A conversation between Margret Wibmer and Magdalena Kröner published in the RELAY artist publication (2020) developed in parallel with the eponymous video work. Publisher: VFMK – Verlag für moderne Kunst.
The RELAY artist publication holds a rich selection of images related to the eponymous video work, the interview with Magdalena Kröner and a beautiful poem by Marianna Maruyama, a reflection on this work.
Magdalena Kröner: What grabbed my attention after only a few seconds of watching “Relay” was its dense weave of performance and visual and acoustic realization. You open with a split screen on which all the performers appear in miniature. Each performer is surrounded by a nondescript black space, with nothing to distract from the respective person; the film was shot in stark black and white, which intensifies this stylization even more.
At first, the performers seem as small as insects, and it’s like looking down into an experimental set-up in a laboratory or into a Petri dish containing some very lively, minute creatures. They could also be tiny avatars. After a while, their configuration seems to condense–or at least I had that feeling–into a kind of script; into a loosely woven fabric of logograms, i.e. characters or ciphers like those used in Chinese and Japanese writing systems. It strikes me that the idea of the body as a cipher characterizes not only this piece but all your works, actually. It’s always about the tension between space and body, between universality and individuality.
Margret Wibmer: I love the way you describe it. The cipher arises from improvisation, and intuition plays an important part in that. Not thinking, but doing. When I was editing the recordings I tried to visualize the aspect of what you call the experimental set-up: that’s how I arrived at the boxes, in which you can see all the performers at the beginning.
Music also played a vital part: together with composer Robert Poss, I considered what music would correspond to the openness, to the unplanned nature of what was happening in front of the camera. We were looking for music and sounds that give the impression of something being rehearsed; not a harmonic sound, not a recognizable song but something that seems to be evolving while it’s being heard. This kind of music also has a direct influence on what you perceive, as does the arrangement of the performers in the boxes. We worked with different sounds, from ambient to experimental and even rock for the subsequent image sequences. “Relay” focuses on the individual performers, but as in all the large-scale performances that I have realized for specific locations with audiences, the performers’ interrelationships are also very important. I see what happens in “Relay”–in individual performances in front of the camera–as an entirety, just like my major live performances with an audience: I see the performers as representatives of something universally human–and so I think that shapes the broader context of what you see.
MK: Besides what you once described as “unfolding”, I think there is a lot of “hiding” in your work–the stark black and white reveals only as much as it obscures–again and again the bodies disappear into the darkness or are covered by the fabric. I believe this correlates with the play of individuality on the one hand and the capturing of something supra-individual, a universal knowledge of humankind, on the other. Representatives. How would you describe what “unfolds” during the performance?
MW: The personalities and characters of the individual performers unfold in performance and improvisation. Individual states of the soul may surface, but also a deep awareness connecting us with others and with the world. The Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro, whose work I encountered during a period working in Japan in 2013, coined the phrase ‘acting intuition’ for this. In “Relay”, using digital technology and performance, I try to show ‘something’ that goes beyond the body as an object, and beyond the image as well. Aspects of concealment and disclosure play an important part, for both the performers and the viewers.
MK: The manual aspect is also very significant in your handmade props–the textile performance objects. Sewing, a process initiated and completely controlled by you, prepares and constitutes the performances. The making-of-something-by-hand is a central aspect, which later also represents a touching of the performers’ bodies. The impressions of your hand have a direct effect on the fabric, thus shaping it. This means that something like your individual handwriting is directly inscribed into the fabric and then transferred to the performers. That’s where the “chiasm” occurs–the crossing-over and double sensation to which Merleau-Ponty refers.
You often emphasize how vital it is for your work that the textile objects the performers handle are carefully made by hand. As I see it, your textile objects are the medium through which the transition from the standardized to the individual materializes. They mark the transition, if we were to express it musically, from the theme to the variation. They are the medium of confrontation with you as an artist, as well as the medium of the performers’ individual confrontation with the camera, which forms the true heart of “Relay”. This is a key aspect of your artistic approach, I believe: each performer is given the same textile object, which you have sewn individually by hand–according to the same pattern. Everyone is given the same object, so the individually different, the unique, only arises from the different ways in which the performers transform the conditions and settings that are the same for everyone.
