supposed to happen in 2007, but there were several problems regarding the funding, and this event, which was much-awaited by the local artistic community, finally happened after almost five years. There is a website with the curatorial statement and general information: http://www.trienalsanjuan.org/

(some of the links to the works might not be active yet)

The artistic director of the II Trienal was Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, who chose to work with Jens Hoffmann, Director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, and Julieta González, who was recently appointed Associate Curator of Latin American Art at the Tate Modern in London. Pedrosa also included Puerto Rican artist and curator Beatriz Santiago as guest curator.

Pedrosa and his team chose to explore in depth one line of action among the many that the Trienal opened up: that of artist’s editions and publications. Indeed, this Triennial consisted almost exclusively of printed matter, with the inclusion of a few sculptural pieces and a video. It read as a cleverly curated show, not exactly as a Biennial-type event (in the sense that it was housed in one relatively small space) and, in my opinion it was successful in that it managed to include many outstanding artists with strong works around a very specific subject.

Perhaps one of the most important features of the Trienal is something that cannot be seen: the grants they awarded to established but struggling art magazines -which enabled them to carry on with their editing business- and the production money that they gave to twenty artists for the edition of specially commissioned artist books. The Trienal also commissioned posters from several artists/designers, which were mailed in advance to museums and curators all over to spread the word about the event and create a buzz. The Trienal published a magazine, titled Número Cero, which was guest-edited by artists and curators like María Inés Rodríguez, Jennifer Allora, and Guillermo Calzadilla with Charles Juhasz, Magalí Arriola, and Carla Zaccagnini, among others. This magazine was also mailed in advance, and served to create a critical context leading to the Trienal.

Gabrel Sierra´s reading room

All the publications, including the artist books, posters, magazines, and other ephemera were displayed in a reading room designed by Colombian artist and designer Gabriel Sierra, whose credits include the overall design of the Casa del Encuentro for the Encuentro de Medellín MDE07 and the furniture for the 28th Sao Paulo Bienal. Sierra opted for a labyrinthine maze-like structure made with raw plywood, with nooks and alcoves where the viewer can sit and read in relative isolation. There are racks and shelves for the take-away publications as well as a small video room.

In addition to the publications, the curators put together five thematic shows, all but one of them dealing with different manifestations of printed matter: money, journals, books, archives, and flags. Some of the curated shows felt a little repetitive since the subject matter tended to give the shows (most of them comprising strong pieces by very interesting artists) a uniform look. Also, on some occasions, even though printed matter was the visual reference, the actual work was not a print but a drawing, as was the case with Mateo López’ bills, or Johanna Calle’s newspapers.

Some viewers complained that the decision to limit the entire Trienal to the Arsenal de la Puntilla (just one of the 13 venues that were used by the first Trienal -and not even in its entirety) ended up in a show that lacks in ambition what it has in coherence. Another part that was absent in this version are the monographic shows, which would have given the II Tienal a platform to fund research into the subject of the expanded field of contemporary graphics, as was the case in the first Trienal with the guest-curated shows of Antonio Berni at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico and Beatriz González at the Universidad de Puerto Rico museum, and the very important exhibition curated by Margarita Fernández Zavala, Inscritos & Proscritos, shown at the Museo de las Américas, which presented a historical overview of radical approaches to printmaking in Puerto Rican art.

Jose Carlos Martinat

But overall, the Trienal felt coherent and tightly curated, and included some outstanding works: José Carlos Martinat’s installation, which featured palm trees with tiny printers connected to a software that gleaned information from the web and printed small receipt-like notes that fell from the top like falling leaves; Miler Lagos’ tree stumps, done with reproductions of legendary Puerto Rican printer Rafael Tufiño’s images; Runo Lagomarsino’s sun-printed texts (a "tropical" clin d’oeil to Duchamp’s Elevages de Poussiére); Satch Hoyt’s Say It Loud!, a pedestal made of books where the public is encouraged to speak out; and some classic works not previously seen in Puerto Rico like Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’ Insertions in Ideological Circuits (subversive slogans stamped on bills to bypass censorship and ensure distribution), Jorge Macchi’s cut-out newspapers, and the posters and flyers of the now-defunct Taller Popular de Serigrafía from Argentina, to mention but a few.

J. Roca.

Miler Lagos

Taller Popular de Serigrafía

Jorge Macchi

Satch Hoyt

Interview: Regina Silveira

Two works from the Masterpieces (In Absentia M.D.) series.

