Jacob Fabricius I thought that we weren’t going to meet because you were in Berlin, but then it turned out you’re right here.
Nadim Sammer I popped up.
JF: You popped right out of the box. And the exhibition Poetry of Encryption is still fresh in your mind?
NS: Yes.
JF: Maybe you could start by explaining how one entered the exhibition at Kunst-Werke?
NS: It is an exhibition about technology, and the digital. And so viewers might expect to encounter some kind of media art—blinking screens, and so on. For this reason, I don't want to give the audience what they anticipate. Instead, you come into a dark room, where you immediately encounter the organic. There’s a vitrine which contains soil and living plants, and on the top of it, a sculpture made out of a classic art material: plaster. The work is by Juliana Cerqueira Leite, and it is called Urn. Behind it there is a video showing an airplane being buried in an empty field, by the artist Roger Hiorns.
What I try to do in that dark room, with this reliquary-like plaster figure, and these funereal intimations, is establish a metaphor that will run throughout that first sequence of galleries: the metaphor of burial within a technological grave. I am interested in bringing this impression almost subconsciously into viewers’ reflections upon the rest of the works in this section. So much digital rhetoric tends to fly above one’s head: ‘cloud’ computing, and so on. Virtual reality supposedly exists in some far-off ‘immaterial’ realm. In this exhibition I try bring this fantasy down to earth, and set it in correspondence with the analog. You cannot have a circuit board without an open-pit mine, from which its minerals are extracted. Only in the next gallery do you encounter the blinking lights of media art.
JF: So, you deliberately delay the fulfilment of the viewer’s expectations?
NS: Yes, and the delayed expectation makes encountering the work of Gillian Brett, which you see in the next room—all these fractured screens, depicting galaxies and nebulae—more satisfying. I would call this strategy ‘burying’ of the viewer’s expectations, too.
JF: I felt that. It was a really interesting way of entering the space. Something I clearly remember is this piece by Simon Denny with all these piles of paper.
NS: These five wall-mounted stacks of printed paper document inventions that have been filed with the US Patent Office. Three of them belong to the Amazon corporation. They describe their innovation as a ‘system for transporting workers around an active workplace’. But it has become known, in the media, as the ‘Amazon worker cage’. It’s kind of a cage-like structure, with a claw. Its occupant can grab things and pilot around the fulfilment center without risk of their body being in danger. It was a response to multiple deaths in these centers, when workers were crushed by robots that were zooming around the warehouse, grabbing packages. Rather than redesigning the system around the human body, Amazon invented a cage or capsule for the body within that system. The artwork is really about emerging labour conditions in the age of automation. As I said, this section of the exhibition is about technological burial. Denny’s work proves that this metaphor is grounded in reality.
JF: Something else that stood out to me was the feeling that you played very consciously with notions of architecture. I was thinking about the two points in the exhibition where you, as a viewer, actually have the opportunity to penetrate the architecture.
NS: Yes, exactly. The concept of the exhibition is long-winded because it’s based on a book I’ve written. It’s based around three metaphors that describe our embodied imaginary, concerning where we are in relation to ‘the inside of tech’. It has three chapters. The first is called ‘Black Site’, it concerns being ‘locked in’. You're buried alive, captured, or contained. You are encapsulated. Hence the metaphor of burial that I speak about.
After being locked in, the opposite is being locked out: I call this section ‘Black Box’. An indicative work is a sculpture by Carsten Nicolai. It is a mysterious black obelisk, a rhomboid that is a scaled up version of the one that appears in Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 print Melancolia I. It is an inscrutable object whose inner workings are obscure.
Finally, the third moment: after locked in, and locked out, is locked down (‘Black Hole’). Inside, outside, here, there? Everything is scrambled. This is a different kind of spatial relation—the collapse of legible relationality in principle. As you can tell, the exhibition concerns access and exclusion. If you're locked in, can you escape? Or can you orientate yourself within this place? If you’re locked out, can you break in, and recover the information you want, the facts of the matter, and so on? In a state of lockdown, how do distinctions between here and there, truth and falsehood, etc., break down?
JF: Is that also the exclusion of Rafman’s video boxes?
