Interviews

"I spent the last 3 years as prisoner in prison. My body was usurped. 3 years of my stay in prison was a performative experience for me from beginning to end. And I drew a picture like crazy. All my creative potential had been revealed".

"During the period of the lockdown I was unable to work in my workshop on a daily basis, like I used to, even though it is only a fifteen-minute walk away from home. Yet this did not prove to be an obstacle for me to continue working on various ideas. Preserving my belief that the virus cannot be superior to creativity, I tried to enrich the freedom of loneliness by staging a ‘one-man performance’ at home in order to negotiate the absurdness and surreal contingencies of photography".

Timo Menke is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Stockholm. Investigating the relationship between the observer and the observed, subject and object, recorder and projector, lens and screen, his practice is increasingly aiming at a dark holistic approach. Using photographic and moving images, documents, objects, drawing and plant cultivation he approaches, renegotiates and speculates about our common nature-culture, in order to highlight and transform an increasingly dark matter: body, earth, space.

"The drift of the life of an artist is very curious. It is common to think of his career as a series of evolutions that also affect his technical skill and conceptual realization. The reading of a life in creation is according to the classical linear vision. In these pre-quantum times, I have discovered that in a way people look for ourselves, we seek our fate within a complex universe where reality is not always an absolute truth".

Ryota Matsumoto is a co-director of an award-winning interdisciplinary design office, Ryota Matsumoto Studio. He is an artist, designer and urban planner. Born in Tokyo, he was raised in Hong Kong and Japan. He received a Master of Architecture degree from University of Pennsylvania in 2007 after his studies at Architectural Association in London and Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art in early 90’s.

"I think that when your work is directly connected to your life, eventually your views will reflect on your work. Even more when someone’s work becomes the means to deepen and become better acquainted with yourself. My work functions as an allegorical calendar which records my relationship (and possibly the relationship of each one of us) with nature, technology, time and death".

"Art is inseparable from life. We are reproducing our feelings, experience and knowledge through the language of art. I think, Art is political when it communicates with audience, regardless of an artist’s intension each piece of art consciously or unconsciously records socio-political history of our time. It is a powerful tool to push the conventional boundaries of thought, it dares to deconstruct and reconstruct ideas asan independent political or social message".

"I think that art has not such a social role that contemporary society would like us to believe. Especially when it is used as a substitute to real politic or education to try to badly fix a certain lack of social cohesion, economical fragility or cultural poverty. At this level, society's expectations of the unifying and restorative potential of art (and artists) are totally disproportionate".

"The ability to create is first perceived as a rare skill reserved for a few exceptional individuals, and is now considered a widespread and easily accessible phenomenon. This new conception of creation, referred to as the new word "creativity", has taken on such importance that it has now invaded all sectors of human activity".

"I believe that the artist can create and talk about art only from his/her subjective position.To have a political responsibility that extends beyond the artistic territory is too much of a burden which could jeopardize the artist's creativity and freedom. In such a case, the art serves a function, becoming a manifesto. Art should not fulfill a function, it should be free. "