For more than thirty years, Brazilian artist Regina Silveira has been investigating the ways in which reality is represented, and the codes and procedures used to achieve said representation. She has used various methods of perspectival projection, reworking and deconstructing them to produce paradoxical images, such as shadows without a solid at their origin, or shadows that contradict their referent. Silveira has also used traces and imprints to speak about presence and absence, and has used several printing techniques in her work, which often attains architectural proportions.

Tropel, façade of the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia, 2007.

I had the opportunity to work closely with her when curating a survey of her works for the Banco de la República Museum in Bogotá in 2007, entitled Luminous Shadow. I recently collaborated with her again in putting together a visual glossary of her work for a solo exhibition she had in Koege, Denmark. This interview stems from a long conversation we have had over the last five years, and was done primarily via email.

J. Roca.

Alejandro Martín, Concept-diagram of Regina Silveira's work.

José Roca: You have been doing editions and diverse forms of prints since the seventies, and those prints took the form of sculptural (the porcelains) or even performance pieces (Corredores para abutres, Pronto para Morar, etc). In more recent years, you have gone to laser-cut vinyl and similar techniques in order to be able to achieve the imprinting of large architectural surfaces. Does printmaking continue to inform your artistic process?

Regina Silveira: This graphic mark has always been detectable, even when I was making the short experimental video films in the seventies. This mark is certainly related to the continued exercise of printmaking, which I practiced and taught for a long time in my professional career, even though in this practice – and also in my teaching – I have been quite unorthodox. For me, printmaking has always been a field open to graphic experimentation, much more expanded and flexible than painting, since it could include practically everything. When making prints, my favorite operations have always involved the hybridization of traditional procedures with techniques and resources from industrial graphics, as well as printing on various supports. But coming before all this, including the printmaking, is what I believe lies at the very basis of my means of operating, which is this strong predisposition, this response, or, if you prefer, this poetic “graphic” approach, of configuring by producing graphic marks – whether on paper, walls, porcelain, interiors or large-scale architecture, even on the urban fabric.

Two prints from the Eclipse series (2005), photo etching.

JR: Were other early works also informed by printmaking?

RS: Many of them, yes. Even my early performances were always intermediated by a graphic element, as the Pudim Arte Brasileira [Brazilian Art Pudding] that I distributed at the entrance to the subway, back in the seventies; the flyer Pronto para Morar [Ready to Live In], a parody of the real-estate flyers, handed out to people in cars waiting at a stoplight at one of the busiest corners in São Paulo, in 1994; and the Volkswagen beetle with the vinyl adhesive in the image of a zipper, which went through the downtown region of the city, interacting with street vendors, as registered in the documentary Blindagem [Bullet Proof, 2002]. Actually, it appears that the graphic icon comes either prior to, or together with, the first ideas for my artworks, as if the insight itself were graphic, no matter what medium I choose afterward. I believe this explains my almost exclusive preference for the color black.

Installation of Tropel (reversed), Koege Museum, Denmark, 2009.

JR: Your work is almost completely devoid of color, obviously because of the nature of your visual research (light and shadow), but is this also because it relates to typographic elements?

RS: In a commentary to my recent installation Tropel (Reversed), a large graphic splotch that I made fictionally invade the internal architectural space of the Koege Art Museum, in Denmark, I was pleased to find the use of the expression “black art,” not in the sense of contemporary African art, or even Gothic art, but to designate graphic manifestations, letters or illustrations made in the color black, traditionally linked to the old typography, or derived from it. I got to thinking that my installations with plotter-cut vinyl could also fit within this lineage of black art...this rubric could include the silhouettes, the tire tracks, the animal tracks, the human footprints, and this entire family of black, indexical images that have occupied my imagination for so long now, and which I have used to re-signify objects, spaces, and architectures of many kinds.

Derrapagem II (2005), Sicardi gallery, Houston.

JR: Printmaking always implies a matrix, a support, and a transfer medium or "ink". Do you consider the digital file a type of matrix that does not lose quality with subsequent editions?