NS: Rafman’s work concerns being locked in, cocooning oneself within a kind of sarcophagus: just shutting yourself away with the screen. On the one hand, you are physically encapsulated. On the other hand, the screen proposes a sort of transport; a window onto virtual freedoms—which are of course, in some sense, illusory. You’re still stuck in a box, staring at a physical object. You’re not really being transported.
The vision for the exhibition architecture was to play with ideas of access and exclusion. We had vinyl walls or partitions designed by Jurgen Mayer H. throughout the space, they subdivided the larger rooms, and defining a series of smaller galleriers. But, if you wanted, you could walk right through them. Walking through walls is, essentially, wish fulfilment.
JF: So, fulfilling people’s wish to get out, for their bodies to escape the feeling of being trapped while roaming the virtual?
NS: So much of the show explores our lack of ability to penetrate to the heart of the matter when it comes to emerging tech, to pass through a certain threshold of technical understanding. Those vinyl strips, which are clear shiny plastic, refract and distort—they break up the reflections that appear on their surfaces. They are multiple planes at slightly different angles. So, when a TV or a video screen is reflected in them its image is broken up. Dealing with a device like a phone or a computer, or whatever it presents to you, you’re only engaging with the interface. You’re mostly attending the surface of a black box. But what you may want to do, critically, is penetrate beyond this interface to discover something deeper. Like: how is this thing constructed? What is it actually doing? Are there hidden operations apart from the one’s I can see? Is it, for example, surveilling me? Also, what larger production circuits is it a part of it—economically, ecologically, etc.? You want to break the screen.
JF: Are there other examples of controlled architectural escapes in the exhibition?
NS: There’s a nice moment near Carsten Nicolai’s piece, which is a small peephole, cut through the gallery wall. Those who notice it are able to look out from this gallery into the main hall—along its central axis. At the end of the hall there is gigantic film projection by Nico Vascellari. Parallel vinyl partitions run towards it from each side, almost like a runway. So, through this peephole you access a symmetrical view of the room, where everything is visible at once. If you don’t notice [the peephole], then you don't gain this perspective. Instead, you take a snaking path which, after the next small gallery, delivers you to a mezzanine in the corner of the main hall. Here, your view runs across the hall’s diagonal axis. Vascellari’s projection is thus only visible through one of the vinyl partitions. As such, it appears distorted. Right here, a staircase that you should normally be able to use, to descend onto the gallery floor, is blocked by a rope. Instead, you have walk the full length of the mezzanine to the open staircase at other end. Before you get there, half-way along this mezzanine, you encounter the other side of the peephole. Its aperture is a rectangle . Around it is an unfolded envelope. The hole was the envelope’s ‘window’. Printed on the inside of the envelope is a data protection pattern, of the sort that appear inside correspondence containing bank statements etc. It is a work by Juergen Mayer H., which we came up with while designing the exhibition layout.
JF: So, conceptually, we were staring through a window into an envelope.
NS: Exactly. And, conceptually speaking, the supposed inside of the envelope is the main hall and all the works in it.
JF: I only I looked back through it, onto Nicolai’s black sculpture. I couldn’t stop thinking about the monkeys looking at the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey.
**NS: **Space Odyssey was totally part of it. But the idea with the peephole and the envelope was that you might only notice one half of the piece. You might have ignored it on the way out and only looked back through the envelope once already on the other side.
JF: So, with the envelope, and the curtains, and the peephole, and the vessels on either side of the peephole, it sounds as if you think a lot about the dramaturgy dealing with an exhibition like this one?
NS: Always. From my point of view, when you have a large group exhibition, it’s really important to have very controlling architecture. I try to create these sequences of encounter where, as a viewer, you’re not just ping-ponging around, able to see anything in any order. if you leave it too free then it is harder to establish dramaturgy. Sequencing is what helps narrative or implied argumentation. If you have, say, sixty works, then you need a bit of an argument for why one thing follows another, unless you’re doing something really chronological. The beginning of this show was almost like a labyrinth. Very small, dark, tight rooms. You enter from one side, and you exit from another. Viewers really are on a path, and that allows me to control the tone throughout.
