In this interview, Adrián Villar Rojas talks about the research that drives his ambitious site-specific projects, and about the way in which he has created a successful infrastructure for a nomadic lifestyle that takes him and his team around the world. We discuss specific exhibitions, including his most recent duo show at The Bass, in Miami, which he developed together with artist and long-time friend Mariana Telleria.
Adrián describes what it means to him to have an ecological practice as an artist living and working through the rapid deterioration of our environment and ideological structures, and how he tackles paradoxes of the future. “What will happen when our terrestrial fictions, the ones that cement nations and identities, travel to outer space? Will the stories of the Greco-Latin gods, the European empires, or the modern nation-states shaped by books, museums, and anthems survive as we know them?” he asks.
Questions like this, guide Adrián's practice and, through this inquiry, a real commitment arises to shake the ground upon which our most common values and beliefs have been built. Poetic, speculative, and sometimes heart-breaking, his work is a search for answers, embodying a multitude of mediums: from sculpture, installation, film-making, and sound to writing.
Adrián Villar Rojas (Rosario, Argentina, 1980. Lives and works nomadically) conceives long-term projects, collectively and collaboratively produced, that take the shape of large-scale and site-specific installations, both imposing and fragile. Within his research, which mixes sculpture, drawing, video, literature and performative traces, the artist explores the conditions of a humanity at risk, on the verge of extinction or already extinct, tracing the multi-species boundaries of a post-anthropocene time folded in on itself, in which past, present and future converge. Recent exhibitions include The End of Imagination, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2022); El fin de la imaginación, The Bass, Miami (2022); Poems for Earthlings, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (2019); The Theater of Disappearance, The Geffen Contemporary at Moca, Los Angeles (2017); NEON at Athens National Observatory, Greece (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2017); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017).
Adriana Blidaru: Hi Adrián, so happy to have the chance to talk to you! Where are you currently and what do you see around you that stands out?
Adrián Villar Rojas: I’m currently in Rosario, my hometown where my parents and most of my extended-family live. I've been here for a few weeks now though soon I will be traveling again.
Rosario is a city that feels to me like an intimate diary made three dimensional. I have walked its streets so many times, I know them by heart, I can tell every change, even on sidewalks. I see on the streets people who I went to highschool with or friends of friends. I am seeing my city, the city I grew up in, age day by day. I should rephrase what I have just said: I should not say Rosario is aging, I should say that my world-making of the city, my lived experience of Rosario is rapidly aging, and this is a very specific situation I’m perceiving now and am learning from.
AB: Interesting... I start with this question because I know that a very important part of your practice is your nomadic lifestyle. This seems to define your work in quite a specific and personal way: the time you spend in a location tends to influence the outcome of your work through site-specific research, materials, and craftsmanship that you encounter. I’d be interested in some of the challenges that you have had to overcome in sustaining this lifestyle as an artist.
AVR: My nomadic practice comes from a desire to engage in a symbiotic relationship between the systems I create with my team, and the material and symbolic systems of our hosts. The host can be any type of agent (with very different ways to emancipate its agency), from a park in front of the Louvre Museum in Paris or the Bosphorus sea washing the shores of Trotsky’s house in Istanbul. I can’t – and I do not believe I ethically could – produce experiences in a mental state of epistemic vacuum.
I think an evident challenge is how much real integration one can have when crafting a chronologically and topographically specific commission. I would like to use the case of my never-ending project at the border between North and South Korea in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as a good case to storytell to you what I’ve done when facing my very limitations as a nomadic entity.
Since 2014, I’ve been regularly visiting Yangji-ri, this small village, a place where – due to its unique political, regional and social make-up – almost everybody is over eighty years old. Feeling, there, was a unique memory to be rescued. I invited the villagers to participate in a hybrid filmical-theatrical experience in which they would be the actors, and the entire village the stage. I planned a series of activities, mainly meals, in consort with the villagers. Almost every lunch, dinner and communitarian barbecue was conceived and organized with them. With my team, we visited their houses, spent time with them, made footage of these gatherings around meals, and from all this togetherness, the film’s different scenes began to emerge. And as the film appeared, a document of village life also appeared, and a personal connection began to develop that slowly enabled us to build trust and try more things. The resulting memoir is The Most Beautiful Moment of War (2017) – a trans-fiction film where we produce meaning to collect information and vice versa.
