Artists at Work: Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum

Iratxe Jaio (Markina, Spain, 1976) & Klaas van Gorkum (Delft, The Netherlands, 1975) have been working together since 2001, producing performances, videos, publications and actions.⁰¹They have created projects that explore public and private spaces and the use thereof by individuals and collectives. Using documentation as their work methodology, they analyse and question social and political issues concerning everyday contingencies. Their work has been exhibited at MUSAC, León, TENT Center for Contempoaray Art, Rotterdam, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and de Appel, Amsterdam among other venues.

In the following interview with Afterall’s Paula Barriobero, Jaio and van Gorkum discuss notions of communities, social and activist practices and some of their projects, as well as their recent experiences at Occupy Amsterdam.

PAULA BARRIOBERO: In your last project, Producing Time in Between Other Things (2011) at MUSAC in León, you pay homage to the artisanal work of Jos van Gorkum, Klaas’s grandfather – particularly a metal box belonging to him, containing ephemera relating to his post-retirement hobbies. When did you decide you wanted to make a project about Jos van Gorkum’s legacy and how did it work?

IRATXE JALO & KLAAS VAN GORKUM: The metal box has been with us for a long time. As with many other hunches and ideas, it sat on a shelf, awaiting the right set of circumstances. We made a habit of opening it at least once a year, to go through the pile of notes and half-finished sketches, while discussing the notion of artistic practice and its relation to contemporary culture. There was something about the connection between Klaas’s grandfather and the objects he was making that held our interest. These were not the authentic products of an artisan living in an artisan’s world, but those of a retired factory worker; someone who had lived in an industrial world, and who was just beginning to reap the benefits of an emerging social welfare state. His wood-turning hobby was a pensioner’s pastime, a simulacrum of a way of life lost in history. It suggested that the most significant product of his hobby might very well have been the hobbyist himself. So we moved on from just leafing through this yellowing archive to physically working with the original lathe, placing ourselves in the same position to find out how that would reflect on our own artistic practice.

PB: You were reflecting on the relationship between work and free time­, in relation to the material labour of craft and the immaterial labour of cultural production. Could you expand on that?

IJ & KvG: The rights and benefits that previous generations fought for are slowly being eroded in the name of increasing productivity. Today, people are expected to work longer hours, and retire at later ages than before. As more and more aspects of our existence, such as our social networks, or cultural production, are infused with neoliberal logic, the distinction between leisure and working time dissolves. This is most clearly the case for the so-called ‘creative class’, whose social and cultural capital fuels a growing industry based on intellectual property and the segregation of material and immaterial labour. With Producing Time in Between Other Things, we wanted to look at our own artistic practice in relation to these developments, by investigating the correlation between three separate regimes of production: the artist in the studio, the worker in the factory, and the worker at home, in his ‘free time’.

PB: The exhibition formed part of ‘Amikejo’ (2011–12), a series of four exhibitions at MUSAC curated by Latitudes, based on the work of four artist duos. How do you normally work and develop your projects as an artist duo?

IJ & KvG: We have been working together since 2001, but we didn’t always consider ourselves an artist duo per se. Two just happens to be the smallest number at which one can start speaking of a collaborative artistic practice. We’re interested in the processes that lead to collectivity, without idealising the conditions under which that happens. Conflict and dispute play a big part in these processes. Nevertheless, we believe that it is in a state of crisis that collaboration is at its most inspiring, when the common ground between those involved is a contradictory and inconsistent mesh of personal projects that happen to coincide and challenge each other.

PB: I would like to talk now about the widespread cultural cuts due to the recent waves of economic crisis. Of course these are not restricted to the Netherlands, but as you are based in Rotterdam, how have you lived through these cultural cuts and how are they affecting artists and institutions?

IJ & KvG: When the Dutch government announced the cuts in its culture budget, there was a great and indignant response from the art world, where it was perceived as an assault on culture itself. Unfortunately, most of the indignation from artists and institutions did not extend beyond their own interests, as they failed to acknowledge that the cuts were part of a larger set of austerity measures affecting all kinds of public sectors, such as health care, public transport and so on. We had mixed feelings about participating in these protests in name of the art world, since we believed that there was something larger at stake. What good was there in demonstrating for the leftovers of a cultural policy, when the social welfare state, whose ideological foundations it was based on, was being dismantled before our very eyes? All that these protests managed to achieve was to expose how estranged from society the cultural sector had become.

PB: You have organised The Social Experiment (2011) with Wouter Osterholt, Jonas Staal and Elke Uitentuis. In one of your projects within the Experiment you hired a former member of the riot police to teach interrogation practices and techniques to a group of artists and students. Do you see yourselves as part of an activist practice?

IJ & KvG: We formed The Social Experiment to provide a collaborative environment in which to elaborate and refine our ideas on how artistic practices may influence and even provoke social change. This initiative was prompted, in part, by our annoyance with the self-absorbed character of the art protests against the cultural cuts. So when the Spanish 15-M movement and Occupy Wall Street went global, and people started pitching their tents on city squares everywhere, we could hardly stand on the sidelines and watch. We bought a big army tent between the five of us, and joined the camp in the centre of Amsterdam. For the two months that it lasted, we were fully integrated in its daily routine. We did not consider our presence an art project in itself, nor were we seeking to turn the camp into a platform for our own artistic productions, choosing instead to remain subservient to a cause that was bigger than all of us. We were careful, however, not to assimilate entirely, by organising a program of activities parallel to that of the camp. This mainly served the purpose of acting as a bridge between Occupy Amsterdam and members of the art world who might otherwise not have crossed the threshold. Our group soon expanded to some 30 active members, and became known as the Artists in Occupy Amsterdam. But there was also an underlying purpose of maintaining some vestige of autonomy in relation to the camp, namely that which brought us together in the first place: the desire to explore the reciprocal relationship between artistic practice and social change.