Sven Christian [SC]: Where to start. . . Maybe with how you studied biology but ended up practising art?

Stefanie Koemeda [SK]: Both subjects were of interest to me as a teenager. I chose biology over art, initially, but after a year I realised that I wanted to study art and applied for this pre-art school year that one must do in Switzerland. I then went back to biology to finish my Masters, and decided that I really don’t want to stay there.

SC: What was your Masters on?

SK: I was enrolled as part of a Bill Gates Foundation Project that focused on promoters in plants. We were working on cassava, trying to find root promoters that would make them more resistant to drought.

SC: What do root promoters do?

SK: Every gene has a promoter that communicates with the outside world. When there’s drought stress, the gene that would help the plant to adapt is present, but it needs to be activated. The promoter can sense the signals of drought from the outside world and activate the gene, to help the plant survive.

SC: So what did that entail for you, practically? Would you have to inject something into the seed?

SK: We were looking for promoters that activate things in the roots of other species. We tried to isolate these and transfer them into cassava, which is one of the five most important worldwide crops; a staple food that’s mostly eaten in the tropics and sub-tropics. It looks like sweet potato.

SC: So the intent was to find the right promoter and to distribute it widely in drought stricken areas?

SK: Yes. I don’t know if it is being distributed today — that’s the extent of my 180 from science — but I worked in the same lab as the guy who invented golden rice, a controversial GMO that had enhanced vitamin E and was used worldwide. I think the problem with GMOs is not that GMOs per se are difficult, but that they’re so expensive to produce and distribute. You can’t do it without big companies, who are profit-driven and can be exploitative.

SC: The text that you wrote when applying had a lot to do with the terra — about the remnants that one leaves behind, in the archeological sense, be it through mining or excavation or industrialisation. . . Did that start during biology studies or later?

SK: I was twenty when I first visited the Lascaux caves. That’s when I realised an interest in long time-periods: what remains and the level of mystery that comes with it. We don’t know why people made these cave paintings or engravings, just as they may not have been aware that we would find them 17,000 years or so later. The traces we leave behind are often unconscious. Today that might include mining activities, the infrastructures that we build, or the materials we use, which create new minerals.

SC: You have a body of work, made from impressions of industrial machines. Can you chat about that?

SK: A relevant aspect of these findings (and geology generally) that connects to my sculptural practice is this back-and-forth between negative and positive space, or this succession between the two. You often see this with petrified things, where the object or body is degraded and refilled with another material — petrified. One might only find the leftovers or “moulds,” which ultimately define the structure. I told you about the bodies that they found in Pompei. What they really discovered were holes in the ground, which they then filled with plaster and dug out, to see the shape of the bodies that lay there.

My work around these oil-digging machines or pumps refers to that process of model and mould. For me, they’re one of many touching points between geology and contemporary society. I took imprints from the negative spaces in those machines, and then put them together again as full bodies. Because if they were to be petrified, we would probably find the negatives. Or, if we did find the positives, they wouldn’t be metal anymore, but stone. So I was interested in generating new forms based on those very industrial yet archaic-looking ones.

SC: Do you consider your work as artefacts, produced for the future; as objects that might get dug up and excavated one day, or are you more interested in the speculative, and what that means in the present?

SK: It’s more the latter. There was a time when I thought about consciously burying things, but sor far it’s more about speculation.

SC: You’ve also made ephemeral works, like REAL ESTATE (2021).

SK: Yes, I made that as part of a collective. We see ourselves as feminist, critical artists. Our first project, REAL ESTATE, dealt with the economic and spatial situation and the resulting visual work of the Austrian Association of Women Artists — VBKÖ. Around the 1960s or ‘70s, construction was being done for a subway in Vienna, which required a lot of digging. A lot of really good clay was excavated in the process. My alma mater asked them for a few tons, which they put in the cellar. Students still use it, and so for REAL ESTATE we used it to build these structures, with a view to returning it, so that it can be used again. In this project we drafted a monumental building for the VBKÖ — an institution for women artists in Vienna — because in 1868 the Austrian Artists’ Society built the Künstlerhaus exclusively for male artists, and in 1889 the secessionists split from that society and built the Vienna Secession, again for male artists. Today those two buildings have enormous real estate value. Even though the VBKÖ was founded in 1910, they still only rent a flat in the city centre.

SC: Those works were wrapped in plastic — you had to come in every day to wrap them, because you wanted to keep them moist?

SK: We didn’t want to fire them, which meant keeping them a bit moist, so that we could transport the clay back afterwards. There was also a performative quality to that installation, which wasn’t part of the plan — it wasn’t intentional — but we had to regularly come back, spray the sculptures, wrap them. . . In a way it became a care project; we were taking care of this imagined institution for female artists. We — Veronika Dirnhofer, Cristina Fiorenza, Anna Khodorkovskaya, Sascha Alexandra Zaitseva, and I — took it in shifts.