As I said, with the first room, I set the tone of the burial. Then I bring in the screen as a problematic mediator. From there, we go into figures that have been captured by Virtual Worlds. There is a film by Enore, where you appear to be watching gameplay, in which the objective is a ‘find’ your lost mother in a digital world. Next you can access a small cabin, where you have a video by Jon Rafman, inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This myth is about search and recovery. Eurydice has being snatched away by Hades, god of the underworld, taken away to a dark place. Jon retells this myth through google street view and google earth. He casts internet ‘searching’ in a new light. In these dark galleries you are searching for artworks too. It is only after a sequence of five labyrinth-like, tight, dark spaces that you open up into the larger space of the main hall, and you have a bit more freedom to move around. But it’s in that tight beginning that I’m able to set the tone. The tone is literally about darkness. And it’s about enclosure, and search and recovery operations. I love to control the view as much as possible.
JF: I also got that feeling as a viewer–it’s very precise and controlled.
NS: I think that’s the only way to approach large group shows, especially when, like this one, it’s based on a book. It’s based on an extended essay, and an essay is an argument. I sort of needed to unfold a whole argument through the line of the exhibition.
JF: And that’s the other thing I wanted to ask you about, because what comes first? How should we approach this exhibition? Should we see the exhibition and read the book? Or should we read the book and see the exhibition? What is the entrance point?
NS: I suppose you could do either. The book came first, and that’s just how it happened; I was trying to make sense of art that I’d been working with and thinking about over the last ten years in Berlin. It’s an intellectual summation of my engagements with art and technology over the course of a decade.
I realized I was interested in work that was more concerned with metaphors and narratives around technology than actual widgets and gadgets, and media art, so to speak. I was interested in discourses around technology. Discourse is so full of metaphor, and it’s full of storytelling, so I told my own story. I basically put artist’s metaphors for how tech works within my own super metaphors—Black Site, Black Box, and Black Hole. Locked in, locked out, locked down. Anyway, it’s possible for you to come at it from either way.
In the end, it’s one project. One project that plays out in an exhibitionary modality. Another project that plays out in argumentation. There is such a thing as making an argument through an exhibition, through dramaturgy, through sequencing, but it’s not the same kind of argument. This kind of argument is made through your body, through your senses… It’s not an argument in words. It’s more of a montage of other people’s words and other people’s images. Whereas I think the book is me speaking for everything.
JF: I’d say the book combines the two, as you refer to a lot of the artists there but always coming from philosophy.
NS: I think there’s a lot more of me in the book; my actual voice.
JF: I get that the book is very much about you, but it also has a lot of cliffhangers to the exhibition, of course.
NS: Yes. But I’m happy to say that they’re all one project. This was always the plan. It was devised as a book, a conference, and an exhibition as one project.
JF: And in the book, you have the three themes.
NS: Yes. There are three spatial metaphors for where an intelligent, embodied human is, or imagines themself to be, in relation to the inside of technology.
Why? For a start, I wrote the book because I was hired as a ‘Curator for the Digital Sphere’, and I was had to ask myself ‘What does this mean?’ What is this sphere that you speak of? I realized straight away that it is a spatial metaphor. But if the digital is thought of as a ‘sphere’ where does it begin? Where does it end? Where am I, a supposedly intelligent, embodied human, in relation to that sphere? Am I inside it? Okay, maybe I am. Am I outside it? Yes, maybe I am. Am I in superposition, between the two? Am I a wave and a particle at the same time? Black Site is inside the sphere, Black Box is outside, and Black Hole is superposition. Those are the three chapters. It’s like a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis. Black Hole is the synthesis.
JF: And then you have divided the three themes onto the three floors.
NS: Yes, except Black hole was subdivided into two parts—because this chapter had two sections. So it got two floors. The first part is about distortions, or perhaps you can call it the rule superpositionality in politics and society: Post-truth, in culture, politics, and so on. How longstanding frames of reference or modes of identity are disturbed by the Internet and data flux. I was writing about this during the end of the Trump times, with the Capitol riots and QAnon emerging. So, conspiracies play a part in it.
