Attempts To Deconstruct and Reevaluate: On the Exhibition »Unframing«

Gabriela Kühnhardt Alvarez: Thank you Cyrus, Sophie, Ella, Stefani and Tatyana for making time for this conversation. Let’s start with your individual pieces: What were your motivations and the methods in producing this artwork?

Cyrus Peñarroyo: My contribution to the Unframing exhibition is a collection of digitally rendered desktops made in collaboration with remotely located »crowdworkers« via Amazon Mechanical Turk. A worker on this platform is paid to complete virtual micro-tasks that a computer cannot yet complete, at least not in an economically viable way. For example, you may ask thousands of crowdworkers to fill out a survey based on personal experiences or identify specific content within an image. These tasks are often paid a small fee because they may only take a few seconds or minutes to complete, which means that workers may spend an entire day carrying out a variety of tasks in order to generate more income.
I’m interested in the lives of these anonymous laborers. Who are they and what kinds of spaces do they occupy? Using Amazon’s platform, I paid one hundred crowdworkers to submit a written description of the physical desktop where they work, as well as a screen-capture of the digital desktop behind all of their browser windows. I started to design desks based on their descriptions, and the detailing became a way of speculating on the worker’s personality and preferences. Then, I created images of each desk, dissolving the edges between furniture, technology, and environment by applying the screen captures to nearly all surfaces within the rendering as if it were a material applique. The resulting images – visual fictions inspired by truth – invite people to look closely at what is otherwise an invisible space of work and consider the real people and places behind the screens.

Sophie-Luise Passow: For several years I have been working on a recurring theme that I express in various forms in my artistic work. It is about the interplay of originals, reproductions, and copies. An important reference is the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin, which I first read at age 18. My background is in photography, graphic arts, and printmaking. Today I am known artistically mainly for my large-format paintings. For Unframing I explored this broader theme in the form of shapes of organisms.

Ella den Elzen: I recently began researching seeds, plants, and their histories. In particular I have been investigating ones that grow and have been propagated in colonial contexts for mass distribution or consumption in European markets. Especially in the late nineteenth century, these plants were also exhibited or displayed, either in colonial world fairs or botanical gardens, where they were collected and shown for their economic but also aesthetic value. What is interesting about plants is that they show how many different territories are connected through capitalism and colonialism. The plants I have been researching have histories that predate colonization, their narratives have been forgotten or superseded by their perceived economic value. These other uses are lost in capturing or describing a plant in an archival record, because they were often linked to embodied forms of ancestral or Indigenous knowledge.

Stefani J Alvarez: Framing Dagli, an autobiographical (re)writing and reclaiming, is a mixed-media installation project that reveals not only the centuries-old genre within the literary tradition of Philippine literature, the dagli, but the artist’s critical exposition of its design principle of recreating, retelling, and reimagining through the centerpiece, An Autobiography of The Other Lady Gaga: ILG. It’s an anthology of nonlinear short narratives, a chronicle of traditional dagli originally written in Filipino in autobiographical and confessional prose. The project weaves a poetic trail through full immersion in worldmaking. The mixed-media design is about hiding complexity from the audience/viewer — a transitional phase of enclosing between the textual and visual interpretation of arts; between narrative mode in time and digital media in space; between poetic voice and silent image. It is the art of enveloping the observer in an enticing exploration with its readymade elements, recycled tools, and found materials as a landmark to triumph in a new platform. It’s a thematic attempt at merging multiple mediums available at the artist’s residency in Akademie Schloss Solitude to contextualize, experiment, and visualize.

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GKA: You found yourselves among other artists at Akademie Schloss Solitude, a peculiar space to share and work with. Could you tell us about the collective process?

TZ:  R/ I think in arts exists an idealization of the collective, we probably could answer these question together as a »collective« but is no easy, so when you at least see in the Signal »Group exhibit« all the  👍 ❤️‍🔥  confirmation between each others you can say that each exercise of collective is an act of faith. This time, Thanks emojis for help us to communicate our social emotions in the exhibit group!

SA: Solitude is a collective space in which to share, contribute, and collaborate. We actively participate in planning, scheduling, logistics, and discourses in both face-to-face meetings and online, thus the process of conception is entirely created by the collaborators to blend and speak each other’s thoughts. In contemporary art, it’s getting easier and more accessible to combine and assemblage a certain perspective to reach our audience and better understand society and the world as a whole. And that gives us hope for this project and the future.

