Zugzwang

Not anymore so much, but yeah, of course, it's also an artist's talker reference.

But within my bureaucratic documents and in the exhibition titled Zugzwang, I wanted to sort of negotiate this relationship between bureaucracy and that maneuvering of that sort of play between the administrative side and one's personal life when it comes to administration forms, asylum forms.

You've already mentioned a couple of contemporary artists, actually, but which contemporary artists do you most admire?

I think there are so many contemporary artists that I admire.

It's a platform where people just drop different field recordings that they've taken and you can download them for free and listen to them and play with them.

And I actually do that a lot within my work is to scroll through those archives online

And you've used them really productively, like in Zugzwang.

Obviously, there's a very direct reference to music in there because you're using Wagner's Tannhäuser and then allying it to the most ordinary sounds in everyday life.

But if the other side, right, if your counterparty executes a system gambit, then you're finished.

And actually, I have a sequel called The System Zugzwang on the way, and that kind of looks at this compulsion to do something.

So if one side executes a gambit and the other side doesn't, what does the-- you know, what do you get stuck into? And so there is this concept of Zugzwang in chess, which is you essentially put the counterparty in a position where every move they can do makes them worse off, and they can't really pass or wait, so they don't have a null move.

And I think, uh, this notion of time and how can you enforce, uh, that kind of pressure on someone is not something that's explored in this book, and I felt that, you know, it wouldn't make sense to squeeze it in, and so that'll be the sequel.

But to come back to your question, and Nokia is actually one of the examples, and there's, you know, a press, uh, release or an interview with one of the then CEOs who essentially said, "Look, we're super agile.