MW: Right. By the way, improvisation also plays a part in the production of the textile objects. I didn’t start with an existing pattern, nor did I make a design drawing: I developed the form step by step through improvisation. The attention I paid to making the textile objects by hand also plays a key role in the performance.
MK: I would like to know more about that…what role do improvisation and focused attention play for you in your designs?
MW: By contrast to industrial production, which presupposes standardization, in manual work implicit knowledge is written, so to speak, into the material. This is about upgrading a cheap functional fabric, a stiff unbleached cotton, which also includes a criticism of the mass production of clothes and the associated catastrophic effects on our environment.
MK: Yet at the same time, there are very few things as culturalized and encoded as clothing….
MW: Precisely. I am concerned with the question of value here: I don’t give the performers any instructions regarding the action itself, but I do draw their attention to the fact that the circular openings are hemmed by hand, and that the double seams have been worked very carefully by hand. This influences the way in which they handle and interact with the object. Beyond that, preciousness is important to me in another sense. I would like to stimulate reflection on what we actually use to measure “value”, namely the value of clothing and even a person’s value or individuality. I ask myself whether an item of clothing is worth more when it has a label, a brand associated with luxury, or whether it becomes valuable because it is unique? And more broadly–in what way does a person’s value or uniqueness unfold when fashion design defines who we are to such an extent? In other words, if a body is only the carrier of a brand or a label, who are we? What is left of people if we only dress according to social norms and trends? After all, clothing is rather like a second skin, and fashion allows us to assume a variety of identities. This also raises the question of self-determination. By introducing a textile object with an obvious nearness to clothing as a ‘relational object’ in my performances, I visualize a fundamental truth about humanity through the way the performers handle it in the context of the performance: in terms of their subjective experience and their objective being.
MK: Well, fashion is not only a social agreement; it’s always a ritual as well. One central aspect underlying all your work, as I see it, is the question of ritual’s impact and significance. Where is the ritual quality of the textile object constituted in your work–during its production? During its use by the performers? In the performance itself? Or, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty again, in the chiasm, in the intersection and simultaneity of meaning and effect in the performance, of medium and message, or more precisely: in the interplay of body, clothing and performance?
MW: Ritual plays a major part in all my works, although not necessarily in the production process, more often in the performance itself. In the work “Time Out”, for example, which I staged in various forms in Japan, Australia, and Europe, I was very concerned with staging the Ma, which is associated in Japanese with the idea of the pause, or the space in-between, or even with the negative space. The process of staging was equally important: the performers were carefully dressed up in their clothing, which again led to an even more ritualized situation. In addition, various waiting and resting situations were incorporated, which led to a change in awareness and an intense interweaving of body, object and space.
The work of art is created from the interaction of all these elements–all the steps through preparation up to the actual staging and all the participants’ direct experience. I see this direct experience as the essence of the work; at the same time, it’s the aspect that can only be documented very inadequately, visually speaking. By the way, that was also the starting point when I was developing “Relay”.
MK: You mean searching for a way to visualize the entirety and complexity of the performative experience?
MW: That’s right. By contrast to the compositional severity of the setting, with its strong emphasis on black and white and the static camera perspective, in “Relay” there is a completely open space, an undefined space; in other words, it’s also an undefined temporal space that the respective performers have arranged according to their own requirements and knowledge. It was also about moments of showing and hiding–including extremely individual and intimate aspects, which were influenced very differently by the performers in accordance with their personalities or their respective states of mind on that day. The presence of the camera was also significant: of course, for a professional performer it’s easier to move freely in front of the camera than for someone who is perhaps doing it for the first time. The location itself also influenced the performance. It took place in an industrial building on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, where my studio was located for several years. It’s a special place where artists, designers and scientists have worked for decades. All the performers, including the owner of the building, Al Attara, are my close friends.