The second part of the chapter engages with a deeper distortion or unsettling of what may be called biology. Anything that can be digitized can be analyzed by digital tools, including powerful AIs. You can do gene editing now, just as you do video editing. Now, with the generative AIs, you can train them on data sets of scanned cultural artefacts, ancient artefacts, and then they’ll dream up new artefacts. Works by Nora Al-Badri, Juan Covelli and various others feature here. We’re talking about about monsters of AI, and monstrous politics. A Frankenstein’s monster that is the literal ‘undeath’ of cultural heritage.
It just so happened that at KW we have two floors that are connected by a void, so I thought it was nice to spread this section between them.
JF: And then there’s this yellow metal tray that appears on each floor, connecting everything. It pops out of the wall, runs along the floor, climbs up over a balcony, and then goes into the wall.
NS: Yes, it's like a meme in the show. It’s a bit like a snake; the game of Snake on your phone. It carries electrical cables and ethernet cables all the way to the top floor, eventually, where it plugs into a server. That server is an artwork by Eva and Franco Mattes, and it also hosts an another artwork—by Vladan Joler—within it, on a peer-to-peer torrent network. You have to be in that torrent network to download the artwork. So, you have a kind of hidden artwork that exists in another realm of being the cloud that’s actually in the server. It’s another black box.
JF: And when you have these three themes, these three divided floors, do you consider each floor as a new opening? Is there an opening work on each floor?
NS: We have entrances on either side of the gallery, and I want people to go in from one side and exit from the other. The way the works are placed, and also the temporary walls, tend to push you from one to the other. But there’s nobody stopping you from doing it the other way around. By design, I privilege entrance on a particular side of the room, but I realize that you have to be able to enter it from opposite and still have a coherent experience. The works you first encounter aren't necessarily the main works of the gallery.
JF: Would you ideally have blocked one entrance?
NS: No, because for me, putting the audience on a path, forcing them to go down that path and not deviate from it so radically that the path is unnoticed, is the point. It’s the only way to build a dramaturgy, a narrative, or an argument, whatever you want to call it, in a group show of that size. I guess I was influenced by Ilya Kabakov’s thinking on ‘the total installation’, which he calls describes as ‘the dictatorship of the viewer’. You can go and have your own free experience somewhere else. In my exhibition, I’m all over you.
JF: You’re the Virgil.
NS: I think that’s what you come for. It’s also where a curator adds value, especially in a group show. You add the value by setting up sequences of encounters, and modulating how the viewer arrives at an artwork. In part, you are offering the service of spatial management.
JF: Spatial management. I think it’s a good term.
NS: But the works exist on their own. What’s a curator for? Okay, I selected them, fine. But the next order of business is to shape how the works are encountered. And if you’ve got many, many works, then they cannot be encountered all at the same time. They’re going to be encountered one by one.
But who decides which one comes first and which one next? Again, this idea of a radical freedom so a viewer can ping-pong around, I just don’t like it. I don’t find it as interesting as a curator to allow this, because I get less to do. I’m trying to keep busy, intellectually, in this life, and I want to add some value.
I devise a precise route for the viewer. Take the ride.
JF: That’s also why I asked: when there are two entrance points, two exit points, then you have less control.
NS: Think of it as a tunnel. Okay, go in the tunnel from one side, come out the other, or vice versa. You are still in a straight line somehow. There’s still a line.
JF: People can interact from both points, but you have controlled both experiences.
NS: Everything between it is laid out in a sort of line. Maybe it’s a serpentine line, or a line with some paths that fork off from it, that go to dead ends. But it’s not a full-on network. It’s a tree. It’s not a net. Thinking about network diagrams, I just like it that way. I get more out of it.
And funnily, I said, take the ride. Actually, my most perceptive review was in Texte zur Kunst by Stephanie Diekmann. She said, ‘Where the ghost train ends, the cabinet of curiosities begins’. That’s a real, shrewd line on the show. Yes, it’s kind of a ghost train, you’re on a ride. It's a sequence of encounters. Not an open space.
JF: I completely agree. I think that’s the purpose of curators, in some sense.
