Try – Tell – Try Again
Interview with Filip Vest
by Miriam Frandsen
Filip Vest is in the midst of creating their new performance, The Tryouts, for the historic Round Tower. I meet them for a conversation about their artistic work and the creation of The Tryouts at the Danish Art Workshops, where rehearsals with the three performers are happening. The Tryouts premieres at the Round Tower on November 20 and is both a performance and an exhibition.
What is the core DNA of your work? Why do you work as a visual artist with performance?
What interests me deeply are all the narratives we’ve created about ourselves as a society and as individuals. These are the invisible scripts that we continue to re-enact. I’m curious about all the stories we’ve told—both the very tangible ones told through theater, visual art, and literature, as well as those that have become laws or ways we organize our society, along with all the unspoken rules about how we exist in the world. This is something I keep returning to. These narratives can relate to our ideas about identity and how we perform our identity in different contexts. How do we make ourselves readable to each other, or when do we misunderstand each other? Work is also a recurring theme in my practice. There is always some way of relating to work: How are things produced? Under what conditions? What does it take to create something? Everything that happens behind the scenes, the production itself, interests me. Backstage spaces often appear in my works, in a more or less concrete sense. Or we could call it the “rehearsal room”, I keep returning to. I’m interested in where the world and we are created.
Originally, I was focused on objects in my visual art practise and where they came from. But then I became more interested in the people behind them. And so, the narratives shifted to other structures, where it’s not so much about the objects anymore. They are still very much present in my practice, but perhaps more as something people gather around and something that can transform you.
When I first started out I was working with ‘readymades’, exhibiting found objects in a corner with a really long title that one had to stand and read. It was often very theoretical, really dry and highly speculative. But then I realized that the objects might just be an excuse to unfold a process or tell a story. I became more interested in exploring the stories and giving them a body, so I actually started giving lectures, creating so-called ‘lecture performances’. Later, I moved away from that and returned to my interest in theater, which I’ve always had in some way. When I was little I attended mime school. It’s only in recent years that I’ve come to realize how much it actually means that mime forms the basis of my body-based practice.
What is the artistic motivation behind creating The Tryouts ? How did the idea emerge?
There are two stories about how the idea came to life. The first one is that I was going to do this project in the Round Tower, so I started researching what had taken place in the building before. Then I found this story about a scenographer named Carl Lund. He had a workshop in the Library Hall of the Round Tower in the 1910s-1920s, and I became quite fascinated by all the images of the space from back then, where he worked: various giant flowers and all kinds of scenographic elements. The scenographies were very vaudevillian, romantic, and fantastical. I quickly realized that I wasn’t necessarily that interested in working with Carl Lund himself. But he represented something I was drawn to—a particular artistic vision where art is used as a means of escape. Even though it’s been 100 years, there’s still a lot of theater today that’s created in much the same way, simply as an escape. And while I was grappling with what to do with Lund, I felt like the world around me was increasingly falling apart. And that’s the second story. I think all artists sometimes ask themselves: How can it make sense to create art in a world that’s burning and with all the terrible things happening? How does art relate to that? I felt a bit hopeless about making art, and it was out of this frustration that The Tryouts was born. So, the project had a rather difficult birth. But it also made me feel that I needed to talk to others, so I invited Sidsel Ana Welden and Jihaan Yussuf to write the script with me. This process has largely been about trying to find some kind of meaning in making art. It’s a fundamental philosophical discussion about the role of art and how art should relate to the world. Many people still think of art as an autonomous thing, detached from society, but I believe that art is always political. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that art should be instrumentalized for political purposes. I believe more that art should prepare us to act. And that’s what The Tryouts tries to negotiate.
Let me understand this: You have a visual and body-based practice, and now you’re also working very consciously with text in a more classical sense, in the form of a fully written script?
Yes, text has always played an enormous role in my practice. I’ve always read a lot, and at first, I didn’t dare write anything myself, so I started sampling—cutting out texts from other people’s works. I mainly read novels, but also poetry and drama. Then I assigned these text fragments to characters because I liked the different words and sentences I found. It became a way of writing, and gradually, I moved further and further away from it and started writing more on my own. So, it was a kind of collage text, and what I’m doing now by inviting others into the writing process and letting it take up more space is an evolution of that. It’s been really exciting because we come from different writing practices. Sidsel is a visual artist and writer who has published two novels, and Jihaan writes poetry and has also started writing plays. So, we write quite differently, but it’s precisely the negotiation between different voices that I’m interested in. Some of the text is rooted in reality and lived experiences, while other text is more magical and poetic. The text operates on two different frequencies.