The participants’ different approaches and their fundamental openness towards the process provided the starting material for the production of the video and the publication. The additional processing, interpretation and implementation of the material required completely different temporal and structural methods.
MK: What I would like to talk to you about, including taking a closer look at your earlier works, is your interest in the relationship between performers and spectators, or the absence of spectators and the presence of a camera. I’m thinking especially of Lygia Clark’s relational objects, which have interested you for a long time. What’s the source of your interest in social, or rather in supra-individual relationships and the irritation of outdated relationship patterns? On the one hand you have the generally passive spectator, and on the other hand the usually active performers, and you subject both to a quasi-fluid, reciprocal activation in your work?
MW: It makes sense to bring that up in this context–because a desire to comprehensively expand the space of experience is something that I have always found fundamentally interesting, right from the start. In 2000 I co-curated an exhibition called “Die Desorientierung des Blickes (The Disorientation of the Gaze)”. Broadening and switching viewers’ and actors’ perspectives has always interested me. Even as a child, I found it odd when, for instance in a museum, I stood and looked at an object on the wall but could not relate to it. Reference to the body, and direct work with the body, whether in my photographs, videos, or even performances, seems to me to be a way out of this, because as soon as a body appears somewhere, immediately there is something performative about it. In my work, I think it was important to me from the very beginning to step back as a performer and open out the stage into something that can be filled by other people.
MK: Why is that, do you think?
MW: I’m happy not to dictate everything that happens in the performative space. It’s very important for me to create a space of experience for everyone individually or a space for dispute, confrontation and uncertainty, as well. Abandoning control is a central element of my work, whether in relation to the audience or in relation to the development processes underlying my work. Of course, this always entails a certain amount of risk–for example, if I go to a strange place, a new cultural location or a new country for a project and only have a limited time to realize the project there. The inevitable ‘unplannability’ of this situation, and the fact that I can only control what happens on site to a very limited extent, often produces quite amazing results.
MK: Which also means opening up space for chance, of course…
MW: Absolutely. I’m very interested in opening things up to chance, not only in my own work, but also in other fields of art. Take Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew”, for example, in which he gives his fellow players room to improvise–he abandons control in order to allow something completely new to emerge. Merce Cunningham, who not only deviated from the rigid choreography customary in classical ballet but also conceived entire pieces with the camera in mind, also had a great influence on me.
MK: I thought about Cunningham and his relationship to the camera the other day in regard to “Relay”. It seems to me that the way your camera perspective is integrated into “Relay” is a solution whereby the camera is not only a pure and very limited means of recording but also creates and directs fresh attention, so to speak, and thus becomes a constitutive and central element of the actual performance. Coincidence, which is important to you, also played a major part in Cunningham’s work, e.g. when you think of his solo “50 Looks”, which is created from a sequence of still images–or “looks”, as it were–then activated to make a considerable degree of freedom possible, based on random operations. In your performances, I have also observed this mix of quasi-mathematical precision and modularization of individual sequences of movement in complete artistic freedom–I’m thinking of the relationship between the precision of the pattern from which your objects arise and the complete freedom that you give to the performers in their handling of the textile objects…
MW: Right. Coincidence, the chance encounters that already played a part as a compositional tool for Cunningham, have been important stimuli for my work. His ideas about dance in relation to the camera inspired me to think in a number of ways about the body and its movement in space. I had already experienced the difficulty of adequately recording the event in large-scale performances such as “Time Out”, where I realized afterwards that it was almost impossible to make all the performers visible as well as transporting the totality of the experience in any way appropriate to the situation. That’s why it seemed obvious for “Relay” to concentrate fully on the individual performers, in order to really take time to analyze at leisure the relationship between body, object and space in the performance. In addition, the question that had already played a part in my early work “Off the Wall” became important: How can I transpose the performance into digital space? In other words, how can I not only film a body but also make its presence perceptible to viewers? Currently, I think this is an extremely exciting question, when space, time, and our very existence are redefining themselves.
Photo of publication by Anastasia Nefedova at The Merchant House Amsterdam, 2025.