In gratitude to the villagers for their hospitality, I gifted them a series of miniature clay reproductions of the sculptures of my project for the Argentinian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. These figurine replicants, the monumental originals of which have long since disappeared, now live amongst the miscellaneous decorations and accoutrements on shelves, tables and cupboards in the village.
Two years after my first visit, Gapro Hwang, one of the villagers and a former soldier, left the village to move closer to his family and I had the opportunity to lease the vacant property, which dates back to the formation of the village, in the 1950s, allowing me to become a virtual resident of Yangji-ri and thus of the DMZ.
I didn’t want to touch the house too much, it was itself a perfectly preserved example of the origins of the village, so we just did a very light “restoration”. To our surprise, Mr. Hwang’s son had left behind a lot of his belongings and furniture, so we archived these items, reorganized, tidied and carefully folded them and put them back in drawers or cupboards. We cleaned everywhere. With great detail and diligence, my team created a protocol that defined areas of the house that can never be touched or walked through again. One of these is a little interior patio where Mr. Hwang used to sit and spend time in. His footprints are still visible in the dirt and will hopefully remain there forever. There was, however, this little sprout that appeared in the soil in 2016 and that last time I saw it, it had grown into a huge plant. We bought a special freezer and placed two cakes inside it, hyperbolizing the very anthropic will to preserve things against the passing of time. In fact, the electric line feeding the fridge is the only service still working there. Everything else has been cut off: water, gas, and even the electricity of any other plug or light source.
The house is itself a quiet memorial to seemingly meaningless items, humble fragments and rituals that through these small actions will remain here eternally. Yet it will change and new layers of unknown events will take place there, perhaps in some months or in ten, a hundred or a thousand years.
AB: Decontextualization in your work creates a level of detachment, which - I think - allows the viewer to navigate the worlds you create in a dream-like state. Both these elements (decontextualization and detachment) feel like they are important parts of a larger strategy that flows throughout your practice.
AVR: Many years ago, I used to say that I wanted to induce a sense of death-anxiety in my audience, as the environments (the world building) that my praxis generates is “placed” in a future where human-species no longer exists. Therefore, most of the work I do vibrates in an alternative universe, displaced although adjacent to our perception of time, of our nowness.
This question reminds me of a project I made for the 2010 Serpentine Map Marathon in London called Songs During the War, where many of these formative ideas I had back then were crystallized. The work is a short parable in which I proposed a hypothesis: what if, in the final moments of humanity, the last five women and men on Earth decided to make an artwork? That would be the last human artwork, together with all the logical implications unfolded by this fact. In the story, the last group of humans encounter a long abandoned amphitheater. Knowing and feeling that their end is coming, they carry out one last mission to affirm their existence: to perform the role of Neanderthals, executing modest rituals and household activities, until their death, until their extinction.
There is one beautiful paradoxical gift as a result of this last artistic operation: if the only beings who can measure time are time-traveling through their performance, back before evolution dictated that it would be Homo Sapiens that will survive over the Neanderthals, it is impossible to deny the fact that the travel back into the past is really taking place. Time, language, representation, and meaning is theirs. Traveling in the negative direction to the arrow of time, denied by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, is - in this case - perfectly possible and achievable.
The space-time is thus exposed to one last ghastly and dissonant fold, like two mirrors or two microphones facing each other and producing an infinite audio feedback. With this act, we arrive to the shores of anthropocentric representational systems or to the very shores of art, its ultimate ending.
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AB: In the El fin de la imaginación at the Bass, in Miami - a show that you have developed with artist Mariana Telleria - you present a series of sculptures that are recontextualized in a totally new environment. What were some of the conversations and ideas that you and Mariana decided to highlight through this exhibition together?
AVR: Mariana Telleria is an artist I deeply admire, and who has been a source of immense inspiration for me. We met at the Art School in Rosario 25 years ago and we have been friends and close collaborators since then.
I sometimes approach my own exhibitions with – for lack of a better word – a “curatorial curiosity”. I underwent an exercise as if I were a post-human curator of an exhibition in 300 years, tasked with my work and Telleria’s as a subject matter.