NS: For this kind of thing, yes. But solo shows are very different. You work with the artist in a much more intensive way. I provide a different kind of service. There are moments in the big group show, during commissioning process, where you do that. But part of the fun is also just having your wicked way with the objects, not having to answer to anyone. I wouldn’t call it meta-artwork, but it is work with art on a meta level.
JF: Should we strike the word curator and make it into a spatial manager? Because curator is also… You can be a curator DJ, or like a shop window curator, or…
NS: No, I would never do that. I don’t want to use the word spatial manager as a title. I care a lot about the architecture of the exhibition. Whatever space I deal with gives me cues as to how I can work with it, especially in KW. It’s a peculiar building. It has these different little nooks and crannies. It’s not rationalized, not a cube, and I think I prefer this. I find being interesting much less challenging when the architecture is imperfect. A fully modular cuboid suggests stirs the imagination less.
JF: You take all these elements into consideration and accept the, let’s say, weirdness or charm of these spatial challenges.
NS: Yes. It’s totally where it all begins. How do we create a great start here? And where do we go from there? I believe in site-specific curating. Everything has to do with the site, and how the space is managed. Or, should I say, handled.
JF: Why handled?
NS: Because management suggests a degree of remove, whereas, as I said, if it has imperfections or weird features, then you have to actually get to grips with them. You have to really get in touch with them, somehow, in your exhibition design.
JF: You talked about the cue. It can be a spatial experience, but it can also be the cue, like the title of the exhibition. How do you deal with titles? Do they need to be a cue for the experience?
NS: For sure, a title is important. I like short titles. While theoretically I am completely open to various possibilities, in practice I tend to favour two-word titles. I enjoy titles that play with existing terms, phrases or names, offering multiple interpretations. I often borrow titles from other sources and infuse them with new meanings. I did a buried exhibition. It was called Treasure of Lima, A Buried Exhibition. The first part, Treasure of Lima, was the name of a historical buried treasure on the island where I buried my exhibition.
JF: Tell me more about this exhibition. What is the Treasure of Lima?
NS: I buried an exhibition on an uninhabited Pacific island that is famous for being a place where real historical buried treasures are buried. The most famous of is called the Treasure of Lima, and it comprises gold, jewels, and all these plundered artefacts that the Spanish took from colonial Peru. When Simon Bolivar’s troops were threatening to overrun the capital, Lima, the Spanish gave it to a sea captain, supposedly working for them, to take somewhere else. He was supposed to sail it to a safer place. Anyway, he and his crew killed the priests and the soldiers who were supposedly guarding it, on their ship, and absconded. They buried the treasure a place called Cocos Island. Many people looked for it.
This project is interesting to talk about, in terms of exhibition design, because it’s all about designing an exhibition narrative. My idea was to bury an exhibition, but I borrow the name of the historical treasure for part of my title. I called my project Treasure of Lima, A Buried Exhibition. Whenever you google Treasure of Lima, instead of just finding out about this historical hoard of buried gold, you also discover that there’s another potential treasure buried there.
My project had a lot to do with conservation of the marine environment. You can read about it in the On Curating journal, issue 50, in my essay ‘Errant Curating’. Anyway, by borrowing the name you introduce a conversation about what constitutes real value—as there is a tension between the value of buried gold versus the value of the island’s ecosystem, etc. I like borrowing titles.
I also like to borrow titles that are normally technical terms, but which offer other possible affordances.
I recentlty curated an online exhibition about the a cultural impact of AI for the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. I called it Convolutions. A convolutional layer is part of neural networks used in image-generation. This convolutional layer allows for this production of more and more image content that ends up in the culture, perhaps scrambling the culture and making our reading of what’s going on, what’s important, more convoluted. So you see, convolution is a technical process, but it can also be used to describe a cultural situation that I hope my exhibition speaks about. I like this kind of bivalence—titles that operate on two levels.
I’m all about burial. I’m all about buried layers, hidden layers.
JF: The buried exhibition is intriguing in the fact that nobody will witness it. I’m not sure if you revealed the contents before burying it, or how artists were involved in the process? I guess it’s possible that someone might discover it eventually, but the intention is not immediate visibility. This sounds a bit like The Antarctic Biennale that you did?