SLP: I came to Akademie Schloss Solitude in October 2022 and have been here for almost nine months now. As a guest of the residency rather than a fellow, my experience of it may have been somewhat different, but I’ve ended up taking a pretty social, collective path toward developing my practice, which eventually also led to creating this exhibition. Generally, collective exchange is important to me, helping me work across media and look at my own art from different angles. Among other things, I am now part of a photography duo that was born at Akademie Schloss Solitude in January 2023.

GKA: How do you link your work to the other works in the show?

CP: Several of the works in the show, including my own, navigate physical and virtual environments and explore interrelations between text and image. For example, I think of Ella den Elzen’s interest in the colonial backstories of different plants. I see similarities between how the two of us are working, especially in our hybrid approaches to image-making that embrace glitches and other visual interruptions. We both seem to complicate otherwise »smooth« spaces (for her, the botanical garden; for me, the desktops of remote workers) by framing moments of coarseness or unevenness that prompt people to see a familiar socio-cultural condition anew.

SA: Framing Dagli is not a performance of new art, nor the writing of a new form, not even a literary frame story, but a form of collective consciousness vis-a-vis objectivity in an autobiographical (re)writing and reclaiming space, existence, and our narratives. I never meant to be a trailblazer. If I did this in a solo exhibition, this could be treated as a kind of solitary mirroring and framing of my artwork, alienated from the surrounding world. On my ground, I am a woman of color who faces constant scrutiny, not for my arts but for my race and gender, specifically based on social constructs and standards. I even struggle with my historicity, and I must face this fact to trace my rootedness and uphold my identity. These projects help me realize the distinctions as well as the similarities of artists rethinking, reshaping, and unframing their relationships with society.

GKA: Does the transdisciplinary exchange of various artistic spheres encourage you to break boundaries and enact transformation in your artistic practice?

SA: Being an author was fundamentally alien to my work and the transdisciplinary exchange. But I began to experiment with performances, aural essays, and video poetry. I beg to disagree that I lost faith in my language-based concepts. I am not only engaged with the object of criticism but also highlight issues concerning my writing. Not only social, political, and economic controversies or arguments over aesthetic questions can be linked to my writing transcended to mixed-media installations, but also contradictions and tensions that can be unfolded in processes of perception as well as overlaid with other interests.
Are we beyond global inequalities and cultural stereotypes? Or could we say that we break borders and boundaries particularly to unearth complex core issues in our contemporary societies?

SLP: From early on I was intrigued by all kinds of relations, interrelations, and relationships. I am drawn to analyzing the big picture of our world and how it is structured, for which I tend to take a psychological point of view. To practice my art, it’s important for me to understand these connections better, and ultimately that’s made easier by being involved in multiple disciplines or in exchange with people who work in different disciplines.

CP: Even though I’m trained as an architect, I’ve always worked in a manner that has allowed me to remain consistently out-of-category. I feel uncomfortable when architectural academics or professionals insist on specializing. While I can understand the value of establishing clear boundaries or limits to one’s practice, I was drawn to this residency precisely because I can operate more fluidly and interact with people addressing a wider range of topics. An exhibition like this one can help to reframe how we understand our own disciplinary commitments and encourage us to question and transcend received categories.

GKA: Does the framework of an exhibition work best for your individual piece? Are you perhaps thinking of other modes of visibility and manifestation?

SLP: To grasp the »texture« – the surface texture of the material of my paintings – it is crucial to see them in real life. I would say that these works are halfway between painting and sculpture. By smudging and rubbing paint into the fabric, I sometimes strive to create an illusory effect, making the works appear to be tapestries. When it comes to the wider context of exhibitions as spaces – the historical exclusivity of so-called high art – I think it is important to engage with this idea in the presentation.

SA: It is about the new world created in this way; it is about this new truth of the collective project that comes into being. My autonomous artistic form is all about the artist’s sensitivity, and my capacity for empathy as a storyteller, a human being. Unframing is all about the rejection of exaggerated sensitivity and overstated perception. The world is a canvas sequined in glamor and misery, an ideal world and bombed cities, and pictures of beautiful faces and photos of deformed corpses. There is no in between. Morphing my practice from textual into mixed-media installation entails a dual task in my view. The framework breaks the principles and practices that surround my identity as a migrant artist, as well as exposing and reconsidering possibilities, rather than canceling or bypassing them. But what is personal is always communal and political.

