Metahaven
Give Up All Other Truths!
Since 2007, the work of Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden) has encompassed graphic identities, publications, garments, spatial installations, and music videos. Over the last three years Metahaven has focused mainly on the moving image, combining different forms of documentary and fiction, essay film and poetry, and drawing on the investigative methods used in their design work. Conversing with Attilia Fattori Franchini, Metahaven talk about truth and fiction, the latest show “Version History” presented at the ICA London, and their new film Eurasia (Questions of Happiness).
ATTILIA FATTORI FRANCHINI: Using design as a form of investigation manifesting in a specific approach to structure, texture and surface, your work fluidly encompasses design, publications, spatial installations, apparel and filmmaking. I am very interested by how immaterial or digital communication impacts larger mechanisms and manifests physically (something central to your work), and I wonder if this open approach to making is also a direct strategy of investigation.
METAHAVEN: For the last three years, we have focused on making films. It would be obvious for someone to link most of our work to technology and the digital age, but in fact we slightly disagree: this is not the main motif. You can say that the films are all investigations of the relationship between fiction and truth, each working in its own way and each with a different objective. We are interested in generating an intimacy with the viewer around these investigations; not to constantly remind viewers that they live in a digital society, which they already know. In fact, the type of cinematic image we often use in our films has to do with already being aware of this and in a way being past this point.
When I first met your work it was through the publications Uncorporate Identity (2010) and Can Jokes Bring Down
Governments? (2014), the first bridging between design and geopolitics, the latter analyzing the importance of memes as tools for political action. These two works were crucial for me to understand your ongoing interest in unfolding the complex political structures behind information societies and a specific method of inquiry. How has your practice evolved since then?
Since these publications we’ve made three more books, two music videos, and five films. We are in a transformation process from seeing many phenomena in the world as belonging to design towards seeing them as relating to art. This means, in so many words, that we think and work as artists. Our work will always include design as a layer, but design is not and perhaps has never been the only or final name for what we do or aspire to do. The problems that art solves are differently oriented than those addressed by design. Contrary to what is often suggested, art is not able to address problems in the world simply as they are, on purely factual terms. The transformation that art applies to them happens on a different level. Even if art can seemingly apply to society, it is never possible to prescribe how it does that, and it is even more impossible to suggest that it has any effect at all. We are interested in creating works that generate new relationships with the audience, using poetry, storytelling, and new cinematic images.
Your current show “Version History” at the ICA, London (through January 13, 2019) has opened almost simultaneously to “Earth” at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (through February 24, 2019). Are the two exhibitions thematically connected?
They are not connected in any other way than that our work is being presented in them. Both institutions are very different in their architecture and way of functioning with the public, and the shows echo this. The central piece in the ICA show is Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018), and we have added several murals in the ICA to surround the films that work with the architecture of the building. The show at the Stedelijk is less grouped around a central piece and more of an ongoing narrative.
Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) is a factual-fictional mesh of footage, animation, graphics and CGI sometimes layered upon each other accompanied by a multicolored carpet viewing environment, and a designed background wall. Questioning the idea of linear meanings and unique truths along their media distribution, the film imagines Eurasia as a fractured territory, emotionally speculating on the origins and consequences of Europe’s current fragmentation. Can you tell me more about the different technical and narrative layers of the film and its spatial installation?
The film presents a sequence of poems. It begins with Marina Tsvetaeva’s I know the truth. “Give up all other truths!” she writes, and after an interstitial part about Lars von Trier, we immerse into the Ural steppe, where a drone circles around a camera on a tripod at the top of a hill. The drone and the camera film each other. This is near the village of Beloshapka in Russia, close to the border with Kazakhstan. We hear Émile Durkheim’s treatise on the variations of truth, and descend into a reality where truth differs across space and time. Meanwhile, we encounter a very enthusiastic Chinese manufacturer of plastic straws, a Russian teen goth citing Francis Fukuyama, and an ultra-conservative Polish political commentator predicting the breakup of the European Union on German television. We descend into Fyodor Tyutchev’s poem, Silentium!: the point of the poem is a joy of inner worlds flourishing, “[…] drink at the source and say no word.” We arrive at a red-hued river, in a heavily polluted area in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. There are huge black mountains made of slag – a residual product of three centuries of copper mining without any environmental concerns. A keyboard is hidden in the slag. The last poem is Snow Lies by Alexander Vvedensky, a text that undercuts the constitutive claims of language, in a manner that’s both hilarious and bewildering.
Do you consider Eurasia and your film work at large as being characterized by the use of mixed timelines and depicting techniques as an interface to unfold and represent some of the complexities of our present?
The contradiction of non-linear narrative is that it still has to fit into a single, linear unity. Every filmmaker who wishes to challenge the paradigm of linearity with a unique answer that still is “a film” has to do so by trying to create the non-linear inside of it. Certainly much of this is what our present is like – that we re-live the same media moments many times while they are technically not the present anymore. But the ultimate point is to tell stories that could not be told in any other way.
The ICA show also includes the recent films Information
Skies (2016) and Hometown (2018), which reveal contemporary schizophrenia, a state between attraction and terror, digital and physical, sleeping and waking states. As in many of your moving image works, animation, live footage, VR, and digital abstraction are edited together, questioning the authenticity of information and what is accepted as real. Do you attempt to reconcile this fragmentation?
Yes. In fact these film are not fragmented at all, in our opinion. They use, in each case, exactly two visual states: live footage and animation. In each film, the nature of the material is precisely defined; it is always one kind of animation with one kind of live footage.
Mixing genres and gazes, your expressive visual approach is often flashy and maximalist, combining graphic and digital symbolism, communication tools and cinema. This overload resembles everyday human experience, pushed and pulled from physical to digital inputs, somehow trapped in its cognitive and emotional state. The result is a condition of numbness that annihilates political thinking and action. Is your work a possible way to defy this annihilation?
Our work is a way of re-grounding emotion into this lack of ground.
Attilia Fattori Franchini is an independent curator and writer based in London and Milan.