Interview avec Saskia H.

→ voici encore un extrait d'un interview avec l'artiste à propos de l'INTERVIEW que je trouvais interessant sutrout pou le projet de la vitrine.

Sabrina


Riccardo Giacconi, “Role-Play, Flash Art, January, 2009

RG: Let’s talk about interviews. One of your most well-known works is Interview with Saskia Holmkvist (2005), a sort of conceptual mise-en-abyme on the interview medium, where you hired a media relations expert to train you to deliver a short statement about your work with apparent sincerity and authority. But also all your recent works somehow seem to explore this form, in different ways. The device of the interview is very much connected with the ‘performative’ aspect of human relations, which we were talking about before. I would like to know your take on that. Do you think an interview can be considered a challenge, a duel?
 
SH: Yes, an interview will always be a challenge or duel between two parts. And most of the time they don’t want the same thing. That’s why there exist so many interview techniques and answering techniques to be able to master the situation. The interview is a situation of limited time where the aim of the interviewer is to reveal or at least get behind a supposed facade that the interviewee is putting up. It has many similarities to a normal discussion as the techniques around interviewing depart from the critical discussion. But the interview is about creating a discussion with a point.

People who are interviewed in the media are often people in official positions, which means that they have media training in how to master the journalist. This creates a special kind of interview where the person being interviewed can be the one mastering it. But aspects of interviewing exist in a long list of professions. Even people working at a kindergarten are today instructed on how to tone down criticism when the media arrives. This means that every person in today’s society walks around with prepared answers to be able to defend themselves, their organization or company. 

In Interview with Saskia Holmkvist, which was my first work on interviewing, the aim was to reflect upon the commodification of artists who are expected to deliver statements about their work for media attention. And the better you are at it the more media you will get. My latest works In Character and Role Control treat role-play or the faking in the interview situation. Here the aim was to reflect upon the manipulative power structures that are embedded in different forms of interviews.