Niels - Interviewed by Mike

Scattered throughout the space are green metal stands with cabinets connected to them. You can see several blinking lightbulbs and stacks of booklets.

Will you present anything besides the stack of booklets and the sculptures? There will be two or three stacks of booklets in different colours. Dirty green, red and turqoise blue. They are stacked about a metre high, in a way these are sculptures too. Besides that, I will present sculptures based on the stories written in the pamphlets.

Do you have a clear idea of what the sculpures are? Somehow the sculptures relate to people – you enter the space and you look at, and relate to the sculpture 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.

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

Have you made any of these sculptures? I have made one sofar. It is a metal stand with a cabinet bolted on the top. A blinking lightbulb illuminates the inside of the cabinat. It blinks in an unpredictable pattern. Like the house in the book that uses light to communicate. This sculputre uses light to communicate too but we cannot understand it because it is unpredictable.

Are the other stories in a simular style? With these strange parabels? 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 haven read the story about Peter the house.

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

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. 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 random things like the weather or drinking coffee. Peter finds them by coincidence the first time. The second time he starts looking for them and cannot find them. That contradiction is interessting: to conciously find something by coincidence. Peter transforms into one of them, but the others could have been persons too.

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

Will it be an entirely sculputral exhibition? 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. Some sculputres will have blinking lights, so sulpture plus communication.

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

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

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? I don't think that is necessary. In text you can write “the ball thinks” and instantly the ball has become alive. You could have a random object in a space that feels like it is alive. I am interessted in the point where inamite objects start to breathe. It is an easy thing to say, a sculpture represents human scale because it is the same size as a person. Or give it a hand so you can imagine where the other hand would be. Somehow with this specific sculpture it felt good to have it in the same size as me. We can look eachother in the eyes.

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. They used to make casts of dead people 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. Whereas you have some sculptures by Rodin where you wouldn't be surprised if the 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 fly.

Are you interested in theater? It seems related to that, the sculptures could enact a story. It would be interesting 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.

Retro or antique looking? Not antique, I assosiate antique with ornaments. It doesnt have that. But it is pretty tight, minimal. It is a strange thing for me because I enter the territory of nostalgia which I think is pretty difficult. Also there is a blinking lightbulb in the cabinet that illuminates the inside of the cabinet.