Florian Zeyfang and Adnan Yildiz in conversation (English/pdf)

English
THE IMMORTAL
Florian Zeyfang: Stones (Archive), HD video, 110 min., 2012
A short introduction for the solo exhibition project, “Stones/Steine” by Florian Zeyfang
Adnan Yildiz
Berlin based artist Florian Zeyfang has approached the format of solo exhibition at Künstlerhaus
Stuttgart as a chance of developing a new body of work, which was conceived during a longterm
research process. Based on archive images from the collection of Stockholms Stadsmuseum
- several thousand photos of numbered and registered stones - his new video confronts us not only
with their ontological weight of being from a city that they are not a part of anymore, as such, but
also they are absolute witnesses of human existence standing much older than us; and are immortal.
Zeyfang also presents other (moving) images of rocks that are part of a series of collections he
undertook on recent travels. Between an established form of institutional archive and an artistic
look on the stones the exhibition is built on their silence (of the stones), their potentiality of reflecting
on our existence as well as reminding us the natural fact that we have all fallen on earth... As
echoes from the history of philosophy, the images of stones - especially considering the way Florian
Zeyfang displays them - as the main actors of an almost two hour long film material made of a collection
and projections of an ongoing personal archive. Separately they refer to diverse systems,
languages, and bodies, bringing a series of flashbacks; I recall the voice of archaeology in the present
tense of the past.
Florian Zeyfang: Pebbles (Isolation), slide projection, 81 slides, 2012
According to Michel Foucault, an archive is something left behind by a particular history and/or culture.
It is a form of collecting, and traces of any kind of material can limit our perception of the time
period that they belong to. Through the archive, one can deduce the historical a priori of the period
or its episteme. In his Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault makes it clear with his statement about
how the archive surrounds our presence: “Between the language (langue) that defines the system of
constructing possible sentences, and the corpus that passively collects the words that are spoken
the archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to
emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated. It does not
have the weight of tradition; and it does not constitute the library of all libraries, outside time and
place; nor it is the welcoming oblivion that opens up to all new speech the operational field of its
freedom; between tradition and oblivion, it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements
both to survive and undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation
of statements.” 1
The collections of the stones loop in the dark filmic atmosphere of the exhibition space, where the
audience is invited to experience the abstracted form of the archive as a video installation, or projections
that move from one frame into another in silent existence. Even some of them are numbered,
and others are still kept in their natural habitat, they still do not indicate any information about their
time period – an unusual quality for an archive. They are older than us, and they are younger than
us at the same time. They have existed before us, and will surely exist after us. How long do we live?
How old do we get? How do we age?
What happens when the formation of the archive is based on something that does not allow us to indicate
any time period for it, or even if it does, the material itself disproves of the association? When
it is about the stones, time casts away. In front of them, we feel alike and different at the same time.
The stones, or rocks are composed of minerals and geology classifies, or names them according
to their origins, or the chemical composition that they have in their physical mass. Even if this does
refer to a certain time in its scientific context; it still does not say anything about its future. Like and
unlike us, they are immortal.
1
Foucault, M., The Archaeology of Knowledge, London and New York: Routledge, 2002. p. 130.

An interview with Florian Zeyfang
Adnan Yildiz: How would you introduce yourself to the
Stuttgart audience? Especially if they are familiar with
your work as a curator regarding the collaboration that
took place at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart?
Florian Zeyfang: Yes, there was an earlier appearance of mine
at the Künstlerhaus in 2007. The exhibition “1, 2, 3... Avantgardes”,
originally conceived by Lukasz Ronduda and myself for
Warsaw, took place here in a smaller, refined version thematically
reshaped together with the previous artistic director, Axel Wieder.
The focus in Stuttgart was on the architect Oskar Hansen and
his influence on art and experimental film, through his teaching
of the “Open Form” in the 1970s to young artists. His influence
Florian Zeyfang: Rocks (Naturalism), slide projection, 70 slides, 2012
lasts through today’s generation in Poland, and when I came to
Poland with my interest in experimental film and what it could
mean for us today there was so much to discover - especially
the ways experimental film and performance were used to shape
counter public protests during the Warsaw Block times. The “process-oriented
approach” you mention ended up in a nonetheless
thematically quite focused exhibition and book – at least I hope
Lukasz and I managed to achieve something specific...
