“We are the Guestgiver.”
The Inexhaustible Joy and Desire for Spaces
Anna-Sophie Springer in conversation with Helga Blocksdorf, member of the ‘architectural band’ après-nous from Berlin about collaboration and their latest project fitting room in a former haberdasher’s in Downtown Manhattan in March 2007
Sophie: “We are knots in a net, knots, in which threads are coming together and dispersing. The position of each knot shifts incessantly according to the intensity of the information which is received and emitted. The entire net sways and dandles, densifying at some places whilst stretching thinner at others. Such a society is a nomadic society. Yet, its pivotal point is that it is constructed from knots, that is, from relations; and hence, that it is a relational field and that what is concrete about this society is not any individual but indeed the very relation. That which once was called the ‘I’, the ‘identity’, the ‘self’ emerges as crosspoint of relations. I am – whatever I am – in relation to others. ‘I’ is what is addressed as ‘you’.” .Vilém Flusser.
You are three women working together as après-nous, can you spontaneously think of something, an experience, to relate this quote to in your collaborative practice?
Helga: Spontaneously, I think we are in the process of our work three knots. Three times an ‘I’ but in the result we are only one ‘I’ for example we have three reasons for working together but the outcome is one room.
S: “‘We’ is always inevitably ‘us all’, where o one of us can be ‘all’ and each of us is, in turn, the other origin of the same world.” Jean-Luc Nancy.
Could you describe the different reasons briefly? Your background is in architecture, how about the two others? Should I call you colleagues?
H: (1) Yes, we are colleagues. We met at the University of the Arts in Berlin where we all studied together.
(2) I would say that Catharina’s reason is the idea to realize a project without having a boss or a necessity, an externally determined purpose. With respect to herself, in that sense, though, she usually says that she is not the collaborative type at all. Florence loves the aspect of temporality and ephemerality in our work. My reason is more the idea of doing something, which is somehow related to Catharina, but more in the way that one should take the freedom to say something, to be present in society and at best to share this. Therefore, open our spaces…
S: So you become ‘differently’ in the collaborative process? You enter it and what emerges is yet another ‘knot’ … because you all open up to one another?
H: Yes. For me the collaboration gives me safeness, to have an internal circle where I am free to think about everything without judging the outcome. I trust both of them and both are reliable in what they do.
S: So no one is the boss? But that surely won’t mean that all are always on the same level… one will have an idea but then someone else is going to disagree. Can you talk about how you negotiate your ideas? Describing the process of thinking together. How does a project evolve? Maybe you could do that along the most recent one, fitting room?
H: Yes, that is easy! Somehow I tend to often be the first one to express thoughts in a very associative way. So I often say what I’ve got on my mind without thinking. Then Catharina will say ‘no’. Catharina often disagrees with my thoughts and asks me: “Why do see it like this…?” Florence is a very good mediator while maintaining her own point of view at the same time…
For example in the project fitting room, I was the girl in New York sending emails with free associations of what I had seen there. But the written text was so chaotic that Florence protested she had not the nerve for these mails in which I rambled about stuff just like I would be speaking; in a sort of stream of consciousness. She didn’t know NYC from experience and so it was hard for her to imagine the world I was moving around in during my stay there. All the more so since I was telling about it so chaotically.
Both Catharina and Florence were working a lot these days. They had to make a much bigger effort to make sufficient room for the project than I who had so much free energy. But of course they did and did it well. They met in person to mull over my mails. Eventually, I would receive their answer from Berlin with a very nice little story that they had made from my rather random impressions. Not in the sense, though, that they would have simply tidied up what I had thrown at them. It works like this: the three of us have associations, images in mind, which we tell to the other ones. These ideas usually circulate once, twice, and we discuss them, really, in equality. In such a situation of exchange do we stitch this ‘narrative’ together to one idea.
S: You play ping-pong with ideas? Or, rather, is it a snowball?
H: Yes, but more in the way that we play ping-pong with our feelings concerning a question and the project is the condensation.
S: …feelings… so intuition is important…or do you mean that the process is very emotional, that you work each other up emotionally? That sounds quite stressful!
H: Yes, it is emotional in that intuition is strongly involved and also in the sense that we attempt to digest all the rest of our ‘slavery life’ in the money-world.
Often, when we meet we talk to 90 percent about our private situations. Where we stand in life in general. So we love to dwell on the meaning of a certain question. We indulge in the three answers…
So for instance, for what reasons should we realize a work in Manhattan? What would it mean to us? And how would such a project change our private life during that time?