What parameters are you most focused on in relation to the performance and the exhibition? What are you aiming to investigate or explore?
I’m interested in how hope can look today. But also in giving a voice to hopelessness. Because hope is such a difficult concept and can sometimes seem to come from a very superficial place. I’m interested in finding a place that is both hopeful and sorrowful at the same time. It’s about acknowledging that we live within systems that are incredibly difficult to change, yet still insisting that it’s possible and that there must be ways to organize ourselves differently. The characters feel very powerless and hopeless, but they also dream of alternative ways of organizing themselves—for example, like the way hermit crabs line up and pass their shells on to one another. So the smaller crabs take over the larger shells when they’ve outgrown theirs. There’s a hope for solidarity and community—or at least a longing for it—that exists in both the performance and the exhibition.
The Tryouts is specifically about three interns tasked with cleaning up a theater after a fire, and they end up getting locked in there, spending a long time in this storage room, where they talk about their lives and work, the world, and the role of theater in society. I think it’s quite fun to play with clichés, and ‘closed doors’ is one of theater’s tropes. The idea of people being trapped in a room they can’t escape. I like that there’s this really concrete, recognizable premise, and then from there, it can become porous and wander in all sorts of directions.
What are the challenges of creating both an exhibition and a performance simultaneously?
The fundamental problem I’m always wrestling with is what happens in the exhibition when there’s no live performance? There’s always a fear that the audience will feel as if they’ve arrived too late to the party. As I experienced myself, for example, with Anne Imhof at Palais de Tokyo, where there were just some soundboxes on the floor, hinting at something you had missed. That feeling doesn’t interest me. The exhibition can’t be the performance, so it has to be something else. I don’t think it’s a solution to play a film of the performance in the exhibition because then you get the sense that you can access it without fully being able to. What I’m trying to create for The Tryouts is a text-based film, which isn’t a representation of the performance but an independent interpretation of the script. A version that works with music and rhythm, where the viewer has to imagine the characters themselves. Additionally, I am also working with lighting designer and scenographer Rosa Birkedal to light the exhibition in a performative way. The nice thing about experiencing the exhibition is that you can move around the set design, activating it in that way. The hope is that various narratives begin to arise within the audience when they start to connect the different elements.
What kind of audience interaction are you working with? If any?
I’m actually being quite conservative with The Tryouts. It’s because I’ve missed having the audience just sitting down, facing one direction. I’ve done so many things where the audience had to move around because I primarily create performances in visual art institutions, where the audience is always standing or half-sitting on the floor, some are talking in the corner or sipping drinks. So, for a long time, I’ve dreamed of having a seated audience that just sits, looks, and listens. It was also a feedback I received on my performance Resort, where many thought it was a really intriguing text but couldn’t fully concentrate because they were constantly moving rooms. There are pros and cons to both formats, but right now, I feel like having a space where people have to sit still.
What do you hope The Tryouts will make the audience think about?
I hope the audience feels hope, sorrow, and anger—that it’s an angry, sad, and funny performance that is both utopian and dystopian at the same time. I’m interested in investigating why it can sometimes be so difficult for us to act. And I also think there is a fundamental question about how to preserve one’s humanity in this world. These are questions that don’t necessarily get answered but are at least asked in the performance.
The fire becomes a space of possibility. It’s a tragedy that this fictional theater has burned down, but it’s also an opportunity to build something new. That’s something these interns are reflecting on, so I hope the audience will reflect with them: What other stories can we tell about the role of art in society? About our own role? And how can we find a new, shared language?
What would be the next natural experiment for you after this production?
Next year I’ll be creating a musical out at Deep Forest Art Land, which will be a kind of role-playing musical. I’m interested in exploring further what happens when you bring together different areas of expertise. I’ll be working with musical theater singers and performers who focus on experimental performance art, as well as two composers—one who is an experimental electronic musician and another with a more traditional musical theater composition background.
But the next natural experiment that keeps lingering in the back of my mind, though it’s a bit scary, is about working even more with the space for improvisation on stage.When I work with dancers, I’m used to working with relatively open scores, but what happens if you open that space even more, also with text? How can I create frameworks for improvisation that allow for even more play and exploration, letting go a little more? It’s always present in my practice because it revolves around this rehearsal space, and I’d love to explore what it would look like if it really took place live—if we tried to rehearse together.
