About the slide lectures

On Look But Don't Touch, Display, Prague, 2006 (press release)


David Kulhanek: Could you tell me a little more about the way you "perform" your slide lectures? Is it to make it look like science, or to illustrate research, or is it a kind of story-telling derived from the reality? Is it formal or casual?

Christian Sievers: I'm a big fan of the traditional slide lecture. Everyone is familiar with the form and knows how to approach it. I’m hijacking a very formal way of presentation and use it for something else. No, my lectures are not improvised at all, and they really don't have a casual feel to them. I like to say they're magic lantern shows, pre-scientific.

Do you repeat the lectures, or is it always a new look into the archive, searching for new connections?

I quite like repeating them. The montage of text and images, finding the right order, all of that takes a long, long time. That's the hard bit. Once they are completed, once the collage glue has dried, my part of the process is finished. I can just go and read it out. The lectures are very much a hardened product, an artifact. It’s then up to whoever cares to listen and watch to re-trace my steps, or to walk down a completely new path. It's great fun (well I hope so), trying to match captions to images that have been dislocated, constructing a narrative out of heterogeneous elements that you suspect have something in common. But you don’t know what it is. It makes new sense all the time.
It’s really about slowly revealing one image after the other, and the same for the text. It’s about a certain chronological order, to which the ‘lecturer’ has to stick. That also means that the lecture ‘script’, that details what is said and shown when, is not revealed. I’ll never print the whole text, or show all the images at once. It's a bit like striptease.

Could you describe your method? How do you classify the material you collect?

There’s nothing so special about it. It’s how artists work, you play around with things until you get a configuration that works. It starts with a certain image that then develops some kind of gravity and pulls in other images to complement it. Then of course I have to decide what I want this to be about; which questions to send out to people. That then triggers more images, and so on.

Do you apply randomness in the process?

Of course there’s the randomness of what I see and can take photos of while going to work, or what replies I get to the questionnaires. But in the end it's a conscious collage of all these things. It’s like modelling a sculpture that has to look good from a lot of angles.

Could one describe your work as a sort of research in non-linearity or rhizomatic structures of the "real"?

It makes you believe that everything is connected to everything else. I’m trying to craft it so that the elements feel non-hierarchical, that every element has the same weight. I ’m voicing these very diverse statements and opinions, gathered from the questionnaires, as if there were no contradictions.

Is your individual view-point, a sort of sculptural capturing of the real material, a point of departure? Is it a certain self-orientation system as well?

The process of compiling the work and phrasing the questions helps me find out what it is about these issues that makes me come back to them again and again. You could say, everyone who replies to the questions helps to articulate the (sculptural) problem.

Could one classify your lecture projects as non-spectacular?

What do you mean? Yes, very, but only in a small, intimate setting.

I am interested in the "sculptural background" of your pieces, so if you can just briefly comment your relationship to sculpture?

I like to think that the ‘foundation’ of the lectures are the physical reality of things. The way one object relates to another. ‘Tough Guys and Soft Guys’ for example was on a basic level about hard and soft boundaries, and the volume that’s inside, rigid forms and flux. Those are sculptural categories.

On 'Look But Don't Touch' performed by Karen Bartke, Hospitalfield, Scotland, 2007