Writing > Conversations

Eric Valosin:
As far as I know, your practice has always been materially oriented. However, recently you made a big shift in how you think about material. How would you describe your previous understanding of material, and what made you uncomfortable enough to shift away from it?

Marta Kepka:
Material and its concerns have always been at the core of my practice. I knew I wanted to start rethinking my relationship to materials and sculpture (which is the way I was working). There was also a feminist undertone to my work, which was not yet fully developed as my own. It wasn’t until I really began to dig out from under all the metaphor and “object” of material that I began to truly engage with it. There was a forced hand present in my work. I would work a material to exhaustion. The turning point was when I began reading contemporary feminist writers, such as Elizabeth Grosz and Luce Irigaray. They both speak of a renewed material engagement. Rather than forcing meaning onto material, understanding that it contains its own characteristics already.

EV:
Speaking of feminism, I gather it’s something one can’t just “put away” when one’s work changes. How has your reading of Grosz and Irigaray changed your way of integrating feminist thought into your work, and what does your recent practice now add to the feminist discussion?

MK:
It is a way of becoming. Of engaging. I think my previous work engaged with feminism in a very shallow way. Reading Grosz, allowed for a deeper understanding. That’s an understatement. It completely turned my world inside-out. Traditional feminist thought relies on oppositional binaries to justify a sense of equality. The arguments revolve around disproving or a constant arguing against previously asserted ‘truths.’ Grosz’s writing shifted to a complete rereading of Darwinian thought. Her and Irigaray both speak of a difference at the core of everything. Their writings speak of abandoning binaries and embracing pure difference. Instead of one splitting into two, there is at the core two. My recent engagement with Graham Harman’s writing presented a beautiful tension and challenge to this language of emergence and difference. Exploring dynamic autonomous matter, engaging without dominating. Remaining self while becoming other; an other self. The fluidity allows for there to be no constant or any resolve. It is this mobility and potential in engagement through difference that is informed by this contemporary thought and also what propels it forward.

EV:
I want to come back to this idea of difference in a bit, but this seems like an opportune time to talk about your use of the materials themselves in your work. In light of this nature of two autonomous entities collaborating and co-mingling, you’ve been dealing with collaboration with/between materials. Would it be possible to have the conditions you evoke in your practice with a single material, or is multiplicity/diversity necessary?

MK:
There is no danger in working with one because nothing ever shows up alone. There is no hierarchy in the matter I engage with. Nothing is arbitrary. Surface and atmosphere are just as much (not more) material than the salt, water or pulp. I believe the problem that arises is the potential for an illusion of singularity to present itself. This would undermine the importance of maintaining an autonomous integrity through impurification.

EV:
Which seems to bring us back to difference - to the knowledge of something by its relationship to (or difference from) its environment. This always makes me think of Derrida’s différance, which posits that meaning is only arrived at by the cooperation of what something is with what something isn’t; We know something by both what it defers to and what it differs from. However, that still assumes semiotic meaning as the endpoint, which I think you reject. Your practice is indeed about the cooperation of sameness and difference, but with a pure stripping of meaning and seeing only the actual functioning of the différance itself, maybe more like Deleuze’s understanding of difference. It’s about the “becoming,” as you say, not what it becomes, per se. Can you talk a bit about this rejection of goal orientation in favor of the pure process of différance?

MK:
Deleuze is important to me. Irigaray’s theories and writing are very much in dialogue with his understanding of difference. Both Grosz and Irigaray make reference and work their own theories through his writings. Deleuze describes a becoming-it-itself. This becoming-without-being means that one should sidestep the present - it never “actually occurs,” it is “always forthcoming and already past.” It is not a conscious decision. It is dictated by the evolving and complex characteristics and demands of the processes themselves. Goals imply a direction and a conclusion. Process and pure difference are never present because they are continuously changing, adapting, reacting and evolving. This process has moments of rest, but they are not static either. It is this constant motion which does not allow for a concreteness in thought or identity to emerge. This is precisely the area I am working in and interested in exploring further.

EV:
I think you evoke that to great effect with your salt and water pieces, especially in the ongoing life that is implied in them before and after the moment of process the viewer gets to witness. Do you see water and salt as the ideal materials (thus far) or are they merely satisfactory materials? In other words, is there some quality that water and salt don’t possess that you seek in further projects?

MK:
This is something I have been struggling with immensely on several levels. To answer bluntly, yes, I think salt and water are currently the ideal materials for me to engage with. I think it is important to define salt and water not as materials but processes. Material is process. They are defined by their actions, traits and characteristics which develop through engagement and development. They possess a materiality. Their simplicity and commonality pushes the viewer to search deeper and engage differently in order to alleviate the frustration with the at times lack of visual complexity. It is not possible for these processes to be exhausted. They have yet to reveal their full potential to me and perhaps new processes at the same time. This could take 6 months or 6 years and I am content with that. I am eager to see where this work takes me, whether it be a further exploration of its potentiality or revealing new processes to engage with.

EV:
It seems like your practice indeed has its own time frame, ignoring even your wishes You’ve mentioned this elsewhere in terms of a piece’s duration confounding viewer expectation. The Greeks had two notions of time: Chronos time - measured time that’s broken down into regular, quantum intervals, and Kairos time - qualitative, experienced time, the kind of time that “flies” when you have fun or makes a moment “last forever;” the “right moment” that marks the happening of something within an indeterminate interval. Does the latter get closer to your (or your material’s) understanding of “duration?” Or is a third understanding needed?