GKA: In the course of your collective process, you decided to show at the Römerstrasse project space instead of in the institution on the hill. Could you give us insight into your decision? Is it also a form of establishing un_framing?¹

CP: While it may be logistically convenient to fabricate and show our work at the Schloss, it’s important to us that our exhibition is outward-facing and embedded within the urban fabric of Stuttgart. Perhaps locals hold a certain impression of the Akademie in their minds as a place where a select few have the privilege to spend their days developing a creative practice, and to some extent that’s true, but this doesn’t mean that we aren’t concerned with the problems of everyday life. Every activation of the Römerstraße project space is an opportunity to reconfigure the institution’s relationship to the public.

SA: We cannot identify »institution« unless we are referring to the »public.« »Institution« as a word could misrepresent an underlying diagnostic framing. And its solution is choosing the project space, where it’s likely to be essential for reaching collective goals. Unframing is not only a project title, but an indirect unframing of the risk factors by collective-based (rather than institutional) collaborators in the project. Römerstrasse was not merely a site where a certain group of people waved a flag of entitlement or a setting of institutionalized supremacy or abiding by an unquestioned hierarchical structure, but is a liminal space during the transitional period in the conceptualization of the project. It is a concrete venue to support and enlighten a social movement of artists to more explicitly examine the essential steps for their planned and even future projects in assessing their effectiveness for creating an initiative, practicing resistance, and upholding a collaborative art system.

On the contrary, any space – gallery, project space, or museum – could be a form of »representation«; a space that removes artists from the location and settings of their creative practices and freedom. Such an arrangement relocates the concern of the »venue« as the primary site of discourse, which shifts attention away from the project context. Such exhibitions require significant capital investment for actualization. These funds are what Hito Steyerl describes in contemporary art as »post-democratic forms of hypercapitalism …  opaque, corrupt and completely unaccountable«² to artists and its society.

SLP: The concept of Unframing references the action of stepping out of conventional frameworks, so it makes sense to have the exhibition in an unorthodox place. In addition, Römerstraße project space is located in the center of Stuttgart, which makes it better connected to the surrounding infrastructure and thus more easily accessible to potential art enthusiasts.

GKA: In the exhibition you address the concern of producing visibilities. Visibility³ is a demand, politically charged throughout the discourses and mentioned in the individual pieces as well. It is the agent of reality making and re_producing. So maybe this question is a little provocative: Is visibility always a positive or productive mode or does the exhibition also address the rejection of visibility toward an empowering moment in un_visibility?

CP: To answer this question, I suppose we must also ask »whose visibility?« In my creative practice, I seek to understand the mechanisms of the contemporary built world that make someone »visible.« Much of my work involves studying digital technologies, taking them apart, and reassembling their elements in order to reframe how we see ourselves, others, and our surroundings. Yes, feeling »seen« can certainly be empowering, especially if you’re a member of a community that has been historically marginalized or excluded. I also think that deciding to remove oneself from another’s gaze can be just as empowering, especially when surveillance capitalism makes it possible for us to see and be seen at all times.

My contribution to the exhibition further explores this tension between wanting and avoiding visibility. The anonymous crowdworkers, each of whom chose to respond to my job posting, are never shown in the final images as fleshy bodies. This is because I didn’t ask them to submit any personal data or photos, so I have no idea what they actually look like. Alternatively, their humanity is expressed in uniquely voiced descriptions and in the particular objects that shape their daily routines. The worker remains out-of-view, and what’s framed instead is the nature of their work.

EdE: I think rejecting visibility can be as productive as making something visible. For this I am most directly thinking about Éduoard Glissant’s thoughts on a right to opacity. Not all of the knowledge and uses of these plants need to be revealed, and that’s also okay. There is value in embodied knowledge that is difficult to access or find. It doesn’t need to be made accessible or knowable to all. With the longer project I am hoping to challenge how we think about our relationships to certain species, how they are perpetually intertwined with us. But we don’t often think about how they are used beyond specific uses that are understood as more »productive.«

TZ: R/ non-visibility for me is a bourgeois concept.

SA: There is a fundamental political question about how unframing takes place. Perhaps the artists do not want to make certain things »visible« but suggest how they are seen. Not only the possibility of exhibiting their art, but also how their art could resonate with the community. Thus, how would it be to disregard »visibility« as a concern or a demand, but consider it as a tool, a device to empower?