For example, when we were working in NY we had to laugh about ourselves: How crazy to jump out of the architectural office just to sit in the winter cold in an empty shop space in downtown Manhattan to cut dirty old cardboard for fourteen days in a row…
S: I’ve written a section on skin as the membrane between outside and inside, the fluid boundary between intimacy and the buzz of the world…
H: Yes, exactly we have our inside like a family.
S: And with it [the family] you go on ‘holiday’ from your everyday lives?
H: Yes.
S: Somehow I’m just imagining you guys as a sort of heterogeneous cell with a membrane towards the outside: each of you in sensitive connection with the outside, New York for example, the tough life in your architectural practice… Inside you transform the impressions and finally ’spit’ them out again…
What kind of questions do you ask then?
H: Well, I think lots of them serve as a mirror to what we work and live. (1) We build everything with our own hands in counterpoint to spending the whole day sitting in front of the computer.
S: …an inflected mirror…
H: (2) We work without a contract, or an assignment imposed on us from the outside. That contrasts the daily task in the office. (3) We have no one to work for. We call this après-travaille.
S: It seems like with après-nous you have found a space in which values may mean differently. “How to live a life?” seems the underpinning question. You step sideways and offer an opening for other possibilities… you temporarily leave your money-earning work… time seems an issue.
H: Yes, to give us the freedom to experiment! And then eventually there emerges this ‘bar’, which is designed in a particular way. And the experiment goes into the ‘second round’…
S: This ‘bar’ as the installation when it stands?
H: Yes, we sell drinks to finance the project in the tradition of the Berlin-illegal-bar concept.
S: So why do you not just open a bar?
H: That also opens up your private life a lot, very refreshing…
We do not like the idea of serving, though. Maybe this is the only really clearly feminist aspect in the work.
We sell the beer to a relatively high prize to compensate serving it… (Careful, don’t miss the irony in this. Till that day us three had never talked about the term ‘feminist’.)
But it is important for us to get something back from our guests.
S: Nicolas Bourriaud, the kind of god-father of what he termed ‘relational aesthetics’ wrote: “Through little services rendered, the artists fill in the crack in the social bond.”
H: In that way it would be possible to call ourselves artists?
S: Which you wouldn’t normally do?
H: Only in New York.
S: And otherwise?
H: Maybe an architectural band.
S: Why band?
H: We play for friends. Girlsband.
S: …pleasure…
H: YES and rock´n roll…
S: …fun.
When, in a talk he gave, Vito Acconci was asked what he thought about ‘relational aesthetics’, he had no idea what the term meant and someone had to explain it to him. Although comparable in what they do, architectural projects like yours too do seem to be coming from a different entry point.
What happens at your concerts…gigs?
H: Well, it’s like a living room. The whole collaboration started in wintertime, winter in Berlin… so everybody was invited to come along and to jump into our small space. The guests really like this aspect. Over the years it became a place to meet without special invitation and you can come whenever you want and for sure you will get to know somebody nice or run into an old friend…
S: …from hectic lives, tough lives into cosiness.
You put very much effort into the design of the spaces. It’s almost as if you were involved in a meticulous making of a little world-within-a-world. Do you consider its making ever as close to finished, like, when you have done all the physical building work in the space, the planning, painting and lining? Or is what comes next just equally part of the process? The people who come make up an inherent part of the whole thing to take effect?
H: The room seems completed, or ready with our ‘design’. But it only works through the guests. Maybe for a picture in a design magazine it would be enough but that’s senseless in our perception….
We want to fill it with life and share this with friends. The room without the guests would be dead.
S: Yes. In New York they could even spread pieces from the room out into the city.
H: The guests tell us if the space works indirectly by how they ‘invade’ it, take it over.
S: Has it ever not worked?
Do you have expectations as to how it should work? I mean, besides meeting nice people.
H: Somehow it is important for people that they don’t feel uncomfortable in a less populated room. When a room appears ‘empty’ it makes people feel awkward.
So we try to make the spaces in ways that they also work with only a few guests inside. That means somehow there is a shared responsibility between your effort, the building, making of the space, and the guest. Especially in the beginning when the guest is still a sort of spectator, checking out what’s there, getting a feel for what can be done.
We fill the space with activity, like listening to people reading, playing games or, like in the last project, taking out pieces of the room to connect them with ‘your part of Manhattan’.
That gives the event a sense and the day its ‘now’. There is an emphasis on the present, a pragmatic positioning of presence. Uniqueness emerges from the specific connections and small incidents that take place in the space. Present is also always fleeting. So we like to play out on this ephemerality.
