with Anna Tretter about workshop and exhibition, a cooperation between the Technical University Košice and Ecoles des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, 2010
*Introduction: *hello, Anna, you are an artist and professor, you founded the atelier of new media in the department of visual arts and intermedia at the Faculty of Kosice. You're here for `Feedback´ with some of your Slovak students. How do you combine these activities of artist and teacher?
Since Marta Jonville, now our curator, has been in Kosice we have spoken a lot about this aim to have this <feedback> event as a kind of goal or result out of our cooperation.
Now here we are.
It is fortunate for my teaching experience in Kosice, that I know the work of all Slovak members for feedback, and how and in what they are working.
I brought for my artistic piece here a variation of my `MonitorPoetryTalk´ project from 2001 in order to continue that concept and to transform it into a new aesthetic output.
A new written software helps me to use it to realize a kind of reminiscent conversation from the time that we shared here in Bordeaux.
Out of the experience of our communication here, I have chosen the two mottos of our realized workshops at the
- Ecole des beaux-arts: `if we can dance, we will be part of your revolution´
transformed into: ` if we can, we will be part of your dance revolution´
- and now for the TNT exhibition title `feedback´ I created the German sentence: `Feedback der Erfahrungen in Traum verwandelt´.
I feed the automatic google translater+ with it and out of it run randomly: feedback of experiences into dream, retour d'expériences dans le rêve, návrat skúsenosti snu, etc. German – English – French - Slovak, again and again and then out of this process totally new sentences appear till at the end of 36 lines, always the same sentences answer in translation.
So, this is my individual artistic intervention for situation here.
Also I think about the duration of our 24-hour exhibition as one work, a kind of focus, a choreography for common participation works in the time space between high noon, midnight till again midday, as a phenomena of time.
A clip could be for example, be made as repeating moments of the same piece. Or build it up like a movie out of cuttings and putting together moments, or like a guided quiz show in which the audience and show masters initiate and take part.
We speak and also work it out and develop it together. Nearly the whole day, we are together in TNT place to work on it for two weeks.
A group is always as strong as the individual persons who take part and its getting interesting when different characters and positions come together. We will see the result soon…
1.Question : *Anna, how did you encounter new media ?
New media is a new thinking, a working and reflecting process within the new technique.
In 1996 I made a time life installation in "Huberte Goote" gallery in Zug, Swiss. There I installed rented mirrors, for the time of the exhibition, instead of photos of the view out, face en face. At one other wall inside was the projected camera view installed outside on the roof of the building. The image of the surface of the Zuger lake appears.
My first own digital camera I bought 1997 and from this time on I have been working with it. In Poland I am started with that my bus stop documentation work.
And in the same year, I showed in Lublin, Poland and parallel in Cape Town, South Africa the same video installation `Tempo´. The same video presented in opposite places in the world. You know in south Africa the water runs out of basins in opposite directions? Just imagine that and you see it differently connected. This is not possible without capturing it by technical means.
2. Question: *Anna, how would you describe your work today?
I am still going on reflecting myself inside and my surrounding everyday experience. The world is how you look at it, you, everybody by himself is interpreter and creator of it, like a film directors’ works. So I am a visual artist and I have an inner need to work on that folio in order to realize it to survive in seeing things differently. Show a new facet, your own position of view, what you never saw before, a setting. Otherwise life is only a passing.
I mirror myself in mutual exchange with others. Open secrets that you don´t even want to know. Where is the limit of your capacity?
Mostly it is space installation that I am doing, moving video works, pictures turning around installations, in reflecting my own movement in between and while outside changing phenomena’s. Being part of the work.
Another intension is to work out site-specific concepts and realizations.
3. Question: * Anna, you teach in Kosice, can you tell us more of the new Slovak art scene?
One big difference is that in Kosice there is no public contemporary art collection. Imagine how originals like a Rothko or Barnett Newman work, f. e., or Warhol is present in ours mind. I live with that like a part of me.
In the seventies, there was a conceptual artist group with Rudolf Sikora, Juraj Bartusz, Julius Koller, Toth, Adamciak. This was a very interesting time focusing on virtual realization concepts and on performing events.
I am always interested in seeing works that I am wouldn´t be able to imagine. Sometimes it happens to me in Slovakia, for instance in Juraj Bartusz´ work of a photo series of one day in his life. And after having the print outs he had them confirmed, each by an official stamp.
They have a special humor of the surreal, I always said when somebody asked me about them.
I think new media concepts and video works are especially strong. I like the works of authors whom I selected for Donumenta in Regensburg last year.
4. Question: * Anna, are there projects dead to you that you wish telling us about ?
In December I wrote a little statement for the public press, I sent a short electronic message answering to the question why people should come to look at exhibitions by new media students in Kulturpark Kosice?
The answer is:
To learn how to see things differently and get a taste of how beautiful art is.