For an introduction, I would have to go some years backwards, to
explain how this interest in experimental film derived from the intense
five to seven years in Berlin after the wall fell and my work
with filmmakers and artists and others in a group that didn’t want
to be an artist group. There, we discussed – next to other things
– the meaning of the many forms of documentarisms; then the
Internet broadened the discussion on “media”. I went to New
York in 1997 to make up for some missing input in Berlin’s art
education and there I was introduced to many different ideas on
art, text, and film, since the fellow artists at the Whitney Independent
Study Program came with so many different backgrounds.
During and after the WISP, I was lucky to work with great people
on two different shows, one with Annette Schindler on collective
work, another one with her and Gareth James on Jean-Luc
Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s TV and video work. For me
this was a way to continue the work between making art by way
of my own production, and by way of organizing exhibitions that
were exactly the way we as artists liked them to be. This combination
of practices continued, through my solo-work focusing on
installation-based and cinematic film/video, and in the making of
exhibitions and books, the last one conceived with Martin Ebner
and titled “Poor Man´s Expression”.
AY: For the show at the Künstlerhaus, we both agreed to
work on a long-term project that you have not finalized until
now; so, the solo exhibition operates as an experiment,
or even an open studio process based on three works with
the same approach. Maybe you can tell us how your story
with stones began?
FZ: It is a relief and a restriction at the same time: that we decided
to reject some other ideas of mine, much more “content-based”
and/or text related, and focused on the stones, an idea that has
haunted me now for some time. You maybe want to describe
yourself, how you see it like an open studio process, but I appreciate
that we are somewhat have a link here to the “Open Form”
exhibition we made about Oskar Hansen several years ago.
I stumbled upon the stone images in Norway in 2010, and actually
it was much more by way of my interest in photography
archives. So, in a way we discuss not only stones here, but also
photography, or film that matter, since all or most of the images
in the show are in flux. But how or why make a film about something
as still as a stone? I think I have not found the answer
yet, but your invitation to interpret the Künstlerhaus show as an
experiment came at the right moment.
In connection with a discussion about
my earlier work and archives, I was introduced
to images from Stockholms
Stadsmuseum through the photographer
Fredrik Sweger. Thousands of stones
from the museum’s archive were shot by
him, commissioned through an archiving
process. Stones that were part of houses,
bridges and palaces, etc., and are loaded
with the history of a city that does not exist
anymore in the same form now. Even
though the people there were extremely
helpful, it took me more then a year to get
access to the images, and they are truly
fascinating, in the range of forms, colors
and surfaces and with all the signals they
send out. The archival look isolates them
and detaches them but at the same time
sets free the imagination. And obviously,
they acquire an extremely sculptural presence
that they would never have, shoved
in between a wall and the street surface.
The observation we experience now reminds me of Ruskin’s detailed
description of the “Stones of Venice”, recorded through
drawings and writings in his famous notebooks. So, let’s call this
the man-made side of stones, but again: they seem to be telling
their own specific story by now.
Now to a completely different story even though it comes by
the same title. I realized that this was not the only thing I was
after, and became interested in stones as such, in untouched
stones. I photographed them in a very northern part on a trip
from Sweden to Norway and collected them at the Baltic Sea.
It felt very much like a German tourist, on both locations. And
how to deal with this without getting esoteric or into mysticism?
Roger Caillois once activated the term “mysticism” for himself
in quite a specific way, basing it on “matter” and the experience
it introduces, instead of religion. He was well aware of the
paradox. And for Francis Ponge in his fascinating discussion of
the “Things”, among others, the pebble, it is important to avoid
mysticism by way of naming the details one observes, and by
changing the subject often, while maintaining a certain moderate
distance... I feel I cannot really translate into English, or even
into German, what I remember him writing in the “Introduction to
a Pebble”. But he was trying to establish an enclosed description
of things that I am only starting to discover.
“The pebble is not an easy thing to define. If we content ourselves
with a simple description, we can say first of all that it is a
form or a state between a rock and a stone. But this proposition
implies a notion of stone that must be justified. I don’t want to be
accused here of going back even further than the Flood.” 1
AY: In 2008, you made a video about the books that Walter
Benjamin mentions in his leading article “A Short History
of Photography” from 1931. In terms of considering an
archive as a living form or organic body, the relationship
between that video and the recent project with stones
bring me to a clear point of view that you are interested
in the potentiality of politicizing the past, or are you? How
would you talk about it?