RS: The inclusion of digital practices in my work, starting in the mid-nineties, fully reinstalls the notion of the matrix, now with the potential for repetition, of identical copies without any loss, or with an opening for variants and nearly topological adjustments. This was, above all, important for the recovery of the undesired ephemeral condition of some previous installations, including large-scale ones, in most cases constituted by illusionist silhouettes that I painted, slowly and rigorously, on various architectures from the eighties onward. The use of the plotter for cutting the vinyl adhesive was a good alternative, and also quicker than the results of painting, since the adhesive could be removed and later cut and placed again somewhere else, even in other geographies, almost like a canvas is removed from a wall and can be sent anywhere at all – but with its permanent existence maintained as a potentiality, impeccable and precisely the same, in the matrix, saved in a file.

JR: The use of computer software to plot and calculate deformations of the images in relation to architecture, and plotter-cut adhesive vinyl as the material for the image allowed your work to attain scales that were previously very difficult to achieve, right?

RS: Right. Besides reinstalling the notion of the matrix, the digital graphic resources brought me greater control, especially in regard to the scale and planning, when the work involved covering large architectural surfaces with graphic images, in projects that were many times negotiated and realized from a distance. Within these new parameters, my first adventure of having a graphic work of significant size involving external architecture, commissioned, treated and sent by Internet, to be executed abroad was Ex Orbis. This piece occupied a large element on the façade of the National Museum of Aviation, in Ottawa, at the exhibition Passion for Wings, in 1999. The largest and riskiest, at least up to now, was Irruption: Saga, much more recently. Without a doubt, the saga was also mine and the museum’s, to realize and assemble that huge flow of human footprints, with 1400 m² of cut vinyl, applied to the external architecture of the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts, for the 6th Taipei Biennial, in 2006.

Irruption (Saga), 2006.

JR: What led you to footprints and tracks of animals?

RS: The first provocation came with the invitation from MCA San Diego to dialogue, poetically, with the design of the entrance hall conceived by architect Robert Venturi for the museum’s remodeling completed in 1996. This was when I imagined Gone Wild, that pattern of coyote tracks in perspective climbing the walls, as a specific response to the beautiful pattern of dalmatian-dog spots that had been installed recently on the entrance floor.

JR: In border cultures, "coyote" also means someone that smuggles people across the frontier...

RS: Yes, and the political motives for the allusion to coyotes in that conflict zone along the border with Mexico gained further annotations when the tracks of those wild canines were intermingled with those of many other animals, from different latitudes and incompatible with each other – prey and predators – when I created the image for Tropel, in keeping with the theme of Anthropophagy at the 24th Bienal de São Paulo, in 1998. The anthropophagic voracity of cultures made me create Tropel as the vestige of a fictional event: the escape of those animals out of a gap in the façade, to become lost in the park surrounding the building designed by Oscar Niemeyer.

I think that the introduction of this paradigm of footprints and animal tracks is an expansion of my wide-ranging interest for enigmatic images that serve as indexical signs, such as shadows, photographs, and footprints: enigmatic because they are marks left by light, by events, and because they denote time and absence. The footprints simply pertain to this family of indexical signs I had already explored when doing anamorphic shadows, in many of my objects and installations.

When I appropriated the graphic designs of tire tracks, to couple and form patterns that would invade interior settings and façades –as did the Frenazos in Puerto Rico and the Derrapadas in Montevideo– the configurations of those tracks were more urban, invasive and chaotic. Certainly more playful as well – the tracks of animals were always more “fierce”...

Mundus Admirabilis and other Plagues, Brito Cimino gallery, Sao Paulo, 2008.

JR: In works such as Irruption you take the footprint –the archetypal imprint– as the basis for large-scale installations. Can you talk about that?

RS: The human footprints, which migrated and grew in size, from Intro in Brussels, to Irruption at MFA Houston, and Irruption (Saga) in Taipei, actually originated in the footprints of many children that I printed on sheets of paper in the early nineties, after they had dipped their feet in shallow basins filled with black paint. The footprints printed in black resulted from my negotiations with the children (who also painted their feet other colors) for making a future work – a tapestry that I never managed to execute. These activities were part of a workshop carried out with dozens of children, to compose paths and trails with colored footprints in the spaces and gardens of SESC-Itaquera in São Paulo. Only many years later were these footprints in black scanned and digitally treated to compose the splotches of accumulated footprints that began to occupy the architectural surfaces placed at my disposal for the creation of site-specific installations. Brought together and juxtaposed, they functioned for me as the marks of an uncontrolled event or an invasion, looking like insects, in spatial situations that were completely absurd, or at least unlikely for real footprints.