NS: Yes. They’re all projects about how you exhibit the hidden. Poetics of Encryption addresses the question of how artists talk about hidden dimensions of our technological landscape, the dimensions that they are unable to access because they’re not specialists, or because these aspects are hidden from them and us by corporations and governments that don’t want you to know, even though they want to know all about you. How do artists talk about hidden dimensions of technology? What is reserved?
The Antarctic Biennale, which was my major project before this, asks: what does it mean to have a biennale without an audience, in a place that most people would never go to? This was an extension of burying the exhibition, which was focused on what it means to actually exhibit artworks that no one sees. Can it be called an exhibition? It's a buried exhibition. I had around 40 wonderful artists, some really big names, Marina Abramovic, Carsten Nicolai, Ed Ruscha, Pierre Huyghe and more. The invite was, I’d like an artwork of yours. I’m going to dig a hole in the ground. I’m going to bury it, and no one is ever going to see it – and that’s why they all agreed.
JF: Did you have a scale for the artwork? Could it be any size?
NS: I commissioned what I guess you could call a contemporary treasure chest – I call it an exhibition architecture. It was this stainless-steel form that looked a lot like the rhomboid from Durer’s Melencolia. I wanted it to look like a cross between a hard drive and a nuclear bomb. It opens up like a geometric oyster; inside it there is this glass sphere, and inside it there are these little aluminium boxes for hard drives, LP records, works on paper, things like that. It was vacuum-sealed. They all agreed to it because it was such an odd and interesting proposition.
In fact, it was exactly the thing a curator is not supposed to do: to put the artworks in a metaphorical box of your own, and overlay them with so much meaning; to bury them in so much input from the curator that the artworks are unseen. Literally bury them in the curator’s ego. This is doing everything a curator is not supposed to do. And then I dug the hole.
JF: I was like, how can this be a secret if it’s that big?
NS: It’s on an island that is 500 nautical miles offshore, in the Pacific. You have to sail for four days in a motorboat to get there. It’s a national park of Costa Rica. It’s illegal to go onshore because it’s super biodiverse. I buried an exhibition in a secret location, on an island that’s illegal to visit, in the middle of the ocean. But this is the point: We took the GPS coordinates of where it was buried and gave them to an artist called Constant Dullaart, and he worked with a cryptographer to encrypt them, and the result was an 8,000-character cipher. That is a code. And that cipher was 3D printed as a steel scroll, almost like a printing block.
Then we cedrea a second copy of the chest, and we took it to auction in New York and sold it for nearly a quarter of a million dollars. But the buyer didn’t get the key to decrypt it. They bought an unreadable map to an exhibition on an island that’s illegal to visit, and they don’t know where it is. We then used the money to establish a shark research and conservation project, to observe and learn about how the sharks use the marine environment around the island. The show was about making everything visible, except art:
It was about making the history of the island visible. The human history of the island; discourse around buried treasure. It was about making visible the ecology, the biodiversity, of the island. It was about making the conservation regulations around the island visible. And it was about making the economy around conservation visible. And then it was also about making the power of money visible, because if you can buy something like that, you can probably hire a boat and try to look for it. It’s about the collector making their choice as to whether to keep it in trust or not visible. And it’s about, as I said, a productive misfiling in the historical archive; about making discourse concerning the value of the island’s biodiversity part of any conversation around the value of what might be buried there.
The second part of the title, A Buried Exhibition, is a sort of question. Is the exhibition open, so to speak, only while the box buried? Is it that we see everything else because the artworks are hidden? If someone came and actually opened the box, the exhibition would be closed. The situation, the intellectual situation, would be closed down. It was a kind of conceptual game of a certain sort. It is a core project for me, and it’s the one the fewest people know about. Why? Because I put it in a place no one can see it. I’ll show you pictures.
JF: But I guess you used social media to talk about this project, and in that sense, made an opening?
NS: Yes. I don’t think we used social media enough. We told the press, and I wrote an article about it for The Guardian. The Financial Times wrote about it. We should have done a book, but somehow, sadly, the book ended up only existing online. Treasure of Lima: A Buried Exhibition. Yes.