SC: I guess one difference here, having arrived in residence, was the need to source clay. You were a bit limited, in terms of availability. You had to work with what you could find. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the first work you began making in residence was a replica of the undersea pipes used to house internet cables?

SK: I guess I’m collecting different infrastructures that are of interest: things that people engage with quite often, directly or indirectly, but which they’re generally not aware of.

SC: Those undersea pipes also seem quite permanent, in the sense that I doubt they’re going anywhere soon.

SK: Because they’re underwater, a lot of the parameters for them to enter the geological record are good. I’m interested in them because of that, and because they’re hyperobjects.

SC: What’s a hyperobject?

SK: It’s a term that was defined by Timothy Morton. It refers to these networks of things that function as a single thing. For example, the internet is comprised of all of these satellites, cables, and end-devices, such as cellphones and computers. Because of their scope and scale — their ubiquity — we’re not often conscious of them. They’re too complex and technical. But they will probably materialise in the geological record as very simple things.

SC: That’s fascinating! It makes me wonder about the archeological finds that have been made to date — whether these may have been used in much more complex ways than we tend to give our predecessors credit. . .

SK: Or if they meant something that we do not consider or understand now. Every object or engraving that we find today had its contexts and I am curious about those. Especially with the freedom that comes with being an artist, as opposed to a scientist.

SC: You also like to encode things in your sculptural works – engravings replicated from different sites, or these marks that are of your own making, but that feel symbolically loaded in some way, like that tree of life image at the base of the undersea pipeline, or the animal figures at the back of your reliefs. It’s reminding me of that story about those tasked with developing future-proof signage for nuclear waste deposits, that are meant to explain to people, in thousands of years, what’s inside. They got a bunch of semiologists, anthropologists, and so on together to try figure out a warning symbol that could be understood, in the knowledge that whatever languages we use today might be completely outdated. Which The signs that you leave don’t do that — you’re not trying to code for the future — but they do register in a similar way.

SK: No I’m not, but I usually look far into the future when I think about what we leave behind and who will find it. Will it be found at all? Will it be interpreted? If so, how? That’s one objective. The other is to look at things from very long ago, that are still with us, like cave paintings, engravings, or geology more generally. For me, those little engravings that I make somehow merge these worlds, bringing the past and future into my present. I like that as an artist I can do that. I can mix the far future and the far past. . .

SC: Or the porcupine and person. . .

SK: Yes [Laughs].

SC: Let’s talk about those paintings and reliefs, which you’re in the process of making for your temp exhibition at the end of the residency: is relief work something that you’ve done before?

SK: Yes, one of my first works in clay was a petrified albatros. Its stomach was filled with little objects like bottle lids, lighters, pen lids, comb fragments, and plastic soldiers; the typical mix of things in marine plastic debris. The reliefs that I made in residence at NIROX have something do with being here, in the Cradle of Humankind. I really wanted to walk around, to be in the hills and see what happens to me. The animals here became very important, and of course, they’re widely represented in rock art around the world. So it has something to do with trying to understand these animals: how I see and interpret them. There’s a lot of projection happening. I project my own psychological thinking on them, or ask all these questions about them. When I go for a walk and look at the giraffe and it looks back — that’s an important moment for me. There’s also a connection here to the quarzite slabs that were found in Namibia, in the Apollo 11 cave. They are some of the oldest so-called mobile art objects found in Southern Africa and are estimated to be 26,000 years old. There’s this debate about whether it’s art, because it’s a painting on a stone. I’m fascinated by that. There was a moment where I didn’t have battery on my phone to take a photo, so I had to scribble an image of this animal. I then went to the table where I was doing clay work and replicated it in clay. It made me question whether they just used those stones to scribble something that they’d seen outside, an animal, which they took into the cave as a reference. . .

SC: So speculation is the fun part?

SK: Yes [Laughs].

SC: Going back to this idea of projection, the reliefs take the form of silhouettes at times. The mouths of each, for example, feel quite singular, yet they’re also hybrid and quite abstract. Throughout the residency, you and Io [Makandal] have also been playing this game, trying to figure out what kind of animal each of us is. But there’s something about the profiles against the abstracted nature of the whole that makes them feel a bit like Rorschachs. . . Let’s explore your use of the word projection, though, because as silhouettes, they do start to read like those I imagine from Plato’s cave, maybe. . .

SK: It’s about this realisation of the borders that we set up with animals. We tend to project, claim to understand, patronise, and organise their lives for them. But I am very aware of the separation between me and an animal, when I meet one.

SC: Plato’s cave still feels appropriate — watching shadows and assuming what they are, until someone steps out and returns with fresh insight…

SK: That’s often what scientists think they’re doing; they take too much responsibility for explaining the world. As a biologist I was trained to be rational, to be part of that group who hold the ultimate truth and who know how to arrive at that truth. It’s not something I agree with anymore.

