Space Between #14 with Daryan Knoblauch and james taylor-foster on Presence

That exhibition proposes that we already inhabit multiple realities.

Let's dive into this concept.

In terms of realities, I'm assuming that we're meaning not only the temporal physical reality that we live in through our bodies but also through screens, through games, through personas and characters on various planes.

So I just wanted to ask about the importance of the bodily or the corporeal experience and how this plays with this notion of alternate reality.

Darian, you mentioned performance, and that's a word that I feel like we often use when we're talking about alternate existences.

But personally, I also use it a lot in my real life and my emotional life.

Perhaps we can start with thinking about how performance sits in your practice.

I think since the very start of founding my practice through a range of projects, we actually worked quite heavily with performance artists and musicians and in that case did not really feel comfortable to go down this drain of saying, "Okay, there is a performance artists and we are the stage designer architects" but rather we're interested in thinking about the interplay between architecture and performance as something where the spatial component can become a device that enables a sort of performance that would not be manageable if it would be just your body alone in space.

So architecture as an extension of the performing figure and architecture as a tool or as a choreography device that allows also the audience to take up a certain place within space.

This comes with a set of certain rules that the architecture can imply, rules that an audience can follow to feel more comfortable when interacting in a fleeting or ephemeral moment of performance with somebody to watch.

But at the same time- Being very much interested in how to make audiences complicit in the act of the performing artists executing their work, architecture can become quite an amazing tool to arrange these dynamics that basically confront you with your own self while being part of a larger group.

And I think that is somehow a tension field that we've always been super keen on exploring.

I love this notion of confrontation and confrontation not only with the other, but with your own self.

James, perhaps you can talk about this a little more in the context of a curator, because you're often choreographing or arranging a certain range of experiences in an exhibition.

I don't know.

The more I curate, and I'm doing air quotations here, the less I understand what it actually is.

But you're right, there is this kind of element of, well, we've got a fixed period of time.

We've got a group of people, sometimes a vast group of people, and we need to make something happen, and we need to make something lucid, and we need to make something magical, and we need to position an idea or a series of ideas.

And so I suppose it is somewhere between orchestration, choreography, and then also just, like, letting it happen and see what happens, right? I suppose the more that I develop these kinds of projects, the more I learn to trust the process a little bit in these things.

And that probably comes from just having some experience, but also just understanding that culture is literally a shifting sand, right? We're constantly trying to position ourselves and reposition ourselves with all of these prevailing winds.

And so I think that the idea that you can control any context, and of course, museums are these strange bastions of control, no, where there are these codified behaviors.

Do not run, do not touch, do not eat, do not shout, whatever.

Every project I do kind of resists those codified behaviors by trying to construct a new series of codified behaviors which are, in a broad sense, anti-institutional.

But I think it's more about trying to say, "Well, what are the tools we've got to work with in this format?" Because I really do believe in the power of the vehicle of the exhibition, of its temporality, of its possibility to bring you into a space to sort of think about something or feel something or experience something that you might not normally feel on your sort of average day-to-day.

I believe very much in that.