Niels - Interviewed by Mike

For his show at NCAC, Niels Bekkema (1989), presents his self published short stories, and several sculptures. In this interview we talk about speaking sculptures and the house as a form of domnestic communication.

Michael Fitzgerald: Can you descripe what you present in the space? NB: There will be two or three stacks of booklets in different colours. Dirty green, red and turqoise blue. They will be stacked about a metre high, the booklets become sculptures. Besides that, I will present sculptures based on the stories written in the booklets.

MF: Can you tell me more about the sculptures? NB: Somehow the sculptures relate to people – you enter the space and you look at, and relate to the sculptures because they are approximately the same size as an average person. I think of them as abstractions of the proportions of human beings. They can be thin with a big head, but the head can be anything from a pillow to a blinking light.

MF: So they will be somehow bodies? NB: Yes, a personification of a narrative.

MF: Can you descripe one of the sculptures in more detail? NB: One of the sculptures has a metal stand with a cabinet bolted on the top. A blinking lightbulb illuminates the inside of the cabinet. It blinks in an unpredictable pattern. Like the house in the book that uses light to communicate. This sculpture uses light to communicate too but we cannot understand it because it is unpredictable.

MF: Are the other stories in a simular style? With these strange parables? NB: The second story is about a dreaming man. He puts the duvet over him and falls asleep. But it is not himself that is dreaming. It is the bed and the blankets that control his dream. The sensation of falling asleep because there is something heavy lying on top of you. But this bed controls dreams. You can understand this second story without having read the story about Peter the house.

MF: Will there be other characters embodied in sculputres? NB: Yes. In the other story I write about a lighthouse. The idea of a house communicating to ships is very simular to the ideas I am working with.

MF: Lighthouses communicate for a very specific purpose. Your communications have a more mysterious purpose. There seems to be a difference to your communications and the lighthouse that saves people from drowning. NB: The lighthouse communicates in a more binary way, it is a beacon that says “I am here, behind me is land”. I imagine the houses in my story to share their time together in the same way a family sometimes shares their time, talking about the weather while drinking coffee. Peter finds them by chance the first time. That contradiction is interesting: to conciously find something by chance. The second time he has to stop looking in order to find them.

MF: They communicate in a vague way? NB: Yes. Utterings. Conversation about nothing.

MF: Will it be an entirely sculputral exhibition? NB: There will only be sculptures. I think of the stories as sculptures too because I present them as a very basic sculptural form, the column.

MF: Will the stacks be replenished? NB: Yes they will after there is only one left.

MF: Have you done anything like this before? NB: It is a relatively new area. The idea that writing creates a sculpture, instead of the otherway around.

MF: You talk alot about sculptures as communicating characters. Will they still seem to communicate without the text? Sometimes inanimate things can seem like characters in a space. Objects that get a body by the way they are layed out or connect with other elements. Is it necessary that your objects have arms or feet for example? NB: I don't think that is necessary. In text you can write “the ball thinks” and the ball becomes alive. You could have a random object in a space that feels alive. I am interessted in the point where inanimate objects start to breathe. The scale of the sculptures is not the only reason why they represent characters in the story, but with this specific sculpture it felt good to have it in the same size as me. We can look each other in the eyes.

MF: Some statues are perfect representations of bodies but they are the opposite of alive. Sometimes objects suggest conversations and thereby become alive. It has to do with types of theater that enacts inanimation, theater that treates stage sets as characters. NB: They used to make casts of dead peoples heads just after they died. Because your muscles don't work anymore your head looks completely different. It is not a human anymore but a representation of a human. You can make a perfect sculpture of a human being but still you could not imagine it moving. There are sculptures by Rodin where you wouldn't be surprised if it would walk out of the room. Any random object can absorb that same sculptural quality where you wouldn't be surprised if it would start to float or breathe.

MF: Are you interested in theatre? It seems related to that, the sculptures could enact a story. NB: It would be interessting to turn it into a play. Maybe not the whole story but just the transformation. How would that look like? I might get into that after this show.