Negotiations, Michiel Teeuw in conversation with Lorenzo Modestini

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Negotiations

In conversation with

Lorenzo Modestini

In connection with the exhibition Sesame Open by Lorenzo Modestini, SIGN correspondent Michiel Teeuw visited the artist to ask about process, struggle and negotiations.

I. 24/06

We are standing in the garage of SIGN projectspace, surrounded by green crates filled with bricks. Can you start by describing the material sourcing: where did the materials you’re working with come from, and how did you get them into the space?

I just found them online, I purchased them, I had them delivered to my home, and then through the help of colleagues and friends and faculty, I got everything to the space. First, I thought I could do it by myself, with the bakfiets. And I realized, no, it’s not possible. I struggled with having to ask for help. But with the help of everybody, it was super quick.

When we brought the first half on saturday, I was quite underwhelmed by how many there were. When they are all stacked precisely in the crates, you don’t really notice how many there are, how much weight there is behind it, how much energy it took:

1) to make the bricks

2) to bring them to my place

3) to work on them there

4) to carry them here

There was a lot of energy, movement and favours brought in. When I look at the bricks, I feel the amount of weight that got put into moving all of them. There’s also this ambition to now move them, one-by-one, to the other room. It’s a calming laborious action, which shuts your mind off and allows creativity in.

Now that I’m seeing them in the crates, I really enjoy the aesthetics. I kind of want to flip them on their sides and stack the crates on top of one another and stack the bricks inside them, to play with vacuous space. When the bricks are in the crates, they look like books.

I don’t think I’m gonna use concrete, cause I do like the idea that the bricks have the inherent fragility as they are stacked without mortar. There’s a stress in me, and maybe also for the viewer, as I look at this little sketch I made. I laid one brick down flat, four stacked vertically, and that pattern gets repeatedly four times. It’s a meter and a half tall. It might fall down with a gust of wind, like in the Big Bad Wolf.

The work you’re making here at SIGN holds strong relation with your earlier clay-based work and engagement with soil.

I spent a lot of my studies focusing on raw processing:

I’m going to take this raw material,
I’m going to process it into an artistic material
and then from there
I’m going to produce an object.

How much energy is required for one person to do all of that? It’s exhausting, you need a whole team to get any of that done. So that’s what I learned through that. And I think that’s where my appreciation and proclivity for performing art came from. It comes in because the act of collecting, finding, sourcing, bringing, cleaning, and then using, all of that energy gets put into some kind of direct object or action.

There’s a sense of performativity. In the bricks, which are purchased and not made by myself, there is an inherent “coded” bureaucracy. I’m avoiding that by not using the proper techniques. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I’m exploring the material, what it means to me, how I can relate to it, how it can be used. And since I’m coming into them with a fresh slate, I can find fun and new ways to use them – ones that are not necessarily efficient. Efficiency isn’t necessarily super interesting to me. I do like these laborious, absurd, almost pointless gestures.

However, your approach is also quite direct and pragmatic, often employing the ready-at-hand raw materials. Is there a kind of working-class aesthetic in this attitude?

I do like to have this blue-collar-esque thing about it. It’s frustrating to me that a lot of imagery is made to supply an aesthetic to a class that I’m not part of. Explaining art to people that are of the same class as me, I notice it’s really hard without a background in understanding the aesthetic differences between classes. I think we study that in art, in art history, in politics and literature. But certain images are inaccessible. Especially with sculpture and installation, I do end up taking this kind of working-class aesthetic to what I can relate to it more.

I think most of my work has to do with change. And I think the people that can create change are the people that work. Well, that also sounds a bit ableist, though. So maybe I can continue that line of thought in a different way.

These tally marks feel very carceral, right? These lines and etchings. I started making this at the Encampment, during All Eyes On Rafah. How many people are there? How many people that… How many buildings are destroyed? Is it hopeful? How many minutes are left of occupation? How many minutes have there been in occupation? For other encampment members, it was quite meditative to join the marking. There was a lot of stress involved whenever I was doing the sketch, not because of what we were making, but just during that period, there was a lot of conflict.

As an American, how do you experience the world right now?

As an American outside of America, I’m quite privileged, in this weird in-between space where I’m not super Europeanized, but I’m also not very Americanized anymore. I critique both Western sides. But what are both sides like? They’re adjacent cultures: they’re not very similar, but they’re not incredibly dissimilar either. I think their methods are quite similar, but I think the working class is quite different. In Europe, there’s more active resistance to political extremism. I think part of that is because people here are in closer physical proximity with one another. I think back in the States, activism is only happening in places with a high urban density. However, in places of low population density, there are very strong political extremist values that are just ingrained in the culture. And since there isn’t a lot of influence from the outside in those places, then the culture just persists.

Can you describe what you mean by activism?

I think activism is anything that challenges or questions the status quo. You can have activism on the side of the right, the left, a decentralized perspective… I think any form of dissent is a bit of activism. But I don’t think activism is this really special term, you know? I think we idealize it as this heroic thing, but it really is just about dissent and how you manage dissent. So, for example, not paying your taxes is dissent. That’s a form of activism, I think. I think activists often challenge the role of what is private and what is public. Now, I think there’s generative activism and then there’s destructive activism. And deciding what those are depends on your values, perspectives, place, time, etc..

