Hans Ulrich Obrist
Anri Sala
Anri Sala and Hans Ulrich Obrist on Anri’s drawing background and his preferred medium of video. They are joined by Anri’s sister Evis who gives a thoughtful background on her childhood with Anri.
| HUO | Evis, you are Anri’s sister. Can you tell me a little of what Anri’s work means to you? |
| ES | Well, everything about Anri means a lot to me. I tend to go and see it whenever I can, which is difficult because we are spread so much now. I had a good opportunity; I was in New York when he was showing a few things there so we caught up. Anything in London I try to follow. |
| HUO | What is so fascinating is that I have known Anri for seven or eight years, but obviously nobody has known Anri’s work longer than you. I was wondering when you realised for the first time that he was an artist and what you saw was the beginning. |
| ES | Oh, the beginning was when he was five or six years old, probably. |
| HUO | He was already an artist? |
| ES | Well, he started drawing when he was four years old and he started drawing the football matches. On the little drawings he did you could see the movement, who was hitting the ball and what was the next movement. He always showed the movement, even with a still drawing. |
| HUO | Are they still around, these drawings? |
| AS | I remember one drawing, which I had totally forgotten but now you have reminded me. The one with the Roman battle with the arrows, and it was drawn in such a way that if you followed the direction of all the arrows, from the many soldiers involved in the battle, only one [soldier] would stay alive in the end. |
| ES | But the same with the football thing; you would guess who was going to be the next player to hit the ball and who was going to score. |
| HUO | So it was already the beginning of film there. |
| ES | I think it was a moving drawing. I don’t know if that sounds right, but a moving sort of still object, really. Quite nice. He used to do my drawing tasks as well, which was great because I was hopeless in drawing so there was a little bit of cheating like that for me. |
| HUO | So you knew already when Anri was five that he was going to be an artist? |
| ES | I think so, yes. I was very happy but my parents were a little bit apprehensive. When he was fourteen and going to go to the art school my parents were a little bit — you know what parents are, they thought art was an unknown way to the unknown and they were used to having me at home and I knew I was going to be a doctor and studying. You might say it’s boring because you know what you are going to do with the rest of your life. I said to him, “Go for it”, but my parents were more hesitant. |
| HUO | So you encouraged him? |
| ES | Absolutely. I said, “Go for it! Fantastic.” He used to read a lot as well. But then I had a gap of six years when I didn’t see much of him. |
| HUO | Because you went to Cambridge. |
| ES | I went to Cambridge. The first four or five years when you do a PhD it’s tough. And as a PhD student you are poor; it’s part of the experience, isn’t it? |
| HUO | So you didn’t travel home much. |
| ES | You don’t travel home much. So I don’t think I was there to see the transition from the painting to the movies. |
| HUO | You knew his paintings? |
| ES | I’ve got some of his paintings but I also posed for him, as a model. |
| HUO | How did it go from the drawing to the painting? When did he start to paint? |
| ES | I’ve got paintings of his when he was ten, I think. I certainly remember I liked paintings he did when he was ten or twelve. He remembered the ones I liked so I have now a few of those and I’ve got a drawing of me he did when I was sixteen. Anri was ten. Whoever sees this says, “This is Evis being fed uprdquo;. [Laughs] It was like, “I have been posing for you for hours”. Then I have a painting he did of me — you remember the little cat we had, or the many cats we had? |
| HUO | As children? |
| ES | Yes. Our parents didn’t want them and we used to hide them and get them through the kitchen window. I have one of the paintings of me with a cat. I’ve got it in my bedroom. |
| AS | And she also did a painting once. |
| ES | I also did a painting, which is in the hallway because it’s a disaster! [Laughs] |
| HUO | It is interesting that there is movement in the very first football drawings when you were four years old. |
| ES | I’m sure we have them somewhere. We really need to go back and look at those boxes at our parents. |
| HUO | We can publish them with this interview. |
| AS | If we find them. |
| ES | I think you’ve got to ask Mum to go through them. Actually, I did ask to go through the boxes and they said, “They are untouchable. You can’t touch his boxes.” I said, “I just want to go through the drawings”. But the football matches were brilliant. Do you remember the drawing you did for me when I had long hair and I had to pose and at the end I was, “Just get it over and done”. I’ve got it at home. It’s lovely. You were only ten. |
| AS | I’ve got thousands of drawings. |
| ES | Yes. |
| AS | I also drew thousands of eggs. |
