SUPERHOST 2022 – Where Should We Begin? by FALKE PISANO

Where Should We Begin?
Falke Pisano

Superhost 2022

M HKA 6th floor
Site-specific installation and series of performative events

Public launch: 17 February 2022
Programme updates available throughout the year at: whereshouldwebegin.info
Check this summer update of the superhost space and a new podcast with RA Walden presenting a new language

Curated by Anne-Claire Schmitz and Joanna Zielińska

Superhost is a programme that invests in a year-long relationship between an artist or a collective practice, the museum and its participating communities, and supports the production of artworks, performative or discursive creations.

Superhost 2022, the second edition of the series, is a project by Falke Pisano titled Where Should We Begin? It consists of a site-specific installation, displays of artworks by invited artists, performative works, lectures, screenings, interviews and workshops conducted by the host and its guests throughout the year.

Where Should We Begin? is a sustained, multi-layered (practical, conversational and artistic) research into labour conditions in the field of art, with a specific focus on the labour involved in public programming in art institutions. Situated within the museum, this research aims at collapsing discursive ideals and material realities to discover how different practitioners carve out a space for imagination and desire as they consciously negotiate the conditions in which they work.

The curators of Superhost interviewed Falke Pisano about her work and approach ahead of their year-long collaboration. 

Superhost Curators: Every year, one artist or collective is invited to be M HKA’s Superhost. What does it mean for you to become a Superhost, and how would you like to work with this relationship between host and guest in the project?

Falke Pisano: To be a host and a guest, or a guest and a host, is a complex position that lends itself to a very interesting investigation of responsibilities, expectation and desires. Of course, being a good host does not always align with being an easy guest! Especially not when it is actually work, and especially not in a field that is notoriously inaccessible and for a large part held up by precarious freelancers. So, as I don’t deal well with tension that is not made explicit, I have taken this complexity as a starting point for the programme.

Superhost Curators: Could you explain how, as an artist, your understanding of relationships with institutions, but also with audiences, has evolved over the years?

FP: I’d say that this relationship had been fairly consistent for many years – I considered institutions mainly as infrastructures and spaces to show and contextualise my work, in the best situation involving a curator that I had a connection with – until I moved back to the Netherlands after a decade abroad in 2017. Maybe that’s interesting in relation to the role of a guest. I am older, I am in a context I know very well and where I feel supported on many levels. It has allowed me to relate differently to institutions. Starting to teach and having more conversations with younger generations of artists has really changed my perspective and feeling of responsibility as well. And let’s not forget two years of global pandemic and a growing awareness of the structural racism and (sexual) violence that exists within institutions. So, I have been spending less time on my individual practice and more time on different things I usually label (for myself) as ‘institutional work’. This is not work for institutions as they are, but more work that concerns the institutional layer of the art field: How art (educational) institutions function, what the concerns are of the people working within them, and how these concerns relate to institutional ecology, infrastructure, sets of internal and external relations and models of production, presentation, and dissemination and so on.

Superhost Curators: You are starting from the space, and the space will host events and different guests, but there is also a part that is less visible for the public, like your collaboration with an artist and astrologist and and a curator who works with practices of care, inside and outside of the field of art.. Can you speak a bit about their involvement?

FP:  I have asked two people that know the art field but also bring additional professional knowledge, to support me, and us, in the process of working together.  It is challenging to collaborate for more than a year on such a project, and to understand and respect each other’s capacities, needs, expectations, desires … I don’t have the knowledge to give this the quality of attention it deserves, but they do. They both guide people through situations that are affectively charged and difficult to articulate. I hope we learn something that we can share in other collaborations. But I like things that do many things at once, so there are more reasons for their involvement ‘behind the scenes’. When I look around me, I see that increased and rightful demands for care (besides fair pay) clash with the available resources and capacities. I’m intrigued by what is happening in – and how we are going to get through – this bottleneck moment. And to investigate I’ve distributed some of the budget that would usually go into a public event or work to this rather specific process-support.
But the question of the status of this non-public work also shows that, however much the idea of process, care etc. is valued in the art world, this is often linked to public visibility. Could we say that public visibility is the gateway to value? Which is probably not so strange in the case of art. But when something becomes valuable when it is public … I am really interested in how value systems that really have nothing to do with (for instance) process and care get a hold on it and actually make it into something else.

Superhost Curators: Could you sum up the key notions carried by this project?

FP: Maybe I can put it into the form questions.
One of the questions is: How much does a public programme of twelve months cost in labour?

Superhost Curators: Okay, that’s one.

FP: The second question is: Can we afford it? Another one is: What do we consider labour in the context of such a project?

Superhost Curators: And how do you understand the notion of labour?

FP: It’s also about what shapes the work we do. When we develop and produce public events or exhibitions, what are the forces at play that shape what we do and the decisions we make? We give value to the things we find important, but we also work in a system that gives (often different) value to similar things. What is the friction there and how do we deal with it? And another question is: How to not internalise and individualise the things that are not working in this system of production? How can we share experiences that are related to the working conditions? To me, in the end it is about risk: How do we collectivise risk? We are all taking risks all the time, and we try to keep a lot of these risks private.

Superhost Curators: Your practice is really also about being very transparent and making things visible and sharing attention or a level of attention for things: I understand that your proposal is to be transparent about your concerns, your interests, your doubts, your process and your relationships as an artist.

FP: Yes, I think that’s a very good description.

Conversation held in January 2021 between Anne-Claire Schmitz, Joanna Zielińska and Falke Pisano. The complete version of this conversation can be read in the visitor guide of Superhost.

About Falke Pisano

Falke Pisano lives and works in Rotterdam. Her practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, video work and artist publications. Her artistic practice scrutinises the ways in which systems of thought are structured, formalised and ultimately naturalised. Her series of works stem from long-term research cycles that delve deep into specific subject matter and undermine conventional frameworks of knowledge by triggering a continuous exchange between language, ideas, materials and forms.

Pisano states: ‘I am interested in how we come to know the world, how we develop the capacity to look at this world critically, to be able to tolerate more and more complexity, and to adjust our worldview (and self-image) again and again. I am interested in how, by constantly thinking and speculating about our position and capacity to act within this world, we can slowly develop methods, interventions and forms of organisation that go beyond merely aesthetic and representational proposals, but still carry the power of the imagination and in which it remains possible to connect in unexpected, or in non-optimised functional ways, different modes of thinking (theoretical, poetic and practical) and acting (imagining, articulating, moving, organising, making, doing).’