In that framework, I considered what will happen when our terrestrial fictions, the ones that cement nations and identities, travel to outer space. Will the stories of the Greco-Latin gods, the European empires or the modern nation-states shaped by books, museums and anthems survive as we know them? What will happen with the new stories to come, the ones needed to build the civilizations that will inhabit planets? Will those new stories mutate their meaning as space colonization spreads over decades and centuries?
Perhaps one of these future monuments might be the Moon itself, with all the physicality and memory of humanity’s attempted interplanetary endeavors imprinted on its lunar soil, or if it already is a museum of such conquests. The airless atmosphere turns it into a freezer, sounless struck by a meteorite, each boot print, rover track and flagpole will remain there inperpetuity. With its lack of legal jurisdictions or environmental hazards, the Moon is the Solar System’s ultimate anti-entropy chamber. These concepts, which go back to The Theater of Disappearance (2017) in Athens with NEON, became quite more intensely present in our lives in the 2020’s, which made me reflect that I could return to them now.
This apparent quietness is now being menaced by a new space race launched by private corporations in joint ventures with public agencies as NASA or ESA in an attempt to avoid international treaties regulating the property of the extraterrestrial space. While no spacefaring nation can claim rights over Mars or the Moon, individuals such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos are allowed to develop all kinds of commercial, extractive and productive activities in them. The race is getting so speedy that new concerns on the preservation of the human heritage on the lunar surface are rising in the specialized academic and scientific circles: how to keep historical sites on the Moon – there are at least sixty-three identified –safe from corporative short-term gain, from massive tourism or degrading exploitation? The battle for land and resources beyond Earth is getting serious.
Will any terrestrial museum be able to keep its fictions untouched after we have conqueredand terraformed Mars? Exactly as the market price of gold would fall dramatically if mining corporations were able to ship an asteroid containing three-billion-dollars of that metal to Earth, I hypothesize that colonization of space and celestial bodies will change radically our approach to all previous museological fictions, and will generate new ones adapted to this new amplified context. Can anyone imagine another “white-general-riding-a-horse” – or any variation of him: a male astronaut – on a plinth? Should future heroes of space conquest have a human face, an ethnic belonging, or a religion? How will we deal with the human need for a face, or a body, to give a human shape to this cosmic enterprise?
AB: I was looking at the sculpture David, Two Suns (2015–22), which you first presented at Marian Goodman Gallery in NY, in 2015, in a very different context. Would you say that the meaning of this specific piece evolved for you throughout this show?
AVR: I’m very glad you have noticed a semiotic displacement from the work since its first presentation. As is evident, there is a generation questioning the logic and reasoning behind public statues of historic figures. I saw this in Argentina in 2015, where the monument to Columbus in Buenos Aires was dismantled and replaced by the statue of Juana de Azurduy, an important female leader of indigenous ancestry who participated in the independence battles against the Spanish colonizers in the early 19th century. This potent gesture was actually proposed by Cristina Kirchner, the president of Argentina at the time and now our current Vice President. The social discourse was not at a stage where this action took on a national or international conversation. Now, we are making as a society these adjustments, to examine who is on a pedestal, and why; but not only this, which is just the surface of the equation.
At the time, in 2015, when the “David sculpture” was presented for Two Suns at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, this reference to Columbus was lost on – mostly –everybody. Nobody noticed the toppled down David. I think it actually was perceived perhaps as some sort of romantic sleeping beauty? However, when re-installed in 2022 in Miami, it was very clear that we were talking about a very specific type of colonial gaze put in crisis, and that the David was indeed not sleeping but toppled down or dismantled like the statues of the confederates back in 2020.
For The Bass show, reintroducing this specific work from 2015 in a new plinth, the moonscape was meant to achieve exactly that: a change of meaning or I should say only now it is encountering its original meaning.
AB: It’s also a very interesting coincidence because, just this past month, an article came out about how a school principal, in Tallahassee, Florida, was fired for showing students an image of the David sculpture, which was deemed as 'pornographic'... It’s fascinating how an art object is so imbued with so many political and social layers and can have such a strong impact, even 500 years after its creation. What do you think the legacy of your work will be 500 years from now? What do you want it to be?