By sharing activities and exchanging experience we ask “What is friendship?” on different levels. So we try to transmit something from our lives to the people who come to us and then we get something back.
S: Yes, performance and subjective realities, intersubjektive realities… Let me tie on to the notion of the ephemeral: I’m interested in hearing something about Verwandlung. Could you say anything about metamorphosis, transformation?
Because, at first the work is about the three of you; you are turning inwards; towards each other. You have to open yourselves for the others, so that something new, other can come about (1). Then you change rooms, spaces, a former leather shop for instance, or the haberdasher (2). And (3) you engage in relationships with people, your guests, by integrating them into the discussion, or by offering a space for actions, which somehow make a difference to their daily routine.
H: (1) For me transformation begins as the process of projecting your thoughts into space. This is for me essential in architecture. The three of us, as we are all architects, do speak the same language in this respect. We are definitely colleagues there.
Transformation for me is embodiment: only by doing the building-work does it attain visibility and expressivity. Therein lies the exposition into the public realm… which brings us back to the notion of presence.
Insofar, architecture is a means to express my thoughts. This is the meaning of architecture for me.
S: Wait! “[T]he body is lost outside of the world and its goals, fascinated by the unique occupation of floating in Being with another life, of making itself the outside of the inside and the inside of the outside.” That’s Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
H: Beautiful!
S: Yes. OK and more concretely, when you exchange your ideas concerning New York, as the product of this process there will be the fitting room. Which thoughts become manifest?
H: For example, to take something that has been thrown away and to turn it into something valuable – valuable in the sense of aesthetics. The old story of how to act in that money-dominated city, equally, how to act in the world.
S: Yes, you flipped the value and look for ways of self-determination. So a cardboard, an old cast away cardboard, gets a new meaning, a new outfit.
H: But the first thought is that aesthetics is valuable and we demand the freedom to create it according to our interpretation.
S: …in a haberdasher…
H: Yes, we liked the haberdasher and the girls inside.
H: Also, because we ‘tailored’ the dress to fit with our own hands and the guests could change it again.
S: The furniture or the walls?
H: No, the walls, therefore the folds. The folding walls were only fixed at the edges, in the corners of the room and everybody could pull the walls in his or her direction. That also means you can increase or decrease the size of the interior according to how many people are there.
S: …breathing walls…
H: Yes, although in architecture this is forbidden as a technical term.
S: Oh, that’s funny. But for you that’s still allowed because you’ve got no boss!
H: Yes, that’s right.
The walls are also a reference to, well, for playing with the idea of fitting a dress…
S: When you’re too fat you’ve to draw in your tummy.
H: Haha.
S: More about transformation? Do you change along with your project?
H: We grow somehow in a nice way. In creative work it is good to come to realizations about things. You can go further afterwards.
S: So you sort of push your own boundaries. Do you have a concrete example? What have you found out at some point and then the next experience was different?
H: The boundaries of size and material, for instance. Also concerning collaboration, for example. The next project will be together with a Dutch team and in the open air. So two challenges!
For example, we found out that it is good to have a strict line between the guests and us. In the beginning, we asked just for a donation at the end of the evening. But this does not work. It is much better to sell each beer clearly – changing a good against money, somehow the holy rule, which always works – and one’s work is the context in which the guest is willing to give away what he has himself earned… So we learned that it is good to make this clear and transparent. Other rules like where to sit and what to do we can freely suggest.
S: That’s really interesting: on the one hand your work is motivated as a search for other ways to move in the money-world. On the other hand, you have found out that the only way to ‘do it’ is by sticking to this ‘holy rule’…
I was about to drop you another quote: “We are all utopians as soon as we wish for something different.” Henri Lefebvre; because I wanted to ask what you think about the distinction, blurring of art and life. Utopia stands for something that is outside the real. But then, that can’t really change anything for real.
H: Well, I think I could not survive the ‘real’ without the ‘other’.
S: Yes. But probably it’s not necessary to make such a strict distinction…(anymore)
H: This is grounded in all the rules the ‘real’ imposes on you, even ‘be creative’ can be a rule that’s valid in the sense of a fashion, a commodity. Well, I guess, in this sense, it again comes down to money. It’s the money that makes the distinction…
S: With respect to transformation and impact, I’m just thinking that you as a tripart knot are yourselves also entangled in that net…that is, also you are being affected and acted upon by the circumstances.