I think I’m content with the level of visibility and transparency that we’re currently experiencing through certain platforms. Now of course, there’s a boomerang effect: how are these platforms censored and manipulated and controlled? But I think there is more transparency happening now than there used to be. That’s confronting for a lot of people. And for a lot of institutions. We’re getting a lot of visceral live-casted imagery from places that are completely oppressed, places like Palestine, places like Congo, Sudan. And we end up seeing them as kind of abstractions, desensitized through the constant exposure to really, really messed up images. Feeling bad for people that you’ve never met in places that you’ve never gone to, but somehow you’re related to them.

For example, with Congo, anyone that has lithium batteries is connected to them because they are sourced from there. Anyone that takes advantage of civil liberties like freedom of speech, press and and organizing: they come from the UN resolution in 1948 of human rights. But in that same year, the State of Israel was founded upon the backs of the Nakba of Palestinians, so that our entire idea of civil liberties is based upon one group of people not having it. So there’s constantly this relativity between us as consumers and Western subjects with people of oppression. And then how do we relate to that? You know? How do we conceptualize it? How do we abstract it? How do we come to terms with it?

II. 07/07/24

The artist was asked to freely associate in response to provided terms.

Anarchy;

I think with anarchy there’s always some kind of compromise and hypocrisy in order to just be able to operate in a set structure. Anarchy only really works in small groups. When I was doing the encampment at the RUG, it felt very anarchistic, kind of like a squat. There were a lot of shared roles but it quickly devolved at some point because certain people would be there every night and take on a lot of responsibilities and then other people didn’t.

So then friction arose between people, you know? And I was one of the people that would come and go and do my thing. I didn’t want to put too much into it. Um, Anarchy’s weird. I don’t think it’s about chaos and I don’t know how it relates to the work at the moment. I think it’s just more of a fertile ground, you know? Whenever you take something down, you’re making space for something else.

Encounter;

I think it’s a relationship between multiple variables: it equates situatedness, the inability to separate space from objects from time. It’s all in flux and in relation. We’re constantly in relation with one another. We’re not one single entity in relation with another single entity. There is no borders between us because our skins are porous and we’re sharing the same air and we’re experiencing the same sunlight, etc, etc.

When I work manually I think my natural inclination is to find that kind of encounter or find that kind of situatedness or be in relation to something even if it’s a non-human entity. I feel like I’m constantly learning from whatever it is that I’m touching. Whenever I’m able to do something, I try to put a large portion of my energy into it. It’s not about respect or about love even. I think it’s just pure curiosity.

Break;

I had the bricks stacked outside my front door, and one of my neighbours came up one day.

He said, Oh, nice bricks.

I said, yeah, thank you.

I was sitting outside cutting them and making a mess.

And said, can I have one?

I said, yeah, you can have a brick, you know. By all means, you know, that’s really sweet that you asked. Thank you for not just coming up and taking it.

And he sat down with me and we were chatting and he was telling me about his problems and it was a good encounter.

But then all of a sudden he’s like, okay, I’m gonna write some initials on this brick. He wrote the initials down and then he stood up, jumped in the air and smashed it all over the floor.

I was like, look out look out! There’s shards everywhere.

I thought it was gonna break into the windows.

So I was a bit peeved that he did that… But it was interesting to see that breaking something also heals somebody. That there is this relationship between violence and healing.

Power;

I think a lot of my work initially was trying to discover how much I can do alone. There was often this kind of attempt of trying to prove something: I think power oftentimes is really performative. This time around, I’m not presenting myself with power or trying to be performative and show how much I can do alone.

When it comes to receiving things, I prefer to give than to receive. But I also think that that’s not necessarily healthy. So now I’m back into this corner where my own power levels are quite low and depleted. And now I’m receiving it from other people. So any form of power that I’m having right now is a direct relationship to how deep my ties are to the people around me and to the space around me.

Because, you know, you take a walk and you feel a little bit better.

You spend some time in the sun, you feel a little bit better.

You spend some time in the rain, you feel a little bit better.

I think that’s my relationship to power.

Towering;

Did you see the meme where it’s like, show me your relationship to anxiety — and somebody puts a cup on the very corner of a table, balances it vertically like so; and then just starts pounding the table?

When I’m stacking things, I think: okay, if I take one wrong step this towering responsibility is all gonna collapse on me. I enjoy the fear. That’s why I keep on stacking them. I come back at night sometimes just to make sure that nothing broke.

Wall;

The starting point of this work was a quote from Angela Davis:

Walls Turned Sideways Are Bridges.

That was a critique of the penitentiary system. Oftentimes my work reflects the relationship people have with penitentiaries and forms of unfreedom. I always want to work with a material or an object or a method that is accessible to the majority of people. A lot of times my work revolves around very simple gestures or very simple materials, with a lot of wasted effort and a lot of wasted time involved.

In unfreedom [for example, being imprisoned – red.], the most potent or powerful currency which is in their hands is simple time. How do you spend your time? A lot of times you take the coerced labor because you have nothing else to do. You know, you rot inside your own head. That’s where wall for me comes in.