| ES | Did you? |
| AS | Yes. |
| ES | That I can’t remember. |
| HUO | You became a scientist and Anri became an artist. Is there a link between what the two of you do? |
| ES | Yes. I guess we both work with images. |
| AS | There is probably this potential that some images have in being able to signal something which is not there yet, something that is becoming, which interests both of us. In your case, seeing in an image something that could become what is called cancer. |
| ES | Not always cancer! |
| HUO | So you work on images of cancer? |
| ES | No, any images. |
| HUO | Medical images? |
| ES | In some specialities it’s cancer imaging, that’s true. |
| AS | You said when you see an image you wonder what it will become or that there is this idea of ambiguity in the image. |
| ES | Exactly, but you have to work hard to link things in the imaging to make a diagnosis, it’s not just there. |
| AS | And the narrative as well. |
| ES | You really have to look for it. Yes, there are examples that are there, even my son could see them. |
| AS | But by then it’s too late. |
| ES | It’s too late. The way I see imaging is [that it’s] solving a puzzle. |
| HUO | Quite related. You are solving a puzzle as well, Anri, aren’t you? |
| AS | That’s right. |
| ES | You’ve got all the pieces and they’re all messed up and you really have to solve the puzzle otherwise the patient can’t get any treatment. |
| AS | [Points to computer screen] I didn’t know you had all these titles [Evis Sala MD, PhD, FRCR] |
| ES | That’s a kind of a British — it should stop there. |
| HUO | So you are going to give a lecture of images tomorrow and you are looking here at Uterine Malignancy, so this is a cancer. |
| ES | It’s a cancer of the uterus, basically. |
| HUO | Can you show us? |
| ES | Yes, I can show you. Let’s go to images. In the scientific talks you have to come with the objectives that they’ve told you. That’s a microscopy of one of the aggressive tumours of the uterus. That’s the cancer in the uterus. |
| HUO | Anri said you have invented, you are one of the leading experts [in this field]. |
| ES | [Laughs] I haven’t invented anything. I like being at the edge, in that little three per cent. I quite like having this correlation, when I correlate the imaging with what comes out of the surgery. |
| HUO | The two of you should do a book one day together. It would be very interesting — a collaboration. |
| ES | But he might not like the images. |
| HUO | This transdisciplinarity happens most interestingly in families, you know. |
| ES | I like collating, correlating things. |
| AS | You have lots of images. |
| ES | That’s the way you get the message across, with images. |
| HUO | Do you have an unrealised project in your medical research, a utopia? |
| ES | Oh yes! I think it’s not individual, though. I think it’s probably what all people in my field are trying to do, in all medicine really, to have an individualised therapy, so that you can actually target what you want to treat on each individual patient. Now you can image function rather than pure anatomy and so you can predict response to treatment on an individual base. |
| HUO | Do you ask each other for advice sometimes? |
| ES | He asks me for advice all the time when he has headache or he’s sick. |
| AS | When I’m sick, like when I was sick in Mexico, I called her and she said “Oh! That’s bad, you know?” I said, “I know!” |
| HUO | So it was dangerous? |
| ES | I said, “You’ll suffer, but you won’t die”. So that was good. |
| AS | Doctors are very tough. She was like, “OK. Just take your time. You won’t die. But don’t call our parents.” |
| ES | There’s no point. |
| HUO | So you have never collaborated? |
| ES | Not really. |
| HUO | That’s an unrealised project, then. |
| AS | I would like to, at some point, but I’m not such a collaborator. I like to collaborate for the sound with somebody but in that kind of collaboration, or with a cinematographer. |
| HUO | You do it quite rarely, very occasionally. It’s not like in [artists] Philippe’s [Parreno] or Rirkrit’s [Tiravanija] case or Pierre’s [Huyghe] case, a generalised practice. It happens very rarely, but it does happen. You have just shown me the Negotiation project, which we have never spoken about. That’s a collaboration, isn’t it? |
| AS | Yes and no, the project itself was absolutely Olafur’s [Eliasson]. He had the idea of bringing three tons of white Lego bricks to Tirana, which stayed there for five days and every day and night people would build these amazing things … architecture [Shows images in book]. |
| HUO | Like a do-it-yourself city. |
| AS | Exactly. This is at night. The later in the night, the stranger it becomes; the people get stranger, which is great. |
| HUO | And you made the film. |
| AS | Yes. He asked me and I went to Tirana with him and I made a film, which goes during one day and night. |
| HUO | So it‘s almost like a documentary. |
| AS | Yes. |
| HUO | You have been travelling a lot and yet you now have Berlin as a sort of a place, and even if it’s not a studio, the apartment did pop up in your window piece. |
