Interview with Eloïse Bonneviot
A series of interviews with SPACE Art + Technology artists in residence
What were you doing in the year leading up to the residency?
My production drive is pretty much based on researching certain topics, through reading, making but also collaborating and exchanging with art peers. All of this is being materialised via my personal works and my two collectives HARD-CORE and the Mycological Twist. I feel it is a very intense yet super interesting time for my practice, because I am at a point where I understand my interests much better and I can make connections between all these different aspects of what I do. So basically I have been busy developing all these researches conjointly.
Concerning my personal projects I have been focusing on my ongoing research Thinking Like a Mountain, that is turning into an ever more complex set of relationships between different artworks at various exhibitions. This research is based on a term coined by the early environmentalist Aldo Leopold, who uses mountain accident data to inspect our contemporary relationship in/with ecologies and networks. It’s great to see this body of work slowly coming together and I am very keen on using the HereAfter residency to strengthen those connections even further.
What are you working on at the moment?
I think the interesting potential of Thinking Like a Mountain is how it can also exist online while merging with more IRL aspects of the work. From the beginning it was very important to think of the existence of ‘nature’ clichés part of our digitalised conditions. In fact, it is almost one of the premises for the works to show that ‘nature’ is first and foremost a framework of representation built to separate specific areas of ecosystems from what we consider to be the ‘human realm’. Technology and digital media are a useful tool because they emphasize the primacy of the interface being used in order to mediate the encounter we have with this specific thing we called ‘nature’. In a way the interface becomes ‘natural’.
SPACE’s HereAfter residency emphasis on Augmented Reality really came at the right time, as it perfectly fit within these questions I am addressing in my work.
How have you found the residency so far?
It’s amazing how being provided with something as seemingly simple as a studio and a context to work in can accelerate one’s thinking process. It really enabled me to read and research more, while also meeting interesting people and being enriched by the other residency artists I am sharing the studio with. In a way it forces a focus and actively pushes me to pinpoint the specifics of what I am trying to do with Thinking Like a Mountain. Preparing my workshop Outsourced Senses is also particularly useful in that regards.
The fact that I have such long travel journeys to get to The White Building studio has also helps, as I have been doing some serious reading during those journeys!
What’s coming next?
I am currently preparing a solo show at ANDOR, which I am really excited about. I am also working on the residency with that show in mind. What I am making for that show is much more sculptural, so it would be great to integrate the work that resulted from the residency in the exhibition space, in order for the works inform one another and coexist. I have a couple of ideas that could potentially work in that direction and I am looking forward to test them during the exhibition.
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Eloïse Bonneviot’s recent activities include Planned Obsolescence (Moscow RU), O Super (hu/wo-) man #1: Eloïse Bonneviot, Friends and Foes at Green Ray (London UK), ABJECT at Import Projects (Berlin, DE). As co-founder of The Mycological Twist since 2014 she participated in Piknik na obochine at EXO EXO (Paris FR) and KOSMO at Kevin Space (Vienna AU). She is also co-founded of HARD-CORE since 2011, with the retrospective Strictly Digital at Alternativa 2015 (Gdansk PL). Bonneviot is a teacher at Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam NL) as HARD-CORE.