Some days ago, I read in a scientific publication the news that ancestral footprints were found in Kenya, which researchers believe could belong to Homo erectus. That photo of the isolated footprint, published in the magazine science, in all its details, is the most moving trace I have ever seen.

Regina Silveira working on the installation of Irruption

JR: In recent series, you have used actual objects that seem to project enormous shadows done with laser-cut vinyl; imprinted photographs of objects with graphic shadows; and covered white porcelain with screen-printed decals, all of which defy the traditional format of the printed series. Do you consider them prints at all?

RS: I would hesitate to consider these works just prints, because they are actually graphic hybrids, or better still, works with a strong degree of hybridization, originated by prints or intermediated by them. Some are hybrids between prints and photographs, others between graphics and objects, but most of them operate by hybridization with digital processes.

I don’t know well when this hybridization begins in my work, possibly long before these recent series, at the time when I was considered a “multimedia artist”. Maybe precisely because of this I never wanted to be considered a printmaker, even though I was doing prints all the time. The horizon of graphics was already expanded for me in the seventies, when I screen-printed over commercial postcards in order to make the series Brazil Today, or when I included screen-printed photographic images in the matrices that I would then copy as blueprints for the Dilatáveis [Expandable] series that soon followed. In this constant mixture of graphic procedures, everything was useful and could be incorporated into the mix. Nor did I hesitate to commission weavers to make artisanal tapestries as the support for large graphic silhouettes in the mid-eighties. Even when I review the videos I made in the seventies -very short, in B&W and without any editing- I can see how everything was made with materials and instruments that I had on my drawing table: scotch tape, letraset, chalk, black cardboard...

Hook (Eclipses series), 2003, digital print and backlight

No matter what hybridization component came before, in my work it is printmaking that contaminates everything. If you add to this my curiosity for old and new resources for the production of images, the result is the hybrid universe that you mention in your question: insects made with decals, screen-printed with ceramic ink to be applied onto white china and fired; digital drawing software used to prepare ceramic tiles; actual objects linked to digitally-printed graphic shadows, and so on and so forth.

I have always had a very free, “disengaged” approach to all media, on one hand mixing them, on the other trying to use them in their essential values. My more important and constant investigation is not about the media itself -for me this would be a wrong question-; my most important concern, more inclusive than that of media, is the nature of visual representation, its function and the role (poetic and politic) of the image as the intermediary between perception and the world.

Interview: Orit Hofshi

Datum Collectanea, 2005. Installation view at the Herzliya Museum.

Last week I travelled to Israel to install an exhibition of Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz at the Herzliya Museum, which opened last Saturday. I took the opportunity to meet with Orit Hofshi, who, like Muñoz, will make part of Philagrafika 2010: The Graphic Unconscious. Orit Hofshi studied in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and last year showed at the Print Center in Philadelphia. Hofshi works by hand on a very large scale, achieving monumentality while retaining an intimate quality in her prints. I had visited her last year in her studio near Tel Aviv where she was working on new woodcuts for an ongoing series, and what struck me most, knowing the scale of her prints in advance, was the tiny size of her working space (which was half-occupied by shelves of materials, prints, and books). This tension between grandeur and intimacy is, in my opinion, an important feature in her work, since her prints, which can be viewed from a great distance, have the ability to lure the viewer close to the surface, where their surface texture becomes apparent.

Hofshi works primarily in woodcut, a technique that has experienced a revival in contemporary printmaking in recent years; its atavic associations (woodcut is arguably the oldest of the printing techniques) contrast with the visual output of the technologically driven society we live in. Hofshi usually works in a fixed format, using standard-size sheets of pine from a builder’s supply store. She creates varied horizontal and vertical matrices with the panels, adding to or subtracting from the grid as she works on the image. Pine is soft but tends to have knots although the artist doesn’t see this as a drawback. Rather, she takes it as a positive condition of the material, and uses it to shape her compositions.

Once the matrixes are carved, Hofshi inks the panels and lays Okawara paper down on them with utmost care so that the paper does not become soiled. Then she uses a wooden spoon to rub the back of the paper to pick up the ink. This technique allows her to control the intensity of the line in a process somewhat akin to painting or drawing. Sometimes she integrates the yet-to-be-printed matrix as part of the work, displaying the wooden boards adjacent to the prints.

This interview started via email and was completed with notes from conversations held in Tel Aviv and Herzliya, as well as excerpts from an article I wrote for Art on Paper magazine.

