A CONVERSATION WITH ANDREA WOLF ON THE OCCASION OF WOANDER
CURATED BY COREY OBERLANDER AND LINDSEY STAPLETON
GRIN- How would you describe your relationship with nature? Is this something you often consider? Does living in a city affect this relationship?
ANDREA WOLF- I don't think about this often. I like being in nature, but I also find it interesting that that has become something you have to make happen, like you have to travel to get there (even if it's a short trip). I have to say though, I'm very much a city person. I guess I think more about our mediation of nature and the images of it; the link between the space we observe and the one we find ourselves in. Then, I think more about landscape, or the concept of it. A landscape is not merely a place, but also its image. It does not only reside in nature but also in culture.
G- Would you mind providing some background information about the works in Woander? Where do these ideas germinate, and why have they held your attention?
AW- Last December when I was in Chile, I came across a beautiful album that contained a collection of high resolution photographs of the moon, part of a research developed by a Chilean astronomer presumptively in an observatory in Chile or Brazil between 1961 and 1962. Most pages have two photos overlaid by a velum paper with very specific technical information about the conditions and lenses in which the images where taken. Inside the album, I found two essays written by the same scientist "Observaciones del Desvanecimiento del Brillo de Algunas Estrellas en Sus Ocultaciones Por La Luna" and "Destellos Luminosos en La Luna".
I was completely mesmerized by this discovery. The images of the moon are breathtaking, the detailed information of how they were taken makes it even more compelling, regardless of the technicality of it. This album, with all its research and science, seemed so personal and reflected so much caring. It just made me think about my memories of the moon, just to realize a few minutes later that I don't actually have any. Yet again, they felt like mine. These photos, glued to the thick paper like a family album are how I remember space and probably how you do too.
And then I remembered this super 8 film I found in New York a couple of years ago. It was about space travel and progress and dreams. So I looked it up in my found footage archive. It's a media production kind of film about the space flight of astronaut Gordon Cooper in 1963 and his public reception after landing. The film is called "Mission: 22 Orbits! Flight of Astronaut Gordon Cooper". I think it is the quality of film (actual analog film) that makes you feel that everything you are watching must be part of your memories. It has the texture of remembrance. and then there are some concepts and events in history that are imprinted with certain aesthetic. When I think about the moon and the stars and outer space I think in black and white. How do you imagine progress?
G- Do you find that materials inform your work? Is it the other way around? Or is it in constant motion?
AW- I work mostly with found footage home movies, found photos and vintage postcards that were once written and mailed. I am interested in these memory objects we produce and the relation between personal memory and cultural practices of remembering.
For years now, I have been collecting super8 and 8mm films, creating my own archive of home movies and found footage. I buy these films in flea markets in different countries and have collected some from friends or in random circumstances. One could say, I work with other peoples memories. The archive appears then as a potentially successful means of accessing what has been lost, reconstructing the past. But what is interesting to me about the archive is the possibility to re-appropriate and re-interpret that material, to create new narratives through montage, juxtaposition, and collage.
So I think it is a dialogue between the materials and the work, in which both inform each other. Technology, media and memory affect and transform each other, creating models of remembrance that are culturally shaped. In some ways, my work is about making that evident and, in the process, the memories that I collect are transformed, but they also influence the way I think about my work.
GRIN- How would you describe your relationship with nature? Is this something you often consider? Does living in a city affect this relationship?
ANDREA WOLF- I don't think about this often. I like being in nature, but I also find it interesting that that has become something you have to make happen, like you have to travel to get there (even if it's a short trip). I have to say though, I'm very much a city person. I guess I think more about our mediation of nature and the images of it; the link between the space we observe and the one we find ourselves in. Then, I think more about landscape, or the concept of it. A landscape is not merely a place, but also its image. It does not only reside in nature but also in culture.
G- Do you find that materials inform your work? Is it the other way around? Or is it in constant motion?
AW- I work mostly with found footage home movies, found photos and vintage postcards that were once written and mailed. I am interested in these memory objects we produce and the relation between personal memory and cultural practices of remembering.
For years now, I have been collecting super8 and 8mm films, creating my own archive of home movies and found footage. I buy these films in flea markets in different countries and have collected some from friends or in random circumstances. One could say, I work with other peoples memories. The archive appears then as a potentially successful means of accessing what has been lost, reconstructing the past. But what is interesting to me about the archive is the possibility to re-appropriate and re-interpret that material, to create new narratives through montage, juxtaposition, and collage.
So I think it is a dialogue between the materials and the work, in which both inform each other. Technology, media and memory affect and transform each other, creating models of remembrance that are culturally shaped. In some ways, my work is about making that evident and, in the process, the memories that I collect are transformed, but they also influence the way I think about my work.
G- With so many works confronting memory, do you ever insert your personal ephemera or memoirs, or are they only intended for the collective?
AW- I do have some of my own home movies as part of my archive, but when I use this material, I tend to remove myself and not think of them so much as mine. Continuing with the idea that memory is a narrative construction, we can find similar elements in the stories that we create when we say who we are and in the memory objects that we produce. We tend to record some specific events and rituals that mark the passage of time and the unfolding of our lives: birthdays, vacations, graduations, weddings: mostly happy moments indeed. Therefore, we can think of the idea of our memories becoming interchangeable; the photograph of one’s birthday could be the memory of any other, the person changes, but the ritual and the story being told remains the same. Home movies become cultural products and cultural practices set the tone of the ideal memories. But, home movies are never simply found footage of the past: each time they are reviewed, their meaning changes.
ANDREA WOLF
Andrea Wolf is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist from Chile. Her work consists of ongoing research on time, memory, and image. Wolf’s practice focuses in memory objects we produce (photos, home movies, postcards) and the relation between personal memory and cultural practices of remembering. Wolf creates video installations and video sculptures to tackle these matters, representing the tension between remembering and forgetting. Working with found footage - with anonymous stories - she leaves an open space to be filled by the
meaning that each of us brings through our personal experiences.
Wolf holds MFAs in Documentary Filmmaking (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) and Digital Arts (Universidad Pompeu Fabra), and a MPA in Interactive Telecommunications (NYU). She was a resident of the AIM Program at the Bronx Museum in 2013 and is currently an artist in residency at the New York Media Center. Wolf has shown her work and given lectures and workshops internationally in venues like the Museum of Memory and Human Rights and the Contemporary Art Museum in Santiago Chile, Dumbo Arts Festival, White Box, The Paley Center for Media and Wave Hill in New York, MIT Media Lab in Boston, Digital Culture Center in Mexico City, VIZZI Festival in Kiev and Media Lab Madrid. Andrea is founder and director of REVERSE, a non-profit workspace and art gallery in Brooklyn.