Les:
It’s July 20th, 2008, at NKD. This is Les Joynes interviewing Natalia and Maria Petschatnikov in their studio at the NKD.
Hi!

N&M:
Hi!

Les:
And thanks for meeting me.

N&M:
No problem.

Les:
Great!
We all had a chance to look at your work but I’d like to get it in your own words from both of you what’s going on with your studio right now, what kind of things you are looking at, and how is this residency the place for you to develop your works right now.

N:
-Well, I guess we could start with the few recent projects. We are working on a few series of paintings: some of them are sort of new ideas, new thoughts that we are developing here, but some are continuations of the ideas that we’ve been playing with for a while. One idea has to do with this kind of odd comparisons and diptychs. We always work together. We are interested in diptychs that both of us are working on. This particular series has to do with a kind of strange dynamics between what’s happening in the studio, the kind of absurdity that is happening in the studio now, on the studio table…

M:
-not necessarily absurdity in the things themselves, but in the comparison of the studio situation to the situation of viewing or discussing art in a museum or a gallery setting. We are kind of interested in these things being so opposite of one another. Like for us art is being created and conceptualised in a rather irrational way. And the way it’s being talked about is very analytical.

N:
-And because we also have plenty of experience of giving tours in a museum setting we are quite fascinated by the fact that you can talk about almost anything in a very sophisticated and rational way, and explain any work of art in a very kind of, you know, smart “art-talk” way. But the way art is actually being created in the studio often results from a bunch of accidental circumstances that just happened that way. To be a bit more specific, the paintings that we are working on now depict the kind of normal chaos of our work-table, the kind of table with CD’s and computer equipment, some lose articles, plastic toy-animals, and then some blueberries, which we’ve just picked in a forest…

M:
-It’s not rational… It’s the kind of story that doesn’t have a linear logic to it. It is a story. But it’s not…it’s not a narrative in that sense.

Les:
So there it is... within your studio you have for example your desktop or a place that you are choosing to photograph and there is a sense of randomness of an order in a way things are placed there.

N:
-Yes, exactly.
We do not try to arrange it in any way. We try to pick the moment and we take tons and tons of photographs. The paintings are always based on photographs that we take. We tend to choose photographs that have the most chaotic nature, the most accidental character.

M:
-Or sometimes - something that surprises us, it’s when we see something and can’t exactly explain what is it that we are seeing, what’s happening there.
For us it’s sort of important to use the process of painting because that way we live with an image much longer than we would have if we just used a photographic image as it is. It’s a whole different engagement process for us. And we like the idea of working with illusion because we believe it’s another way of sort of communicating with a viewer.
Because when an artist is using a material in a way of “living with it” and spending time with it I think we are engaging a viewer in a different way. We are offering a viewer another, I don’t know, situation that brings one back to the history of art, the history of painting, the history of things.

N:

• But then such thinking is very common for us not only in painting. I think it’s very important to say that we don’t just paint. Every time we select the topic that interests us, we tend to come up with a material that to our understanding suits the subject that we are talking about. And in fact some of the other things in the studio are objects. Like one piece, a work in progress has to do with casts of ordinary items, found along the sides of the road, like beer cans, and candy wrappers, and half eaten apples, and cigarette boxes, and things like that. We carefully reproduce them by making moulds and casts in white resin and then paint them. And for us this process is very similar to taking a photograph and then transforming it into a painting.

M:

• Usually we choose not particularly spectacular objects. We try to select very simple things, banal things.

N:
-By collecting them, and reproducing them we are spending a much longer time with these objects.

M:
-We are making these objects special and precious.
And I guess, for us there is a kind of dialectic between something that is not precious, consciously not precious, obviously a garbage item that we then transform into something that has a meaning. We started this project in another residency in Scotland. There we wanted somehow to integrate the idea of very special Scottish tartan designs. We painted them on the cast objects and then photographed them in the environment we have found them, on the sides of the roads. In Norway we are continuing to work on the idea further, but of cause the patterns that we’re painting now are Norwegian patterns. And for us this piece has something to do with geography, it’s playing with the idea of “generic” verses “specific”.

Les:
Sounds like, on the one hand that you’re selecting things that are sort of banal and everyday and that might be overlooked. And that through your own artistic observation you make them your own and then you invest yourself onto the banal object and raising the banal object from something that is invisible to something that’s highly visible and then within context for example Scotland, where you were on residency, where you’ve found some of these objects and cast them. And in Norway, for example, you are imbuing the object with your own experience of that culture by, for example, taking the Norwegian sweater pattern and painting them onto the object and also bringing humour into it.

N:
Because for us, I guess, the idea behind this project is bigger than just the experience of finding specific objects. For us it is about geography of things, the whole idea of travelling and things becoming more and more similar. Often you don’t even know where you exactly are. Only a few things remained specific… You are saying that we are experiencing for example Norway or Scotland in an authentic way… but actually by choosing the sweater patterns we are kind of choosing the cliché as well. You know… We are not going for this very particular Norwegian thing that only Norwegians would know. We in fact are going for something that we attribute to Norwegians. So, again we are playing with this idea of cliché and familiarity of these objects because this is a key for the communication with a viewer.