Earlier, you said that you refused “to serve”. I tried to hook into this by quoting Bourriaud about the relationship between certain artistic practices and the service industry. Perhaps, we could pick up on that now. You are quite troubled by the capitalist logics and power structures. At the same time you have found out that certain dynamics are pragmatically necessary and you say this clearly. So instead of trying to formulate a new ideology, you shift into the gaps you find? An empty shop in Berlin and you adopt it to bring it back to life?
H: Maybe this is the effect of our development. We were never the ideological discussion group. On the contrary. We met at the University of the Arts in Berlin. In our days, it was a traditional art school but with a lot of free available space and at the same time with a very old teaching staff. So you could almost perform anything to get your credits. Looking back, this is still a great stimulus for me because this thrown-ness into freedom forced us to figure out how to learn by ourselves. When we left university, we decided to construct the first small project on our own, the après-ski. It contained all our principles from the beginning. For us, the party aspect always overlapped with pondering the meaning of the room or the evening. …and, maybe, the question “How to learn?” is still with us.
S: When you read about collaborative and participatory practices, it’s usually assumed that the artist and the audience, or performers, overlap to different degrees. The people who come to take part in a project are invited to take part in the work within a more or less designated frame. Until then the work remains essentially unfinished. We’ve already spoken about this at different moments. But since you just mentioned that establishing a “border between the guests and us” is an important thing you understood through doing projects.
H: Yes, we are the ‘guestgiver’ [the literal translation of the German Gastgeber]: the hosts. We especially dress for that. Well, maybe I could put it like this: when you enter a house you have an inclination to say “hello” to the ‘hosts’. That assigns you as the guest your place. I think we all are searching for our place. So the border is helpful for that. In the same way as we search for and negotiate our place by realizing projects.
S: There are these concepts ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’; pushing boundaries.
H: De and re?
S: Finding new places – territories – drawing circles around them. Continuing to push out again…
H: And how re?
S: …opening – temporarily closing - opening again…
H: OK.
I’ve just reread what you wrote about ‘playfulness as a mode of thinking’. So you are asking whether it is possible to dissolve the boundaries between real and unreal when we are playful. Now I’ll give you a quote, too: “Tomorrow is another word for today.” William Faulkner.
S: “Within the dream the dreamer is usually unaware that he is dreaming, and within ‘play’ he must often be reminded that ‘This is play.’” Gregory Bateson.
You did explicitly involve playing in la boule. Is playfulness ever an issue in your discussions?
H: Hmm, I think rather only indirectly as we play our ‘game’. No, I think we have never really talked about it as a subject. It seems a matter of course.
S: Yes, this is probably a difference between theory and practice – and I can try to deal ever so playfully with my text and the way of thematizing things…
H: Playfulness… playfulness, for me, really has to do with ‘how to learn’ or, as you say, that ‘experience is irreducible’. I believe that this is something we all three truly share: that we learn by ‘doing it’ and hence through the very experience. In architecture, ‘seeing’, I would say, matters most. Namely in the sense that one becomes, principally, open to see what makes a place special and then to express, underscore this peculiarity with your thoughts. I believe that this is how we play. And the pleasure of it extends then over the many ‘rounds’ which this game has: first, the seeing, then the thinking, next the constructing and building, and finally the ‘opening it for the guests’. Only after all this do we reflect the process and we understand how many – in the beginning, purely additively imagined parts like the material, the name, our dresses – how these activities all flow together, forming a whole as if coincidentally.
S: Actually, I would really like to hear more about how it is to do collaboration and this challenge of opening up.
H: For this opening, what’s really crucial there, is arriving somewhere. Not in the sense of an aim that we’ve to reach. More in the sense of simply asking: “How is it going just now?” Really, arriving, landing somewhere is important in everything, work, privately… as I said, making this possible takes up about 90 percent. Over the years this is how we’ve become friends.
Then, there’s the thinking about a project by associating freely. You mustn’t get annoyed about how the others are; that I often just burst out with a maybe random idea; or that it takes forever till Catharina really says what’s wrong.
A lot of practical decisions will eventually be made in the way of doing stuff. So for example Florence’s wish to sew the leathercloth lengthwise. On that boule alley it turned out to only be possible crosswise.
So there’s the realization, shaped over the years, that one can wait and see because a lot will turn out differently anyway. It’s impossible to foresee it all. And that’s where Florence is really great again. She has such a deep trust in our energy. I am often full of doubts. Catharina has the quality to be unconstrained by conventions. She can imagine well outside of common patterns.