J. Roca.





Orit Hofshi in her studio, March 2009.

Jose Roca: Why did you choose xylography, one of the oldest printing techniques, as your primary medium of expression?

Orit Hofshi: As a woodcut artist I am drawn by the simplicity of process, a seemingly contradictory preference to the textual challenges I choose to confront in my work. A board, a knife, a brayer and ink make the art form possible. The self-reliance on the actual pressure of the hand, releases me from dependency upon the mechanics of the press. In fact, the directness and immediacy of the media lend to a clearer and more expressive creative process. I typically print very small editions (4-6), allowing the intensity and detailed process I feel necessary for each print produced.

Cutting and carving pine boards and printing on paper, is like experiencing a micro reality in itself. I am most conscious of the properties of my materials and their relationship. Particularly the inherent texture and patterns of the wood combined with the effects of the carving and sculpturing tools, all becoming an integral part of the woodcut’s message. I see woodcutting as a physical as well as an emotional challenge, enjoying the negotiating and testing of the board’s resistance to the sharp gouge plowing its path through a wooden earth... There is always the sense of wood, ink and paper, rigid and soft, not antithetical but merging together.

JR: Landscape appears prominently as the subject of your compositions, and so are isolated figures. Do you work from photographs of actual places and people, or are they imagined? Or both?

OH: Landscapes and at times figures are definitely a prominent subject in much of my work. There is the "technical" aspect in addressing this subject and there are the interpretation and subjective processes, which are driving motivations in my creative process. I spend a great deal of time in various natural settings and am attracted to extreme and rugged landscapes, taking numerous photographs, which nourish my thinking and processing in the studio. In such dramatic natural contexts I find an emphasized sense of evolution, time and struggles, not only as records of natural phenomenon but also as reflections of human history.

I was totally engulfed by the volcanic terrains in Iceland as an example. I think that for the most part, I am inspired by such natural topographies, as well as by my personal recollections and imagination, but I rarely look to depict any particular landscape. The following comment by Simon Schama in "Landscape and Memory", captures the essence of the complex conscious as well as subliminal feelings and thoughts evoked by nature, as part of my on going journey.

"There was, I knew, blood beneath the verdure and tombs in the deep glades of oak and fir. The fields, forests and rivers had seen war and terror, elation and desperation; death and resurrection […] It is a haunted land where greatcoat buttons from six generations of fallen soldiers can be discovered lying amidst the woodland ferns."


JR: How does working in such a politically charged environment like present-day Israel influence your practice?

OH: It is, in fact, very difficult to work in. The human condition has a constant presence in my work, whether actually depicted in the work and even if not. Preoccupied with the current and past socio political realities I do not rely only on my immediate experience or surroundings, but am obsessively aware of the broader human circumstances at a given time. I look constantly for images of people in daily newspapers as well as images from archives. Similarly to my processing of natural impressions, I do not focus on the literal content or meaning images. I am fascinated by expressions and disposition portrayed in images as a source of inspiration. My frequent depiction of isolated figures refers primarily to the notion people need to face challenges, as well as the consequences of their actions and decisions as individuals. This does not minimize in any way my deep sense of society as a most significant environment and context for the individual, as is referred to in my work. But despite the fact we are so affected by social and political contexts, the reality is that ultimately the individual needs to make decisions, balancing apparent practical and specific dispositions with more complex moral parameters; and become responsible for any out come of such decisions.




JR: You showed me a sketch of the work you are planning to do for Philagrafika, and it involves creating a physical space for the viewer to enter. Had you worked tri-dimensionally before? Can you talk a bit about this new project?

OH: Tri-dimensionality and physical space have been present conceptually in my thinking and creative process for quite a while. In previous works I proposed monumental spaces conveyed to the viewer by large scale and size, while relying primarily on apparent two-dimensional formats. In this project I wish to create an actual tri-dimensional space formed by several elements which render a new physical presence. These elements will be the combination of materials and formats from diverse worlds, yet mutually-enriching, also manifesting the different stages and processes of print making and drawing: the work on paper, the use of wood, the manual aspects required, the attentiveness to the material's innate rhythm (textures, fragility, etc.).

I have gone through a gradual transition process from strictly two-dimensionality, exhibiting prints and drawings on paper and then adding carved wood panels, as well as framed and non framed works. In fact, over the course of the years I had carried the sense that even panels, which I had used for prints, therefore darkly tinted by ink, embed significant content and statements, beyond their being just a phase in the printing process leading to the traditional final outcome, the print on paper.

