Esther Ferrer

Interview by Jean Wainwright

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

Transcript

Jean Wainwright: I’m here with Esther Ferrer outside the Spanish Pavilion. Esther, you work is very striking, very simple. Would you talk a little bit about your ideas for it.

Esther Ferrer: There are two pieces I chose myself, and one other piece that the commissioner wanted. The two pieces I chose were the In the Framework of Art, in English, and the last one (?). The reason I chose the (Spanish for In the Framework of Art) is because I made a lot of performance from the sixties to now and I wanted to present a piece that in one way or another demanded some action. So in this piece it is the public who do that. I present a proposition and the public make the piece. Two things interest me, first, that the piece is always transforming and secondly when the Biennale finishes, everything is thrown out and in this way it’s like a performance.

JW: I notice the way that people were confused when they saw your piece with the frame; the way they moved from one plane to the other. Perhaps you could describe how the words work with that?

EF: I never explain my piece. Many people are confused; they don’t know what to do. It’s fine, absolutely fine. The people travelling the frame understand immediately that there is a game; there is something to understand. And the other people who don’t understand go out and cling to the other door. Like Duchamp, I say, ‘any interpretation is okay’.

JW: Another piece you have is called The Three Graces.

EF: Yes The Three Graces, at the beginning I wanted to do something with chairs because in my performance I like chairs. I prefer to be sitting than not sitting. It’s funny, one morning I go to my studio and immediately it’s like the Trois Graces, so I choose this. Did you know that Three Graces are for the pleasure of man, they are beautiful, they are honourable. So I decided to do this triangle in red because they are bearers of their period. It’s not very often that I’m doing symbolic signification, but in this case I admit a little signification. I am feminist and I wanted to present something for the women who come to see the exhibition, one kind of complicity.

JW: The other work you have is a photographic autobiographic piece, also about time.

EF: For me time is very important, time. I said always that for me the performance is the art of time, space and presence. So normally in my performance I work the time like a machine.