S: …you complement each other…
H: In New York, I was terribly bothered by the sand coloured carpet…
S: …the space affects, operates you as much as you transform it…
H: …because it stood in no contrast to the cardboard. Merely aesthetic worries as Catharina made clear and she emphasized again that what really matters much, much more is the process.
S: Namely how the threads run?
H: Yes!
That we are there [New York] in the first place; that we gather material from the street; that we fit it into a space which hence becomes from this; that the stuff is then being spilled back into the city through our guests; and, most importantly, that we all learn something about this city by seeing it with different eyes; and, moreover, that also we are guests in this city, in the same way as we are guests in this world through our work.
S: You are ‘guest-workers’! …you seek contact with reality and explore what’s possible within the given context. And as architects you have of course the right feelers to stretch out into the city.
H: City is as much construction as society in which finding a place is at stake.
S: Rearrangment is allowed, and making connections…
H: …which is the very ‘place’ of one’s own….
S: But this ‘own’ is never anything solid, fixed?
H: No, not yet at least. Meanwhile I can imagine that the three of us would build something solid, I mean a real house. That’s also part of the experience of expanding the boundaries. So far, the concrete has been the continuity of our working together as our ‘friends-family’. That’s been quite sufficient.
S: “Home is not an eternal value, but rather a function of a certain technique […] A home is how I find myself in the world.” Vilém Flusser again.
H: Yes, very much so!
S: How do you imagine this house you just mentioned?
H: You mean the real one?
S: Yes, and don’t give me an answer in square metres.
How would it participate in shaping society?
H: That is very exciting as it would have to integrate our tendency to be reasonable with our inclination to expressivity and interpretation. In terms of function and simplicity of our projects, for instance, we always only use one material per space. But then we really try to go as far as possible with it.
Maybe a good way of finding out how this house would turn out would again be a revelation ‘in the making’. We have been designing and building for about six years for others, in offices, and I think each of us already has a very specific opinion about a window. So it would be a completely new field for the three of us.
Or were you rather after something more visionary?
S: In your projects, you want people to meet, it’s about altering the everyday, about friendships, about being alive through exchanges instead of slaving away in front of a computer. Would your house pick up on these ideas?
H: Hmm. Since we always start out from the givenness of the situation, we would have to first go exploring the environment, figure out a task and interpret it. So the development would very much be a matter of context. Furthermore, I think that there is always a collective value in clearing a place, in awarding it with a spatial quality, in improving it. (This is how all other architects also think about themselves and their work.)
I would find it more intriguing if the perception of a place would tilt and shift because we have added something. That’s what’s in it for me. Furthermore, to perform those rooms by which…
S: …a field for action is opened…
H: …we gain an architectural vocabulary which we then can put to the test.
That is the question which we have heard oftentimes, indeed: “So what is it then that you do? A bar, an installation or a social project?”
For me, this is all pretty balanced and it lives from always being answered, or reinterpreted differently again.
Everything together. Discussing the jamming of these different knots is the most interesting thing of all.
S: Well, a regular bar also serves as a place for contact in a neighbourhood, or used to maybe, nowadays, with myspace, facebook and the like, proximity works differently. But since your spaces are installed only temporarily and with a theme, the invitation to enter into a space for experience and ideas exists more pronouncedly. I mean, in the corner pub you can also enjoy good fun and converstations. But less probably with or through the pub itself.
H: Yes, and an act of thinking can be ignited the better when something is not so strictly defined – art, or architecture, or social work?
And still, in the beginning was architecture. That’s where we met and that’s the language we speak.
S: Finally, friendship is a great notion. As such, but definitely also for après-nous.
H: Friendship for me is the reflection of one in the other and then you see things and therefore you see farther than before. Shall I give an example? Perhaps it would be enough to go back to the long discussion about that sand coloured carpet. Of course we all saw that the cardboard was needing a contrast in order for their own very different shades and colours to become visible. We went to the organizers of the swingspace programme and asked whether we could paint the carpet white. The charming answer of Hendrik Gerrits was: “We would love to say no.” And to my explanation that we needed a white cube, he replied: “This is not the programme for the white cube.” The three of us laughed about this so much. Also, as I said, Catharina’s and Florence’s attitude that the process counts much more than the image (whereas you don’t even see the ‘problem’ on the photograph). Privately, there would of course be many more examples for exchange…
S: “The house will rather look like a small group of people (like a ‘family’) in which will be playing going on.” That was again from Vilém Flusser, ‘Designing Houses’.
(2.9.2007)