Tori Wrånes.The Rock, EUROPE EUROPE
Kinetic sculpture made for the 19th Biennale of Sydney, as part of the performance STONE and SINGER 2014, Australia. © Tori Wraanes.
Tori Wrånes’ works focus on the sounds made, spaces occupied and energies generated by the processes of living. Growing up in a village between the forest and the sea, she has vivid memories of following the treetops home while running in the woods. Notions of human importance can seem patently absurd amid the great quiet of the Scandinavian landscape. In Nature Enough? (2011), musicians sit on a tree plying it with saws while the artist dangles from a mere single hair. A performance that draws a good-humored contrast between the natural and artificial.
Shih-yu Hsu: What inspired you to become a performance artist?
Tori Wrånes: First of all. I consider myself a human. Secondly, life is an inspiration. How to feel alive and not to be dead every day, that struggle itself is the feeling of being alive. Not to be dead is important. (Laughs.). It’s a big question. Sometimes it’s like an instinct or a physical need to see stuff in a different way, to rearrange things and to use unused space. We only move around here on the first square centimeter, and don’t use the other 40 centimeters. Sometimes it’s a struggle to live, but luckily the opposite is also true. It’s also full of joy. I’m always thinking about rearranging things to allow new constellations to appear and to allow the secret to unfold, to let the daily life unfold and open up as space. If you ask why I do performing, I think that there’s a physical part of it. I like to work with voice because it’s something we carry with us all the time. It’s something very personal and emotional. It became a challenge: how high can you sing and how low can you sing?
Tori Wraanes.Your Next Vacation Is Calling. 2014. © Tori Wraanes.
Tori Wraanes.Your Next Vacation Is Calling. 2014. © Tori Wraanes.
Tori Wraanes.Your Next Vacation Is Calling. 2014. © Tori Wraanes.
SYH: In your works, you’ve changed your appearance by using costumes, props, architecture and sculptures. Do you design the mechanisms on your own or work with a team? How do you come up with the ideas?
TW: The process varies depending on my limitations and location I design the visuals. Then sometimes I need engineers or flying technicians or people that know more than I do for constructions and technical things. I have a very good assistant. I always make my own costumes. I really like the physical part of it because you can see the change, when I work with voice and do performance. Voice is invisible in a way. Still, I like to say the same thing in many different ways. I like the ways that what you see and what you hear are connected. And the music is the most powerful thing in the space. If you manage to balance it with visuals, it creates an immersive experience. I can’t stop working on this aesthetic. The visual also creates a space for voice as well. Like singing in an international outfit or in a bikini is a totally different expression.The other work I’ve done is Europe Europe (2014). People didn’t notice that the rock was moving and suddenly were surprised by the movement. I really like the idea of having these banal, ordinary elements suddenly surprise people.
Tori Wraanes. STONE and SINGER. 2014. © Tori Wraanes.
Tori Wraanes. YES NIX. commission work for PERFORMA 13.
SYH: Can you give an example?
TW: Like the troll in Stone And Singer (2014). I played a troll, who might come out only at night. hey carry a lot of dark secrets that cannot be shared just like we do: on the Internet, we choose how we want others to read us and how we want them to think about us. Trolling is my big secret in a way. (Laughs.) And the rock dropping from the ceiling might suggest the anxiety of society or whatever. But the troll standing in front of light was sharing the secret. It is ungendered and the voice came out from the brass and the stone. The Turbine Hall used to make boats and I love the sound of boats, of foghorns, so I thought it would be good to use it.
SYH: You come from a music background. What’s the difference between music and performance art? The challenges in translating between them?
TW: I was in a rock band for ten years. but it became about how you look and that almost took over the music. For me, I started to feel uncomfortable about it, but a new album was coming out and we started to tour, and we needed to fulfill a contract. Then I thought, I need time to do my own stuff. I started to do performances that never showed my face, where I want the voice to be more present: our voices have so many personalities, so you don’t have to see the face. Hiding the face seems more mystical and I guess it also makes me more like a sculpture. If we exhibit a sculpture, it is a dead object in a way. But we have a pulse, we have that human electricity. If you stage it and create a scene, the audience provides even more energy.
SYH: Filming performances is one of the primary ways in which non-object practices are documented. Are you involved in documenting the performance and the process of post-production?
TW: I’m very split and frantic when it comes to documentation. I want to focus on all the senses. If you film something, the audience cannot feel the wind on the skin or smell the the space. But at one point, you just have to accept that it’s different things. You can work with video in another way, making it as documentation and telling people that this is documentation of what happened. Even though they cannot smell the smell, the video can still be a good work.
SYH: I first saw your performance via video. Can you talk about the work in Performa 13?
TW: I’ve always want to do a work about guns. Actually I did finish a piece about guns and toys, but at the time of 2011 Norway attack it was too sensitive to show that work. When I was invited to do a project in the US, I thought there would be no better chance to do a work about guns than in a country where you can legally own them. For me, guns are an absolute. Either you are alive or dead, no in between. so in YES, NIX (2013), I have a voice come in following this vertical route, from above. It’s my own voice as I’m singing and flying, and a group of fluters that circles the venue horizontally. And I sang in the horizontal direction and I flied. Then the gun fires, and the show ends.
SYH: Tell me about your newest project.
TW: I want to create a three-dimensional painting. I’m trying to get wild on the wall and work with small and tactile elements in the space. Then I run on a treadmill and do improvised singing. Language for me is so much about hierarchy and I want to make it flat and create the sound of whatever. This is a three-hour loop performance. The audience came into the space every fifteen minutes. Some people just didn’t want to leave. In this work I really find this language without words, just with rhythm.
SYH: Sometimes your titles are funny, they have a sense of humor. Do you come up with titles first? How do you name your work?
TW: Your Next Vacation Is Calling (2014) is an e-mail I got when I was looking around. And I just thought, this is my title. (Laughs.)
SYH: Are there any other performance artists you want to collaborate with? Do you look at what other people do? Who has influenced your work?
TW: Very often I feel that I’m not so connected to the rest of the world. I collaborate with people often because I like to be challenged by someone else and sometimes it’s good to think about something you didn’t think about yourself. I’ve been working with Simona Barbera, a sound artist or visual artist too. and Jan Erik Mikalsen, a composer and Hanne Kolsto, a musician. It’s easier for me to work with people that are doing things I don’t do, like dance or music. Sidsel Endresen inspired me a lot. She dedicated herself to the voice and concentrated on it. People are always asking who inspired me, but I guess my grandma, people around me, friends, the space, different acoustics and nature… the list goes on.
photo credit Yinmeng Liu
SYH: You are in residency here in New York for a couple of months. How do you feel about the art scene in New York? And what’s the art scene in Norway?
TW: I went to see Mark Beasley somewhere. I forgot the name of the gallery. I would say New York’s art scene is busy. You can always can go out and see something. In Norway, the best thing of Norwegian art scene is artist-run spaces.
SYH: Does the government support artist-run spaces in Norway?
TW: There are grants you can apply for. But it’s about the will and the power from the woods. There is a big underground scene in Norway now and not much money involved. It’s vibrant and vital.
SYH: What’s the current project, for you? Is there any subject or topic you want to realize in the future?
TW: I’m doing a project for Bangladesh in April. I’m trying to compose for that. and I have a performance in Chicago called Rapid Post Performance Festival. There is another one in Italy in September and a solo show in The Hague in October. It’s going to be busy. And I would like to start dance lessons: Latin dance or Hip-Hop.