SC: Well Plato’s writing on truth and reason, law and order, does feed into that kind of rationalism. I think a lot of scientific philosophy still has roots in Plato, which is interesting in relation to what you’re saying about our attempts to control the life of animals. But for me, what you’re saying is more about indeterminacy — not only an indeterminate form or the creation of this hybrid silhouettes, but the making of a space of uncertainty or unknowing. It’s also echoed in the inkiness of your drawings and watercolours. . .

SK: It’s about leaving room to speculate.

SC: Working with the gap?

SK: I think so. The reliefs are also a bit fantastic — they’re these fantasy-like animals or figures.

SC: There’s also humourous.

SK: I hope so!

SC: The paintings came first, right? You refer to those as nocturnals, which is also another indeterminate space — the night.

SK: Yes, exactly. I also really enjoyed including these little symbols, which are loaded with stories. For me it was a lot of fun to play with.

SC: Are these things that you want the public to be aware of or are they more for yourself?

SK: I don’t know. When I show the paintings to others, that’s always the first thing I say, though. Like, ‘Here’s the Southern Cross,’ so I guess I do want people to be aware of them, but I hope they work without me explaining them, too.

SC: There’s something very playful about that, like when you’re young and have treasure hunts and hide clues around the garden. But hat was it about painting nocturnals that attracted you?

SK: I guess it was because of my grandmother. I was always captivated by how she survived the Second World War, and how she went through life as this pre-feminist person. She was married to an engineer and travelled the world with him, but was still very stubborn and self-aware. She was obsessed with Goethe, and loved the moon. Whenever there was a full moon she would step outside of her bedroom and watch how it played off the landscape. I always wanted to make paintings for her before she died, but never did. In a way I think I’m also making those paintings for her.

I don’t know if this belongs here, but another interest for me are these non-spectacular biographies of people — people who are considered unworthy of having a biography written about them for the public. Biographies tend to narrate from the back: you find an important person, look at their backstory, and it’s great how they made it from so little, but many people have these super normal lives and just die. When all their offspring die too they’re forgotten. There’s a sadness to that, a grief. It also informs my fascination with cave paintings, because I love that whatever they produced, at least some of it survived.

SC: Over the course of the residency you and Io [Makandal] have been discussing the making of a book about ordinary objects; objects presumed to have a long lifespan, be it through sheer mass or ubiquity. . .

SK: I think that’s how I want to chose the objects we discuss, as a filter.

SC: Like ordinary object biographies. Is the idea for them to be fictive?

SK: I don’t think fictive. It’s more about the thoughts they inspire, although that could be fictive. So I will chose a bottlecap and write about it and send that to Io, who will respond. During our residency I would often tell her about something that I want to do or am interested in, only to realise that she’s already thought about this extensively or has an artistic body of work about it too and vice versa. That’s how the idea for this book came about.

SC: Although it’s not going to be included in the show, you were also toying with the idea of a wallpaper, which was a bit reminiscent of an earlier work, SCUBA DIVIDE (2019)?

SK: That was made in collaboration with Max Lehner, the curator of the exhibition UNENDLICHE VORHERSAGE (2021) at 5020. We came up with the idea together. I found these very small shells on the beach in Australia. There were tons of them. When you pick them up and look closely they’re beautiful. I would scan them, print them, cut them out, scan them again. . . I did that a couple of times and then had them on these long papers on the wall. They were almost three-dimensional, because of this layering approach. Usually I make sculptures, but as print work it still felt three-dimensional. I was fascinated by the small steps through which things grow or morph in geology, that sedimentation. It was like hand-made geology on paper, for me.

SC: The reliefs looks quite fragile when propped-up against the wall or floor. Is there a reason for displaying them that way?

SK: Maybe I’m rebelling against stuff on plinths or hung neatly on walls, but I’m not tied to that.

SC: You don’t want them to read like sculptures or reliefs?

SK: I don’t like it when people refer to “mobile art.” Why do they call it art at all? Cave paintings? We don’t know what they are. When people see road signs in the future, will they think of them as art? We don’t know.

SC: There’s also the cable-tie work that you made, which includes the negatives of these hand gestures that are quite coded; they’re specific gestures produced by different communities: surfers, climbers, sculptors.

There you also used paper cut-outs to create the negatives for these gestures. When you installed that work for your open studio, it was placed upright and had a lot more torque or life as a broken object than it had on its side, while you were making it, but I was drawn to that because it also seemed to echo the hand, in the way that a hand might bend and break and contort when making these gestures.

SK: You often find imprints of hands in caves, too. Interestingly, they found out that about eighty-percent of those imprints in caves are of female hands, but that’s a detour. . . The cable-tie was the object around which, I think, Io and I decided to have these conversations. She said that it’s a funny analogy to the climate crisis, because you can make it tighter and tighter and tighter but you can’t loosen it anymore, and it is getting tighter and tighter. Placing my work in the context of the climate crisis is important for me, because all these things that are connected to climate change are hyperobjects. Because they’re so complex, they have these unintended consequences.