JF: So, it’s about the stories we tell about an exhibition, as much as what’s in it.
NS: Yes.
JF: It seems like a big expedition. It must also have been quite costly to fundraise and produce all this. All for something that’s invisible.
NS: Yes. That’s the perversity of it. I was curator for an expedition vessel called the Dardanella, which was owned by a foundation called TBA21. They have the Ocean Space in Venice. I was the curator of the TBA21-Academy, and I wrote the concept for Ocean Space when I was there. But you can see, from these three projects that we spoke about, I am really interested in the empty centre. How much information, how much drama, how many images, how many stories can swirl around an empty centre?
The productive power of a void is interesting to me. That’s why I often think about black holes, because it’s not just about them consuming everything, including light. They actually emit X-rays. It turns out that things can come out of black holes. This is a recent revelation in astrophysics. Yes, I’m fascinated by the concept of emptiness.
JF: What about Antarctica? Because that’s putting a lot of artists on a boat. Using the boat as a laboratory, a production studio. And then they placed the objects or the works on these different locations.
NS: Or they did performances. Yes.
JF: But in this case as well, no audience would see it.
NS: The concept for it was that the audience was the participants. The artists, and the scientists, and philosophers who were there, just them. Then there was documentation. There were two films made about it. One was made by a Spanish director called Denis Delestrac, and it went out in a couple of festivals. It was called Captain’s Dream. I didn’t like the title, by the way, but he was independent. We invited him. He came along. He made the film he wanted to make. He made it a little bit about the personality of my collaborator. He’s a larger-than-life Russian artist called Alexander Ponomarev. The other film was made by a woman called Leona Ivanova Johansson, and that was more from the inside.
Essentially, we exhibited to each other, and then we came home and told stories about it. Every sea journey is really, in the end, an opportunity to have stories to tell on land.
JF: And the storytelling, the dispersion, or the way of spreading the word, of course it could have been done digitally.
NS: It is, too, but I guess I’m best at the verbal. Until I was at an institution like KW, a proper institution, organizing PR for an independently initiated project was always been quite challenging. PR-ing something is a full-time job, and if you’re producing and curating and you’re on site, it's very hard to do all of those things at once, under the resources that you have. These projects are not cheap. But on the other hand, we had the bare minimum to realize them. Everything was stretched to breaking point in Antaractica, and in the end, it was still an independent project made by enthusiasts. You learn. You get better as you go. But I think the idea with all these kinds of things is that maybe they’re not as available. They’re a rumour as much as they’re a an open book.
JF: The exhibitory rumour, that’s a great image.
But one thing I was thinking about; I know that Poetics of Encryption is going to Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, and that’s of course a very different space. For starters, it’s only one floor. How can you deal with that? Will there be the same dictatorship in relation to the path you walk?
NS: Yes, I thought about that a lot. At first, I thought I might have to reimagine the whole show, just do something totally new. And then I came to the conclusion that I want to try to recreate the sequence from KW as much as possible, to the point where, at least in the opening couple of rooms, I’m recreating the same turns left and right that you had at KW. I realized that the beginning is where I set up the vibe. So, I’ll be recreating a little bit of that.
JF: So people will get the same opening, the same beginning.
NS: I think the opening is the important bit, and then it’s going to change. The opening two rooms are the only places where I’m putting partition walls into the space, because I don’t want to put partitions throughout all of the Kunsthall’s huge, beautiful rooms. The ceiling there of floats too far above everything. You can’t build all the way to the top. Again, you want to work with the architecture … So, it’s only in those first two rooms that I’m adding walls. Because I want you to have a tight, dark, labyrinth-like sequence at the beginning, so you feel controlled.
JF: It makes complete sense, I think. But it is a quite difficult space, because they are high ceilings, and no matter how you work with them, or build walls there, it just doesn’t function so well.
NS: If you don’t close partition walls with a ceiling then you feel like you’re in an art fair. That I can’t have, so I’ll be putting a lid on it. You’ll only know that you’re in a passageway. You won’t feel the rest of the room. And then you’ll emerge and feel the room at some point. That’s the only way to do it.