Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Interview by Michael Archer

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 18 Numbers 3 & 4, 1999

Transcript

Michael Archer: This is an interview with Eija-Liisa Ahtila, talking about her work in the Finnish Pavilion, ‘Consolation Service’. It’s a two-screen project, both images butting up on the same wall and it tells a story about a couple, who have a young child, who are separating. There is, in addition to the couple and their baby, a counsellor who is offering this consolation service. Like many of your other pieces this seems to be very concerned with the possibility or the impossibility of communicating, and what kinds of things might cause that lack of communication.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Yes, certainly. It’s one of the basic reasons for being here, living here; my identity and identity in general. It has to do with the other person and that means communication, that means defining your life,

MA: With reference to your mention of identity, that seems to be something that arises out of the things that one does. You have that sense of identity because you are in a relationship with someone, or because you are having a baby.

E-LA: When you are not a child anymore, then you are an adult. I think identity has a lot to do with that also and that there are some stated parts in identity and that camouflage is not only a negative work but I’m saying that you also really need the camouflage.

MA: That idea of there being static elements and dynamic elements within one’s sense of identity, evades the work, although it happens in one particular moment in this work, ‘Consolation Service’. It’s when the man in the couple, is talking to the counsellor and saying that he’s going to go out for his birthday drinks, and she asks ‘Who’s going to look after the baby?’ and he says ‘well, the neighbour will, she’s the person who’s telling this story’, and so immediately there is that recognition that it’s not simply acting.

E-LA: Yes this is actually the first work where I concentrated on building a fictional world. When we were shooting I told the actors that they could look at the camera when it was natural to do that.

MA: One thing about film making is that it is entirely a collaborative venture, although you write the thing and you’re in charge. It requires an input from an enormous number of people.

E-LA: Yes that’s right. Actually I graduated as a painter and then I did photography for a couple of years and did some installations with photos and texts. Then I studied Media for one year in London and one in Los Angeles. I studied film and I liked working with moving images and I really needed other people to be there. I mean it didn’t suit me that I was alone in my studio the year round. When I write I am on my own in my own world and then there is this period when I’m working with a crew. I’ve worked with the same people now for four productions and we are starting to know each other well. It’s a co-production and there are many people involved. I think it is really funny to have all these grown up people working for something small and really serious; spending long hours working hard and for something that is fiction. When I was a young person I wanted to be a lawyer, because of my background, to help the people who don’t have money. When I started I think my values were feminist or political, but then I became more interested in expressing emotions and different views about what is happening around. I had difficulty to say the meaning of doing something non-political or aesthetic or the meaning of beauty. I started to get depressed and then one night I had this dream that I had in my hand a big white flower with thick petals and I just brought my hand near my mouth and ate the flower. I thought that this is one of the finest dreams I have ever had, it kind of solved my problem with the beauty and the political.

MA: There are all those questions about gender and politics and their relationship to the aesthetic and they come up light-heartedly. There’s the example when they’re having their birthday party and two jokes are told, one about the ideal man and one about the ideal woman. There is also, it seems to me, something quite important about location. This is a finished work before it’s anything else, but the fact that the narrative is set at the point in the Spring when the snow is melting and there is that sense of change, that seems to be an absolutely vital kind of experience within a social space, that echo’s and mirrors the struggle between the couples themselves.

E-LA: Yes, I think you’re right. When I got the invitation to Venice, then I knew that it was going to be Spring, I wanted to show this. Also, when I was writing it I remembered last year when I was making ‘Anarchy and God’ that I had the same thoughts that it was already quite warm like a Summer day but then in the ditches, where there was a shadow, there was still snow. I have been thinking about nature and people and how we are part of the nature; you really can’t avoid it, even if you live in the city.

MA: The sound does seem to be extremely significant in the piece.

E-LA: That’s something actually that you lose a lot in the installation. We spent quite a long time considering the whole schedule with sound and I really enjoyed it, but in this room, I should have thought before, and had a different roof and a different floor, so that there would be more soft elements. Because in an echoing environment like this you lose all the base sound and then you get the treble and that also affects the mixing of the sound. In the birthday scene you don’t hear the music very well, you have only the words and then you don’t get the whole idea of what the sound does. For me the sound is important because I think it is a straight line to the unconscious or maybe, something to do with emotions. There is this basic emotion which is sorrow, I think this work is about sorrow.

MA: So you think of what you’re doing in any of these pieces as addressing particular narrative genres? I’m thinking, particularly at the end of ‘Consolation Service’ where the wife summons up the image of JP and goes to meet him and then he disappears, but he teaches us to accept something, to acknowledge. This trio of partial encounters takes place in front of a large framed poster for an old Hollywood romance film.

E-LA: I wanted to explore the relationship of short films and advertisements.