Stephen Willats interviewed in Kunstkritikk
By Stefanie Hessler
For your exhibition at Index you spent a prolonged period of time working with three individuals living in different areas of Stockholm, individuals who are facing change, both personal and in terms of their socioeconomic conditions. Can you tell me more about this process and how it is linked to the transformation of a particular place?
The invitation to work at Index was a rare opportunity for me to express a model of art practice that was contextual in nature and rooted in a particular place, so that it expressed some issues and polemics that would be connectable to an audience from that place. Instead of the kind of blandness of much contemporary art practice, which assumes universality, here we have another model of practice that works with the relativity and the contextual nature of meaning.
The idea of transformation in THISWAY– is about step change and the possibility of revolution in our life. At the moment of change you are moving fast into the future, and somehow in that moment the past doesn’t exist. It is about thinking how the world is and how it could be.
How did you engage with the city and the specific contexts of three individuals?
I don’t see the project as a representation of Stockholm, but it is important that the viewer can see that the project is part of the city, that it connects, and that the people involved are people living in the same place as themselves.
As for the participants, I discuss the idea of the work with them and what I want to do with them. My job is to bring out what is important to them in their frame of reference, and what is relevant to the idea of the work, and to externalize it. It’s about the person, while the environment is just a background giving you the stable reference for it. In the exhibition you are presented with fragments from the working process, which is like a tool or a kit of elements: text, photographs, film and audio, that you can use as a tool to look at yourself.
In Sorting Out Other People’s Lives (1978), you also worked with a local community. The work depicts a woman in a contained environment in which she acts as a catalyst for change. How do you see the relationship between the individual’s agency for change and her or his surroundings?
In 1978, I was asked, in a very similar way to the invitation to come to Stockholm and work with Index, to make a project in East London for the Whitechapel Art Gallery. I had a similar desire to the one underpinning the work in Stockholm, which was to create a relationship with the community around the gallery. I wanted to externalize the museum into the community, and internalize the community into the museum. The work resembled an interactive interface between the internal realm of the gallery and the neighbourhood around it. I wanted them to connect and for the gallery to have a meaning to people living nearby. To do that I looked for polemics, conflicts and issues which were of importance to the people living there, but that also had a wider meaning that could be understood by people who didn’t live there. I recognized that there could be two audiences – what I call a primary audience that has an immediate language of the neighbourhood, and a secondary audience coming from wider surroundings. Sorting Out Other People’s Lives looked at the power of individuals to transform their situation, and to create a new vision of the world around them.