| AS | Exactly. |
| HUO | It’s an interesting paradox. |
| AS | I’m not [all that] interested in the studio. I like this idea of the game but the game being like a football game where you play the ball before you know the score. |
| HUO | Those football drawings, we’ve really got to see them. This is the revelation of the day. You have just introduced a new dimension of Anri. This has never been spoken about. We should do a book, like we did that other artist book. We should do a book of your football drawings. It is very related to your current practice. |
| AS | We can’t do that until we find them. |
| ES | Whenever we went to matches — I think we were supporting Partizani weren’t we? |
| HUO | So you watched football together? |
| ES | Oh yes. |
| AS | It was popular then. |
| ES | I enjoyed it. We liked it, didn’t we? |
| HUO | And now there is a football field just down the road from your window. |
| AS | I love it, especially in the morning when I wake up because it’s empty, and when empty, the field carries a magic thing. You know the potential in its geometrical form, which is the football pitch. It occupies time, not only space, it creates its own reality. It’s so great to see it at nine in the morning, for example, because it makes you believe in abstract things. Generally it takes some time, you need a few more cups of coffee before you start believing again in the abstract level of things and there it is plainly in front of your eyes. |
| HUO | It’s fascinating — games and rules of the games. It’s not only football. I invited you to participate in my formula project and you submitted a climate change cricket formula, which is almost scientific. Evis, do you know about it already? |
| ES | No. |
| HUO | Anri&rsauo;s cricket formula. He just sent it last week, with the help of the mathematician Gregory J Chaitin. |
| AS | It looks good, the formula, doesn’t it? |
| HUO | Lovely. It’s fantastic. But why don’t you explain it because Evis hasn’t seen the formula and also it’s nice for your sister to hear. |
| AS | With the cricket formula you can find out what the exact temperature is outside by counting the number of chirps per minute that a cricket does. |
| ES | Gosh! |
| AS | And from there, with the help of the mathematician, I proposed a new formula, which tells you how many more chirps per minute a cricket does due to every extra degree we have because of climate change. |
| ES | Is it validated? As a scientist I need validation. [Smiles] |
| HUO | You are challenging one of the world’s leading mathematicians. |
| ES | I know. Has he validated it? |
| AS | |
| ES | Good. I am just asking to make sure it is scientifically sound. |
| HUO | We did test it scientifically. Anri asked me to test it because he knows that I know a lot of scientists. |
| AS | The first one is validated and the second one is a derivate, it’s based on the first formula. |
| ES | That’s good. |
| AS | I found it interesting, how a sound becomes a formula or how two things, which seem absolutely unrelated at some point, can relate; like heat and sound and how political, scientific problems affect the sound. I found different recordings of crickets, recorded on cold, cool, warm, hot days and when I played them over the same image of a field, even if the image remains the same, the sound of the crickets changes the image. It makes the image feel cooler or warmer. |
| HUO | It’s amazing. It’s an oxymoron, almost. |
| AS | Yes, it’s really something. |
| HUO | It relates also to something else we discussed today, which is your new project for the city of Paris, for the 104 [arts festival]. It’s this idea of temperature and cinema. |
| AS | The idea came from here and I thought of exploring different directions. One was to reverse the cricket formula: start from the actual temperature measured by a thermometer installed at the site and continuously calculate, produce and diffuse the sound of the crickets’ chirping varying according to the change in temperature, as if there were crickets around the site. It would become like the sound track of the place. Actually crickets are very nice to hear. There are not so many in Paris, even in summer. |
| ES | They are very nice, crickets. |
| AS | I was wondering how else I could bring further this idea of temperature and I thought of making a programme of films that are connected to the same thermometer. The connecting idea in the choice of the films is temperature. Films do not only communicate through a visual or textual level but also by using a subjective and abstract feeling for atmosphere and temperature. It is not only felt through a visual representation like a continuous sunshine or a permanent snow flurry, but can as well be disclosed in a warm relationship between lovers or a coldness of a desperate situation. These films will cover every single degree from minus 15°C to plus 45°C, from severe cold to blistering heat. The real outdoor temperature will decide which film will be projected at a given moment. The thermometer at the site will constantly measure the temperature, and will be the editor of the program, the DJ of the films. They will run continuously 24/7, but each film will appear on screen only when its respective degree is detected. In the exact moment of a temperature increase from, for example 14°C to 15°C, the program automatically will pick the film which represents the new degree. |