The concept of acknowledging the process and recognizing the significance of its specific phases, fuels a broader motivation in this project. Sections of the work are set to be newly carved elements, but others, forming the tri –dimensional structure, will be comprised of panels which were the reliefs used for a print also included in the complete work. The viewer will be exposed to the print as well as its suggested "echo" or elusive mirror image, in the form of dark carved panels. Evolution of time, remnants and recorded natural or human footprints, which have been a focal point of much of my recent work, take more center stage also formalistically in this project.

I hope that the introduction of the structured space and the dialogue and sub context suggested by the elements rendering the work will stimulate motion and create varied observation points of view, enhancing the viewers' experience and insight.

Interview: Tromarama

Tromarama is a collective including Febie Babyrose (1985 Jakarta, Indonesia,) Herbert Hans Maruli (1984 Jakarta, Indonesia) and Ruddy Alexander Hatumena (1984, Bahrain). Formed in 2004 and based in Bandung and Jakarta, Tromarama has been interested in contemporary urban culture, inserting itself beyond the art scene into the larger cultural fabric of Bandung. I saw their work Serigala Militia (actually a music video for the thrash metal band Serigali) at the 2008 Singapore Biennial. I was captivated by the rawness of the image, a stop-motion animation where the actual process of the carving of the wooden boards is taken as a theme in itself, along with the inking of the boards, exposing the process of woodcut in all of its directness and materiality. Tromarama has since produced other videos in the same technique but not print-related, as well as several editioned multiples.

The following interview was done via email.

J. Roca.

Jose Roca: Why did you choose woodcut as the medium for the video Serigala Militia?

Tromarama: We felt that the woodcut medium suited best to represent the character and attitude of the band, and also the roughness of the music.

JR: Had you worked before with other printing techniques?

T: Nope, this is our first time combining printmaking technique with stop-motion animation.

JR: But you have done multiples and other editioned work, right? Why?

T: We hadn’t done any multiples and other editioned work before the Serigala Militia Video. Serigala Militia was our first video, and it was not a difficult choice for us to use a printmaking technique in it. We did the video while we are studying at Bandung Institute of Technology, Faculty of Visual Art and Design. Studying different majors, Febie was in the printmaking studio. Herbert studied visual communication design, focusing in advertising. Ruddy studied visual communication design, focusing in graphic design. Many printmaking techniques were a part of our daily life at campus. Even though we come from different majors, you just can’t separate graphic design and printmaking. Some people have said that graphic design is applied printmaking. You can’t separate graphic design history from Gutenberg, the father of mass-production printmaking. Printmaking had a big influence in our works not only visually but also in the number of editions for our videos, which are produced in a specific numbered edition -a common thing in printmaking.

JR: How would you describe the current local scene you work in?

T: We studied, live and work in Bandung, a small city full of Do-It-Yourself spirit. This ethos was triggered by the big economic crisis back in 1998. When everything got very expensive, people tried to produce things by themselves. There are many local bands trying to make their own CDs, and many independent record labels supporting the local music industry. Economic crisis drives creativity in this town. We can see the emergence of many local clothing companies, as a result of the crisis. When people can’t afford imported clothes and apparel, they try to produce their own. Bandung is a city well known by the creativity of its people. People here appreciate differences and are very open to all kind of new things happening. Maybe the existence of three art schools in Bandung helps people to be more welcoming with new, creativity-driven events. Video is already quite common in Indonesia as a new media in contemporary art. People can see video art in galleries and also at screenings initiated by art communities, whose intention is to introduce the video art itself to a larger public. Furthermore, this is a way for local artists can develop their art so that it can be enjoyed by many without decreasing the meaning of the work itself.

JR: You were recently invited to the Singapore Biennial. Where you able to establish ties with other artists of the region and beyond?

T: After the Biennale, we did not establish ties with artists from other countries, but some curators contacted us, asking about our work, and possibilities to show our work at their gallery (one of them is you). We are thankful to Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt from universes-in-universe, for spreading our existence to the world.

JR: What are you planning to do for Philagrafika?

T: We plan to do a stop-motion animation with the etching technique, as well as showing our woodcut video and the whole installation. As with Serigala Militia, the video will also be displayed with all of the etching plates as an installation.