Interview with Siri Austeen
Photo: Stefan Schröder
Oslo, 11 nov. 2019
Q: Why / when / how did you start to work with performance, what is your background, how did you arrive at doing performance?
During my studies in the early 1980s my interest in exploring process-based working methods seemed to be a meaningful approach: a framework for reflection and dedication. To me it was form of listening in – and out towards space, body, materials and time. I worked with snow, raw clay, voice, text and sound creating movements and junk in all sizes. In the end I left the academy with a band and a fluid praxis ala "learn and unlearn".
Q: What is your process like when you make a performance, from idea to actual work?
Well, for some time I have been interested in different ways of listening – focused, blurred – and what is underneath the act of listening. I observe movements or transitions from one perspective to another.
So the process is pretty much in free fall – I explore and experiment for quite a long time before I structure anything in time.
The work can be triggered by something I read, an observation from the bus window, news from the world, or it’s an offspring from making art works. Making a performance resets my tool box, gives shape and time to relocated perspectives, scales and qualities.
Q: Can you tell us about your latest project?
South North Sound Exchange is a commissioned art project for Sørumsand High School outside Oslo. The pure architecture, their framing of the surroundings with the use of long viewing lines, and their focus on international exchange inspired me. I had just come back from their friendship school outside Cape Town where I had been gathering sound material in and around the school. This relocated sound material will appear in two multi-channel sound tracks for two highly different window views.
Q: What role does performance art have in your life / artistic praxis? Do you also work within other fields, like installation, sculpture, drawing, and other expressions? How do they influence / inform each other?
Funnily enough I don’t consider myself a performance artist. I still consider performance a fluid praxis with specific challenges I am attracted to. Sharing space and time with the public is a value of common time. My everyday artistic praxis consists of doing field recordings, installations, and so on, strongly informs and reverberates in my performances.
When I'm out doing field recordings I´ve already started composing; moving my microphones around choosing angles is like selecting a section of an image. I'm listening out - tuning in to the environment, taking part of scales, angles, perspectives of a sonic territory. You might not see one bird in a tree behind another tree, but the sound that it makes arrives in audible layers. Sometimes placing sound in a space is informed by observations in the field.
Q: With what kind of form / material do you express yourself and use in your work and how did you arrive at using this material?
The red trembling thread in my artistic praxis has always moved with sound as a medium. So, that's where time-based and occasionally performance-based follows.
Q: How do you experience or consider the audience / surrounding? What space / surrounding do you find interesting to work in? How does your surrounding influence your work? Do you involve the public? If so, how?
Audience is a part of the production. I direct my energy towards a situation together with them and develop my work in the absence of them. The space is a present part of how I choose to engage myself. I actually quite like the spaces that are “already there” and not necessarily made for art.
Q: You are singing in a band – do you also use voice in your performances?
Sometimes I use voice and words. The voice is traveling from me into the world and it tends to bring me along. ;-)
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Q: Why / when / how did you start to work with performance, what is your background, how did you arrive at doing performance?
During my studies in the early 1980s my interest in exploring process-based working methods seemed to be a meaningful approach: a framework for reflection and dedication. To me it was form of listening in – and out towards space, body, materials and time. I worked with snow, raw clay, voice, text and sound creating movements and junk in all sizes. In the end I left the academy with a band and a fluid praxis ala "learn and unlearn".
Q: What is your process like when you make a performance, from idea to actual work?
Well, for some time I have been interested in different ways of listening – focused, blurred – and what is underneath the act of listening. I observe movements or transitions from one perspective to another.
So the process is pretty much in free fall – I explore and experiment for quite a long time before I structure anything in time.
The work can be triggered by something I read, an observation from the bus window, news from the world, or it’s an offspring from making art works. Making a performance resets my tool box, gives shape and time to relocated perspectives, scales and qualities.
Q: Can you tell us about your latest project?
South North Sound Exchange is a commissioned art project for Sørumsand High School outside Oslo. The pure architecture, their framing of the surroundings with the use of long viewing lines, and their focus on international exchange inspired me. I had just come back from their friendship school outside Cape Town where I had been gathering sound material in and around the school. This relocated sound material will appear in two multi-channel sound tracks for two highly different window views.
Q: What role does performance art have in your life / artistic praxis? Do you also work within other fields, like installation, sculpture, drawing, and other expressions? How do they influence / inform each other?
Funnily enough I don’t consider myself a performance artist. I still consider performance a fluid praxis with specific challenges I am attracted to. Sharing space and time with the public is a value of common time. My everyday artistic praxis consists of doing field recordings, installations, and so on, strongly informs and reverberates in my performances.
When I'm out doing field recordings I´ve already started composing; moving my microphones around choosing angles is like selecting a section of an image. I'm listening out - tuning in to the environment, taking part of scales, angles, perspectives of a sonic territory. You might not see one bird in a tree behind another tree, but the sound that it makes arrives in audible layers. Sometimes placing sound in a space is informed by observations in the field.
Q: With what kind of form / material do you express yourself and use in your work and how did you arrive at using this material?
The red trembling thread in my artistic praxis has always moved with sound as a medium. So, that's where time-based and occasionally performance-based follows.
Q: How do you experience or consider the audience / surrounding? What space / surrounding do you find interesting to work in? How does your surrounding influence your work? Do you involve the public? If so, how?
Audience is a part of the production. I direct my energy towards a situation together with them and develop my work in the absence of them. The space is a present part of how I choose to engage myself. I actually quite like the spaces that are “already there” and not necessarily made for art.
Q: You are singing in a band – do you also use voice in your performances?
Sometimes I use voice and words. The voice is traveling from me into the world and it tends to bring me along. ;-)
<< Back