| HUO | So that leads obviously to the visibility and invisibility of archive. Today we talked about 101 Reykjavik, which is a minus thirty degrees film unlikely to be shown in Paris. There are other films that are more topical like Apichatpong Weerasethakul films from Thailand. Also the whole idea of Dominique on tropicalisation will be shown when Paris becomes hotter and hotter through climate change. |
| AS | It is interesting. For example, there is one film which is forty-three degrees and so far in Paris it has never been forty-three, but there is always the possibility that next summer or the one after, this film will be shown for the first time because summers are becoming hotter and hotter in Paris. Films take you so much into their drama, into what’s happening, so I liked a lot this idea of trying to make present what is not at all visible: temperature. And maybe there will be a lead between different films that instead of making you think only of the happy ending or the sad ending, you may constantly have another connection to the story, which would be more like temperature empathy. There is a chance that something could come out of the presence of temperature. |
| HUO | Incredibly exciting. The new form of archive is also to do with visibility and invisibility and that leads us back to here. Evis, your work has a lot to do with visibility and invisibility. |
| ES | It’s perception, isn’t it? |
| HUO | Yes. |
| ES | Everything is there, you have to find a way to see it. Imaging is not just being a good scientist only, you have to have perception. There are some people who are extremely clever but they don’t have the eye, as we say, they just don’t see the abnormality. |
| HUO | So if art is about making the invisible visible, could one say the same for your work as well? |
| ES | Yes, I think so. Every good radiologist, if you work with images you just have to potentially make connections. You obviously have to know what you are looking for; it’s probably visible but you have to make the subtle obvious. |
| HUO | We spoke about archives and Evis was mentioning nowadays in the medical world the archives are mostly digital. Today we have been dealing with a very analogue archive because of these ten thousand books that arrived from Luneburg. Can you tell a little bit, Anri, about what you did today? |
| AS | Actually, I wanted to see again in my camera what I filmed today. I am very curious to see it. |
| HUO This | interview [with Anri and Evis Sala] is a homage to [American novelist] Flannery O’Connor — [entitled] everything that rises must converge. Can you tell me, Anri, what you did today in terms of the arrival of my archiving from Luneburg. |
| AS | It’s two fixed shots of the same window. The window from where the books came. |
| HUO | Beautiful. It’s great. The window in the window. |
| AS | At the very beginning it’s very nice, the moment — I think I got it — when you look out of the window, waiting for the books to appear but the crane’s platform comes empty and you say, “There are no books, but there is a platform”. |
| HUO | There are no books, but there is a platform. That would be another possible title for today’s interview. |
| AS | Die Bucher sind noch nicht da aber es gibt eine Plattform. |
| HUO | I want to ask you both, is there something you always wanted to ask each other? Could you ask each other the thing you always wanted to ask? |
| ES | Did you really think my painting was great when I did it? That has bugged me for a long time. Every time I see it I think I want to move it. |
| AS | Of course I really like this painting. I remember it very well. |
| HUO | Evis, Anri has a question for you. |
| AS | So now is the moment of truth. Did you really want to throw me from the window or not [when we were children]? |
| ES | [Laughs] I guess I did! But then… |
| AS | This I know. The question is, what stopped you? |
| HUO | When was this? |
| ES | [Laughs] When I was six years old and he was newborn. He looked ugly and he was crying all the time and all my parents’ attention was on him. |
| HUO | So it was a jealousy attack. |
| ES | Yes, it was a jealousy attack. But what stopped me? I can’t remember. That’s difficult. I suppose you were very cute after that. I can’t remember the moment. |
| AS | I don’t remember it. |
| ES | I don’t remember it, but my parents said when you were two or three months old I wanted to throw you out of the window. |
| AS | We should call our parents. |
| HUO | That will be the next interview, Anri. We will do an interview in Tirana with you and your parents. |
| ES | If they deny it then, “Hey, I haven’t done it”. [Laughs] |