MK:
I think the latter is closer but not exactly. Both seem to still measure time spatially, in increments. Duration can be understood as the movement of difference; a continuous becoming and unbecoming. It does not mark a moment and cannot be directly referenced, perhaps it can in retrospect. Space has it’s own reality and so does time. So it is not a means of measurement or even locating. It is a motion, never present, constantly ongoing. The viewer’s expectations are challenged by the environment/material needs; a carving of territories and framing out of place.

EV:
Often in your work the viewer encounters these territories on a sort of one-to-one environmental scale. However, I know you’ve been “framing out place” in the form of miniatures and models of site specific work. Can you talk a bit about these? Do you see them as illustrative or explanatory of a “real thing” that would exist hypothetically or do these have their own conceptual legitimacy as works in your practice?

MK:
A very important aspect to my work is site-specificity and the idea that place is not something that is a constant. These integral ideas were not presenting themselves in my previous environments as prominently as I would have liked. In my preliminary sketches, I often draw over photographs of existing places. I’m creating these small scale, tactile, models which seemingly are replicas or copies of the existing architectures they find themselves engaging with. However this copy is fractured through differences in both relativity and action. This non-copy is then understood as a filter of place rather than an archetype. This shift in scale and disfigurement of place prevents either from becoming the original and allows them to evolve and diffuse further. The sensitivity to location of these structures is also integral. They present a further fragmenting of experience and space.

EV:
Speaking like that about the material’s “needs” and their “framing” seems to imply a certain autonomous agency within the material. How far are you willing to take the whole agency of materials thing? Do you see them as quasi-sentient in a weird way? At least, on par with the agency of humans?

MK:
We are matter/iality. Dynamic matter acting. Water is fluid, it takes the shape of what it engages with, it’s duration of evaporation or condensation is based on the conditions it finds itself in, or the conditions other matter provides. Salt is absorbent and will hydrate when the conditions allow. These processes engage with others through dynamic, inherent necessity or the presence of environment. It is not a choice of the materials or a presence of a conscious, it just is; an emergence of identity. As humans, as active matter/iality: we are not void of these same actions. Competing and coordinating modes of openness. This is a connection that I hope comes through in the work, in a radical way. It connects more directly the idea that the work is grounded in contemporary feminist thought.

EV:
That’s very intriguing. With this mention of awareness and human openness as a whole, I’d like to shift now to a consideration of the world outside of your work, particularly how the work impacts the viewer and the whole of society. As you moved away from viewing space as a “void waiting to be filled,” you’ve spoken of people/material being activated by a space instead of them activating a space. This seems evident enough in your material practice, but as viewers enter into this ecosystem you create, how would you hope the space activates them? Could a viewer be thought of as yet another collaborating material?

MK:
The environment awakens a radically new way of being. Of thinking. An act of becoming. The work dispels notions of form and totality. These are elements that humans tend to find comfortable and familiar. My work challenges traditional notions of engagement and pairing. You approach with a new language and embrace its implications in order to begin understanding its characteristics. It is this shattering of existing alternatives and oppositions and embracing of a new mobilized language that activates the viewer. On a very basic physical level, as the viewer moves throughout the environment, their body temperature and their motions engage and move with and through the processses. Their engagement can influence the developing characteristics and behaviors within the environment. At my most recent gallery show, a viewer walked through a pool of saline on the ground surface. This interaction and engagement affected the fluid’s path and formation. The change of consciousness on the part of the viewer while engaging with the work is a form of collaboration. A necessary co-laboring.

EV:
Much of what we’ve talked about stems from an abandoning of Lacanian semiotics, as I’ve heard you say, placing importance on what something does rather than what it means, and how this in turn becomes a sort of abandoning of critique. What implications do you see for this abandoning of critique beyond the art world?

MK:
It turns everything inside out or outside in. I mean it completely shatters the idea of relativity to form identity. In the sense that we can no longer be defined by what we are not (I am this because I am not that). Identity is developed through the actions and behaviors of the one, the one through action. In this action it relates to the other. It abandons critique in the sense that we can no longer rely on what we know to formulate truths (not looking to past knowledge to form comparative formulas) but rather look to potentiality. This openness presents a radical and freeing space for thought and action.

EV:
Does all that contradict the theory of difference that you mentioned before How do the two (identity by way of difference from other, and identity by way of behavior of the one without regard to the other) work together?

MK:
It is not a disregard of other. It dismisses the idea that one is dependent on other to realize an identity. Traditional theory states something to this end: There was one, split in two … male/female. In this binary world, there is a constant need for comparative identifying. You are female because you are not male. Whereas in pure difference, identity arises through action, becoming. What one does is never singular and never binary. One and other develop within, intra-actively, independent of the other but also in action with one an(d)other.

EV:
Relationship by way of difference, but identity by way of autonomous value?

MK:
Yes. The relationship between the two is by way of difference but this difference distinguishes from the development of singularity. Identity as excess/agency emerges through the becoming of (or the action of) difference. Both are necessary, both are radical.