I think that art makes a person feel individual and conscious and there is awareness in the moment of the contact with art.
I don’t think art is to make people feel they are a mass, entertained by some spectacle. A good work of art is making that person feel aware of their individuality in that moment of concentration and awareness. It's not about entertaining or mesmerising anybody.
I like to think that every piece I do, it needs concentration to be understood, to see it clearly, to understand what is behind the gesture in my work that sometimes looks too easy or banal.
"Okay, good, I can see you now. So this is the back and white image?"
F:"Yes"
Symmetry is important to me. I like to explore this notion of symmetry in general. In my work it's everywhere. The idea that you have a line of transit to establish a kind of symmetrical displacement in reality and how the body acts symmetrically and asymmetrically at the same time. The perception of the object that is designed to the body and has quite a complex structure and then, suddenly, with a kind of simple gesture you exaggerate all of that.
"Okay, I want to ask you something crazy, I don’t know. Can you insert a dot in between every dot?"
F: "Oh my God."
"Don’t be lazy, how many dots do you think we have here?"
F: "Ummm…"
Generally, my work is not about showing off a high level of technology or production. It's not about the skills of manufacture or the economical power in the production but it's just showing something that is not so complicated to make, that is easy, everybody can do that. You can have a strong experience that has some impact without showing off your production skills.
We are trying to make one layer, just one layer with just one colour. We are using red now and I think it's actually looking very bad.
"Yeah, I can't see if you are nervous because you have the camera crew here. I know, it's very hard to work under pressure."
When they see a lot of my photographs they start to see things in reality connected to those photographs. I think it's nice to disrupt everyday life in the streets with something that is kind of subtle. It's not so much an imposition but a dialogue with what is happening. I think, for me, what is important is that those gestures in life can be transported to the people, and that is very important, I think. That is the most important thing, that through the work you can help people enjoy reality and life with more intensity.
I like games and sports a lot.
["This is a legend"]
I can be very silly. I think I can enjoy very silly things. I do silly things.
["Then you catch it"]
I mean, I think my work is both normally silly and serious. I think that, yeah, it can be perceived as a kind of joke. Then, I think I am very serious too.
["It's true that you hit somebody with this it’s not good."]
I am a serious artist.
I just always love art and I was surrounded by art in my life. I just follow it. Now is a point that they are finishing rooms. This point, the artist just waits and waits and waits. That’s why I don’t like to come to installations because I'm just waiting. I cannot touch the work, I cannot touch them because they get very nervous. The boss is having fun and then I am here waiting.
"We do what? She got this first or this first?"
I hope this is going to work, it's a new installation idea in Mexico, collecting tyres from the motorways. Travelling in the roads in Mexico I always found these pieces of broken tyres, they look sometimes like serpents or they look like an animal in the middle of the road. I started to collect them and I found them quite interesting.
Normally, I get involved in all of the work. I like to do it because I need to find out by myself, so every time it's a new experience and I need to understand experience to get to the final conclusion.
We'll have two installations. One is the lintels, which is these Laundromat residues from the dryer machine that I showed in New York right after September 11. The city was still quite dusty and shocked and the presence of this disaster was so strong. Showing this work with all these residues of clothes but also human hair and particles of the body was a strange presence and feeling about fragility and death and the residues of movement.
The hood was not easy to make because it's a curve that makes a curve like that and like that. So to cut it and then feed it again, it was very hard. I wanted to be a Formula One race driver and I had this idea that a lot of the cars in the street, they can become sports cars. So, finally when I grew up my dream came true.
It's handmade, it's impossible to make it like in a James Bond movie when it's just like, zoom.
Since I was a kid I've been obsessed by circles. A lot of my drawings have to do with planets in motion. As much as I was drawing cars, I was drawing planets. For me, everything important was circular.
You can take it that’s a model of orbits and planets or a molecular model of hitting atoms. The Cannonball piece is based on a game called cannonball, which is also called French billiards. There are no pockets, three balls, and you play just to hit the other two balls with your own ball. In this case, I made it oval so the behaviour of the ball in the oval bands is very different and very hard to predict. Then one is hanging so it's floating out of the field.
So you have to have a good sense of timing to play the game.
["Oh, man!"]
But it's not impossible to play.
["Yes, did you get that?"]
I get bored easily, so that’s why I need to move to something new and explore something that I'm not sure what it is. I like to be learning. Every work is different, has a different process, because of the materials, many types of techniques, many types of encounters. To live the process, it's very important to understand very well why you are doing something and then also that gives you ideas for new works.