AVR: I want to disappear. I have no expectations of anyone reading my work in the near to far-future. This reminds me of a wonderful reflection by Roberto Bolaño (I hope I’m remembering it correctly), that in 500 years Shakespeare and the worst writer will be thesame thing: nothing.
Your questions also open up other possible ways for me to answer. I’d like to talk about a project I did in 2019, just before the pandemic, in Amsterdam, at the Oude Kerk called Poems for Earthlings.
I tried to construct a cavern of sonic introspection, an archival forest of sound. The space –the oldest church in the Netherlands, still semi-functional as a place of worship – was lit only by candlelight and its walls were hidden by piles of sandbags as if steeling itself and its sacred possessions from a World War II-era air raid, or an attack from a 16th-century iconoclast. A heterogeneous layered broadcast of babies crying, chimpanzees screaming, A Day in the Life by The Beatles, rain, industrial revolution era cotton sewing machines, national anthems, and thousands more (the list is impossible to reproduce in this interview) resonated through geolocated speakers in the darkened space of the old church.
Imagining a speculative history of sound, I tried to deconstruct the obsessions and agencies of Western preservation culture, questioning the strong bias toward accumulating value in certain kinds of scarce enduring objects. The exhibition was a way to revisit our passion formatter via the immateriality and infiniteness of sound.
AB: You are known to work in a collective way, with a cast of specialists, artists, craftspeople, engineers, designers, etc., and in many projects, you also involve your family (you have worked with your brother who is a writer, with your mother, and your aunt, who have also been instrumental in the production of certain artworks). I’m curious to know more about how this collaborative working process evolved for you over time. How do you define a good collaboration in the production of your works?
AVR: The curator (and friend) Lucia Pietroiusti visited me in Rosario recently, and we discussed what it means to have a truly ecological practice. A good project is something that could be also an ecological practice. What could that be?
Perhaps, as Lucia said “ones that consciously make themselves aware of the fact that they grow, exist in and belong to this planet. That we, at all moments of the day and night, and everything we do and choose and leave and destroy and repair – are all part of this planet, all of the time. And that in asking themselves then, “what to do with this fact?”, these practices offer gestures (be they poetic or practical, honestly I’m not picky) that are gestures of repair, or of making sense, or making world. Or also: of love.”
AB: Would you say you are an extrovert or an introvert?
AVR: I’m an introvert that learned to perform -when needed- as an extrovert.
AB: You have such an interdisciplinary practice: you write, make movies, music... What brings you the most satisfaction and inspiration at the moment? And how do you replenish your creativity when you must?
AVR: One way to answer your questions would be that I write as an exercise of existence and resistance. I write about every little thing that I see and experience. From never-ending lists of tasks me and my team must do, to very sentimental silly notes on my emotional life. Writing organizes everything I do.
Another way to answer would be: I learned to inhabit books and movies, thanks to a friend who taught me that a book is like a musical instrument. You don't need to read it all at once, not even in a year or two; you can spend a lifetime with that same book and “play” it as you would play a guitaror piano (I call this camping inside of fictions).
Having said that, nowadays, all fiction seems dull to me during this “post-pandemic” time (a complicated term to use, but hopefully useful here). Nothing seems as intriguing or ineffable as what we all are experiencing now. I feel a profound disinterest in any other thing that’s not experiencing our every day, every little second of it. In the last three years, we have witnessed the cost of a barrel of petrol priced negative USD 37, melting glaciers and weather events that are redefining national borders, Netflix's market shares going higher than EXXON’s, and super powerful artificial intelligence becoming ubiquitous assistance for any office work, and - moreover - accelerating the dismissal of thousands of laborers all over the world (and many more to come); as well as a super rich technocracy that won't stop spending money in prolonging-life technology, while, more and more, the poor suffer of extreme lacks and marginalization. To me that is beyond most people’s capacity to imagine, somehow we seem to have arrived at the end of imagination. We consume an avalanche of content on TV, films, podcasts, books, etc. that once was called SCI-FI and now I don’t feel that this word could be used so lightly anymore. Are we living in a post-sci-fi world?