It’s the sense of, okay, how much wasted time and how much wasted effort am I going to put into something — thereby not wasting that time and not wasting that effort. You transform it through the final process. Through the act of performing something, you’re coming into relation…

III. 15/07/24

I propose we start our last session with a prayer.

Infinitely compassionate and merciful. Glory be to God the Lord. The Lord’s compassionate and most merciful Lord of the day of reckoning. It is to you alone whom we pray. And it is to you alone whom we ask for help. Guide us on the straight path, the path of those who have received your grace, not the path of those who have brought down wrath or who wander astray.

The work is done.

The work is done. It was a lot of back and forth with the work. A lot of negotiating. The night just before the last day, this manic thought had popped up in my head: everything that I made is not done. The next day, I got there at 8 in the morning, and I just deconstructed everything. And Ron comes in and he’s like, “what the hell are you doing? I liked what you had”. And I said that, well, I wasn’t satisfied with it. I didn’t feel as if I had worked with the material enough. So I went there. I deconstructed everything except for two elements. I kept those two, deconstructed the rest and built something else.

I had this wall built, but I just start knocking elements of the wall onto the tent, and then I let it settle and, you know, a dust cloud pops up. The new image was a little bit more dynamic and the composition was more fluid than the previous one. And so as soon as I realized that I was just redefining what I had done previously, then I thought, okay, this is where the work is taking me. So I no longer have to activate it anymore. It’s there, you know, it’s done.

What are some risks you had to negotiate to get to that point?

I was risking making an image and not a statement,
I was risking making a statement and not a drama, and
I was risking making a drama and not an artwork.

So there were different levels to the negotiation.

From the very get go, I had to negotiate the material narration of what I wanted to source and collect. The work immediately started to adapt. The image that I had in my head was blocking off the entire gallery from sight. It was during the period in which All Eyes On Rafah kind took the internet by storm. And I didn’t want anyone to look at an artwork. I wanted the gallery bricked up, as a kind of like this statement: No, this is not where our attention or observation should be placed, you know? But since I had already worked and etched the bricks, it still became an artwork to look at, no matter in what format or where I placed the bricks.

This hypocrisy was another negotiation. I stopped building this wall that would block off the viewer. The different elements of the artwork started falling into place together. You know, you have the bricks, you have the images on the bricks, and then you have how they’re placed. And I couldn’t figure out how they were relating to each other or how they related to me until I started forming this theatrical formation, in which I wanted to invite the viewer through the window to reflect and doubt what they’re seeing, and be slightly confused and perturbed by the imagery.

Right now, for example, I have a series of columns. I’ve twisted them in certain points to kind of mimic like a contrapposto. I have these fallen walls. I have a tent that’s been built up and knocked down and built up and knocked down. There’s a lot of movement and action, but it also feels like each of the pillars which are still standing, are witnessing one other pillar falling down onto the tent. And with that, I think the viewer can kind of like they find themselves in a circle amongst the other pillars, even through the wall. And I think that also mimics what we see on our news outlets, on our Instagram Stories and TikToks, where the viewer is participating and is there just because everything is so available to be experienced.

We started this interview with talking about energy and movements of matter, displacement and replacement. How would you describe these aspects in the last weeks during the residency?

I think I worked incredibly directly. I start with an image, and then the negotiation begins. But it’s not very tactful how I negotiate: it’s a lot of trial and error, which enables me to be performative.

I try to embody the work

through touching it,

through moving it,

through trying out

and redoing it

over and over and over again and over.

I always overwork the installation, the drawing, the performance. I always try to make it a part of me, and myself a part of it. Either through sweat, blood or tears. You know, one of these kinds of elements.

But this one, it was mostly just sweat. I quickly realized that I can’t pick the bricks up one by one. I have to collect a pile and move them like that. But at the encampment, I had been brutalized by the p*lice to the point where now my wrists are so weak that I can’t carry more than a few bricks at a time, whereas before I could carry loads and loads and loads. You know, part of my energy is lost but I’m regaining it through the work.

You did a lot of transferring, but how were you yourself transferred through this work?

I’ve become a lot calmer through this work. Before, I was very prickly, unsure and demanding, but now I’m comfortable in my skin. When I pushed over a pillar, I got addicted to that.

So I would build it up again

and knock it back over

and build it up again

and knock it back over.

The sound,

the clattering,

I would scrape myself on them

as I would fall with them,

trying to carry them down instead of

just crashing them.

Through destroying the work, I was making sense of how I was hurt recently, and for that I really thank the work. And Ron and Marie-Jeanne have given me the opportunity to heal in a way that I didn’t realize that I could so quickly while also being focused on something else, you know? I’ve had a great time reconnecting with working on a larger scale, and it makes me realize that I’m not ready to work on this kind of scale at the moment. I had so much help and assistance from other people. But I don’t want to necessarily rely on that element, because then I place a burden on others. So the only thing that I want to say is, thank you to everyone who has offered me peace, critique, resistance, care, tranquility and support. Thank you to all of them.