The exhibition invites first of all a critical rethinking of the role of collaborators within the planned project. The one-night-exhibition temporality is not only how we present exhibition achievements but dismantle the rising of the all-devouring power of capitalism and orchestrated distress from bureaucracy. This platform is precisely the moment to be resilient and practice resistance, which means doing things differently, proposing changes, and developing alternatives. This requires an engagement from all of us involved for we all remain individuals. Through working critically and collectively from a deep trust, in practical collaboration, with radical inclusiveness and real involvement, we will be armed, and »we« will then probably also become »us.«

GKA: If we speculate framing not only as an architectural form of display but as a theoretical point of view, how deep does its building matter lie in epistemic hegemony⁴?
What are your chosen tools to dismantle the »frame,« to combat and subvert its expectations?

SA: From an artist’s point of view, I call it a social movement. The materialization and implementation are based on rational, efficient, and collaborative effort, rather than commissioned and enforced work. If there is intervention here, what is presented in Framing Dagli as Unframing is – I want to create through/from my narrative, the form expresses my narratives, my punto de vista. I use language as lens, the media collected, and the courage to tell, to retell, to create the way only I think the narrative to be created. We as artists in our positions for art-critical and artistic practices, become also the viewer/spectator, as the public in general.

Tools to consider: To have individual opportunities and unique resources to perform artistry, even in the absence of institutional support. By breaking through institutional barriers, disrupting unfair policies, and challenging dominant structures that a hindrance and constrain freedom; by resisting corporate privileges; by favoring diverse knowledge practices, by the inclusivity of all forms of union; by re-centering societal immersion and the common good; by embracing more holistic understanding of human connection; and by honoring social diversity, minority groups, and Indigenous peoples. Artists must engage in dialogue to progress and advance arts and culture across and beyond communities.

GKA: Could you elaborate here on how your artistic research hacks and claims the frame (to re_frame)? Which situated knowledge is allowed to slip into our field of visibility?

SA: I started to think about literary techniques, effects, characteristics, and devices that I usually use in my writing. And I blend it into social framing theory. I see ILG, the centerpiece, having its narrative situated within another narrative. The subject is the internal one, and the narrative merely serves to set the core themes. I also imagined the characterization of ILG that exists outside the centerpiece. That ILG’s perspective is an independent narrative and may introduce an epiphany toward the mirrors enclosed in frames. I also hypothesized a device that surrounds another frame or set of frames, a mirror facing toward another set of mirrors. The frame has been »framed« around ILG, the mirrors indicate mirroring, or vice-versa, that narrative is encapsulated within the narrative.

I fantasized about contemporary arts in a utopian space (ex. the Römerstrasse project space) to epitomize Michel Foucault’s argument of »pure experience of order and its modes of being«; and Framing Dagli is meant to install chaos and intervention. It may be solely based on my diaspora experience, as repatriation to my home country means alienation and exile. Seeking refuge overseas is a crossroads of my existence.

GKA: There is the collective motivation to leave the frame behind – what un_framed vision does the exhibition lead to? What is left when we’re finished un_framing?

SA: To quote, art is as essential to everyone as bread, but not the frames. I will keep looking at things through the lens of a minority. What is especially significant within the Unframing context is how the assembly of fellow artists at Solitude – the exhibition’s interweave of sculpture, mixed-media, printouts, audio-visual, and portraits – are all included in the fusion unobstructed from the so-called frame. It is the artistic freedom that allows us to combine the categories in speculative and experimental techniques. We do not need to legitimate this gesture, but it is truly a critical exposition of parallel lives and shared experiences. The exhibition also addresses the viewers/audience from different cultural backgrounds on shaping our individual identity, nationhood, and collective memory. What is left is our audacious narrative.

EdE: Beyond the political or social motivations behind most of our works, I am also thinking about this concept of »unframing« quite literally in terms of process. Something unframed maybe implies that it is still in development, or unfinished. Because I am still at the beginning of my residency, I am using this as an opportunity to test ideas and be more flexible.

CP: We deliberately chose to title the show Unframing and not Unframed because we see our attempts to deconstruct certain limits or boundaries as an ongoing process. I don’t know if a totally unframed or unbounded condition is desirable, or if I can articulate a clear vision for what we’re aiming for. As times change and people evolve, we must continue to reevaluate the contours defining our existence and collectively decide if they need to be redrawn.

GKA: Thank you everyone for your thoughts. Looking forward to the show! See you there!