INTERVIEW WITH FANNI FUTTERKNECHT

Fanni Futterknecht works as a performer and visual artist in Vienna, Paris and Amsterdam. She studied visual art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, followed by a Masters study at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Her previous focus of interest was video installations, but she currently develops performances that are constructed for traditional theatre contexts. In 2006 she joined the program Essai at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, a program aimed at young artists from different disciplines, that fosters the exploration of new dance and performance strategies. In Spring 2008 she received a grant for a three months residency in Rome where she pursued her choreographic and her visual work. After her stay in Rome she lived for half a year as artist in residence at La Cite International des Arts in Paris where she developed her last solo performance Excerpts of confusion. This performance had its premiere at Imagetanz Festival 09 in brut Vienna. At the moment she is working on a new performance: Where life has no value, paradise sometimes has its price which was presented at WUK Vienna and will be shown at Festival a/d Werf.

In which way does your work as a visual arts influence your work?

I wouldn't consider myself a visual artist but rather simply somebody who is creating work inspired by a visual art context. My background as a visual artist is still very present, I think in a very 'image-based' way. When I make performances I think a lot about the images I want to create. Not only the images that I want to produce as such, that you can actually see, but also the ones I want to evoke in the spectator. I feel concerned about the physicality of the image, of how to represent them within a performative situation. There is also the aspect of time that became very relevant for my work now. Before, I was working with video, which is a different way of using time.

So this aspect is something I am really curious about, how do we read a performance in relation to a film. For example, the difference between time in video and time in a live event, in a performance, where you cannot hide anything. How could you create a performance with a time feeling that is rather related to film? I try to create the equivalent of zooms, or close ups in a performance. I always start with an idea of an image and then I try to develop a certain physicality or action that would allow me to approach this image.

Speaking of aesthetics, I have the impression that you are working with very aesthetic, compared with your previous work.

Yes it might look different, but the strategy of aesthetic is maybe the same. Now this piece deals with artificiality and superficiality. It is a plastic paradise, with naïve shapes and cartoon figures. It is full of strong colours put together in an obvious relation. One of the performance works that I did before was inspired by a more “painterly” way of creating an image, like a baroque painting.

It was composed in a way that could remind you of such a style. But this new piece is about artificiality and the texture of artificiality; it is also about naiveté, and so there is a need to work with simple shapes and simple obvious actions.

Can you tell me a bit more about your projects for the future?

I don't perceive my work as projects. For me it is one big research that comes out through different works or objects but in the end I actually feel I am always busy with the same thing. But I can say that I would like to make another solo work which goes further into this aspect of naiveté and innocence and therefore would also like to collaborate with children for certain scenes.

Can you name this search?

That would actually be a contradictory thing to do. I am in fact working exactly against this idea of naming things or framing them or putting them down or being concrete about things. But of course, in a way, I still do it a lot. But I do it in order to leave these frames or definitions or even theories behind. I do not want to base my work on theory, even though theory inspires me a lot. And I also don't want to speak about the concrete or well-defined. My work is rather about the open, the 'un-concrete', the undefined. I have a very big drive to go into things that we but also the dreams that we dream when we are awake. What is this 'un-physical' mental or even spiritual cannot grasp or that are not really reachable. I am curious to find out about different realities. For instance, the reality of dreams. Not only the dreams we have at night that happen in the unconscious, reality and how does it seduce us? This has to do with my very personal relation to life.