FZ: One would maybe talk first about “re-visiting” the past, past
ideas and images, and connecting them to contemporary discussions.
In the case of the Benjamin video, I returned to a text
that once had left a huge impression on me and tried to find a
way how to deal with it. Of course the quality of the text comes
with his words, but I found it necessary to look at the same images
and in the same form as Benjamin when he wrote the “Kleine
Geschichte der Photographie”. I found most of the books he
mentioned in the first edition – basically like Benjamin saw them
– and introduced them through a rigorous formal frame into the
video. For me that was the only way to do it, to kind of “neutrally”
look through those images. In the second part this collection
is confronted with fast images from today’s world, collected in
six “volumes” like places of production (film set and photo lab),
places of projection (Cinema and TV), Moving and Standstill, Inside
and Outside. The six volumes corresponded with the six
books that are the basis for Benjamin’s ideas.
The simple form opens up for that many ways to read the video.
Benjamin wrote the text before his famous “Artwork” essay, and
yet this was the moment when the form of looking at art was
turned into book consummation – the first catalogues gave an
overview of art history to maybe a privileged class, but still it was
far more accessible to people. And it changed its form. Not yet
considered an art form itself, it was photography that allowed
this and photography became itself subject to such historic
recording and publication. Photography wrote and shaped its
own historic appearance. Benjamin caught that moment, and so
did others, but his interest was maybe more embracing, with a
love for the subject and the book and the place, its discussions
marked them both historically and socially.
In how far does this means “politicizing the past”? Maybe it is
just a way to bring back the political approach that Benjamin
used in writing this text; he had so many forms to do that. The
“artwork in the age of reproduction” is the classic example, but
regarding my video “Introduction to a Short History of Photography”
I have been asked more in direction of his “Passages”,
the non-finished, giant collection of “convolutes” he left us with.
(Many an artist and even more art historians have commented
on, and used the Passages, and while this may be banal, they
shall forever claim the right to do so.)
This video was already much less carrying an obvious political
message than earlier work of mine, where I traced back the role
of media in relation to politics, to revolutions, to social responsibilities.
One obvious sign is that here, the text level is reduced
to a mere introduction of what follows, and then just images
are shown. They carry the politics of their time, and Benjamin’s,
and they trigger a contemporary reaction. The collection of the
archival stones I am showing here now comes without any text
in the video, and there is no sound either – how would it be
ever political, and then, looking at the stories these leftovers
and bricks and columns and lions and monsters are telling, how
can it not?
Through the projects in the last years, I have been introduced
to many forms of the making of moving images and the experiments
of the past, as different as the abstract films of Oskar
Fischinger and his contemporaries, or Dziga Vertov’s newsreels.
Cuban film told me a lot, both the films they love and those they
did not love. Then it was the history of experimental film and
there, especially the experiences in Poland, that showed me
how formal experiments can be intensely political. And through
“Poor Mans’s Expression”, the title says it, we discussed the reasons
and ideas behind the use of poor means in film, video and
other media, a very important issue, and political in itself. For
my personal approach, the stone works are an experiment to
reduce even more, to work more “poor” than before in terms of
form, but not in terms of content.
Thanks to Fredrik Sweger, Petter Smedberg, Clemens Krümmel
and Judith Hopf
1
Francis Ponge.
Schedule:
Saturday, March 17, 2012, 7pm-2am
LANGE NACHT DER MUSEEN
Exhibitions and workshops at Künstlerhaus are open.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 6pm
Curatorial Exhibition Tour with Adnan Yildiz
Thursday, April 19, 2012, 7pm
“Thinking Like A Stone”
Lecture by Clemens Krümmel and film screening
Clemens Krümmel will provide an illustrated analysis of several motives from
the Japanese film “Nowhere Man” as well as talk about the aesthetics of enlivened
stones by showing clips from other films and works.
After the lecture, the film “Nowhere Man” will be shown. It is centered on a manga
artist who chooses to quit his commercialised profession and starts to run a
stone shop. „Nowhere Man“ is the direction debut of actor Naoto Takenaka. It is
based on a famous manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge and was awarded the Fipresci
prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1991.
„Nowhere Man“ („Muno no hoto“)
Japan 1991, Japanese with English subtitles, 107 min, director and leading
role: Naoto Takenaka