Les:
So bringing a kind of iconic surface to that.

M:
-Yes. Exactly.
-We’ve been to Scotland once, but even as children living in Russia if someone would have asked us, what we know about Scotland, we would have named Scottish patterns (we wouldn’t have known the word “tartan”). Or like with Norway - Yeah, I know the sweater… even if you’ve never been to Norway. But I guess it’s this kind of cliché patterns that we paint on objects. The objects that we choose are extremely global; they are the same everywhere. You take a photograph of a can, like a squashed can or a cigarette pack in Norway and it would look like it could have been taken anywhere. It’ll be the same, because the brand names are global. Of course irony and humour are very important to us. We don’t want to talk about these kinds of issues in a very serious “political” way. We want to be playful and personal with them.

N:
-And I guess that has always been with us. We really think that it’s so precious when an artist talks about his or her own experience. Of cause we live in a world where so many things are happening in politics. But I do think that it is more interesting to see the personal story. And I guess this is what we are trying to work on. We respond to situations that probably affect everybody but we do want to respond to them in our own way by noticing these little things, special or non-special, I mean, that are special to us, specific to us…

M:
-There is another series going on here; it has to do with “wellness institutions”. We are interested in the idea of false promises. I guess we try to see that in a kind of ironic way as well, because we really don’t trust these “big” things.

N:
-We take a lot of pictures in fitness clubs, swimming pools and other public institutions. In Germany (I think it’s actually everywhere) the idea of “wellness” is blown out of proportions. Wellness centre - is EVERYTHING. It’s not just a fitness club and a swimming pool; it’s a whole environment that is supposed to make you feel great. We are trying to investigate what is behind it in fact. We’re very interesting in the way the rooms are constructed to serve certain purposes. What we’ve discovered, a lot of these rooms where you are supposed to relax, like relaxation rooms, saunas and all these things are highly artificial. They are decorated with plastic looking plants (even if they are real palm trees they still look extremely generic and really unnatural to a place like Germany). It plays on a certain assumption that when you see a palm tree in a huge flowerpot it makes you feel relaxed right a way... But very often we personally feel ourselves highly unwell in this kind of rooms. The choice of colours, materials, and signs in such institutions appears aggressive and overwhelming. In our work we often make comparisons between unrelated environments. We made a series of paintings where we compared “wellness” rooms with zoo-rooms. Rooms that are designed for animals in the zoo are very similar to fitness centres. They are quite often covered with blue or green tiles to imitate water and trees.

Les:
So it’s a utilitarian space for humans to feel good about seeing animals in captivity.

M:
Exactly! But I guess it tells us so much about people in general and the kind of spaces
They consider great.

Les:
Or they are taught to think that.

M:
-But again it goes back to clichés. A lot of people would probably name certain things like sand beach, palm trees, sunset and so on to describe their concept of wellbeing. But when all these elements with a Mediterranean flavour are reproduced artificially inside a glass covered urban building, it just doesn’t work…

N:
-There is a piece that we like very much by Ilja Kabakov. It’s called “Heeling with memory”. He recreated a hospital for mentally sick. Every room has a depressive atmosphere of a mental institution; all furniture is screwed to the floor, walls are painted in depressing colours. And jet there is a “pretty” painting on the wall in each room with a view of a Crimea landscape. Classical music is played in every room. As a viewer you are so aware of the fake promises… Because it is so obvious that a patient would never get out of a place like this.

Les:
There is a project I was doing in Eastern Berlin at a former Soviet radar station that had been abandoned about 1994, I think, they just demobilised and pulled out when the wall fell down. So I, a friend of mine and I, jumped the fence and went in there and there was a green very dense rain forest in there. In a lot of public meeting rooms they had these beautiful posters of idyllic natural scenes and I think that was to compensate the place that is really difficult to be hanging out nine months a year probably.

N:
-But it is a sincere belief that by looking at an image of an idyllic place from a sort of prison it gets better for you. But I think it’s the opposite way around because it makes you much more aware of the fact that you are in prison…

M:

• Everyone needs different things to feel well. And a lot of the times that has nothing to do with these “big promises”.

N:
-But I guess we are trying in a sarcastic way to talk about serious things that concern us. We always work with digital photography and have tons of pictures on our computer. We often compare images that geographically or otherwise have nothing to do with one another. They are taken in different countries, in different time periods and then all of a sudden they evoke a similar feeling.

M:
-It is like you have one image that is very old, we took it many years ago and that house in the middle is the house we grew up in and then recently in Scotland we took another picture of another house and they seem so similar…

N:

• The houses have a feeling of being abandoned, some kind of a forgotten city, a forgotten place.

M:
-Or maybe it is a model of a city.

Les:
Do you have any final remarks about your work and what you are doing here?

N:
We are planning to experiment a little bit more with the place and do a few things outside, things we are not necessary planning to take with us, just collect ideas to think about…

M:

• Residencies offer a perfect format for developing ideas and we very much appreciate the time and space to do that.