"This is about me and not some imposed, charged terminology."
“I am Simon Freund. My name is Simon Freund. That’ll have to do to describe me and that which I wish to express,” Simon says, his face all smiles. Right away, I become aware that our conversation about his work will depart the superficial realm and lay bare deeper correlations. “How lucky is this,” I think. After all, what follows our own surprise is usually curiosity and recognition. Let me introduce him to you: his name is Simon Freund, and he works and lives without a permanent address.
That’s pretty impressive, considering you’d want a good bit of courage to make that kind of statement.
Just recently, I started to write down all the words people have used to describe or categorise me. For example: photographer, fashion designer, artist. Additionally, I asked myself what I am by default: child, son, brother, friend – literally and by name [Freund being German for ‘friend’]. I wrote all these terms on my rigid boards, using white for the colour. My query was to find out which of these I identify with. My result was: none of them, except my name, which on some levels, is very individual, even if it does actually exist elsewhere more frequently. I feel like my name is the best description of myself. This is about me and not some imposed, charged terminology, which I can’t and won’t identify with. I reversed this and all the other work I did on the rigid boards, so as to regain order in my thoughts. What remains is one of my newest works: four completely empty rigid boards. It felt like such a relief.
What did you study?
Art. In Professor Hermann Pitz’s [a German conceptual artist] sculpting class.
What you probably don’t know about me: sculpting evokes strong emotions inside … Sculpting, for me, is the same thing as living. Whether I’m piling colours on top of each other, assembling words with the help of letters, chiselling sculptures, scribbling pixels into a computer or creating shapes and sequences of movement with the aid of my body, sculpting is life. That might sound like a simple formula. Artistically speaking, sculpting is the most complex and versatile concept.
In preparation for our talk, I heard you work with ephemeral materials. How does that work?
This would probably be considered more in the context of a philosophical approach. In fact, I work rather little with physical materials. My work is primarily about the idea that I then put into form using as few materials as possible. In my work allipossess.com, for example, I simply photographed everything I own without specifically creating anything new, and in ‘I Will Never Sign My Work’ (2018), my artistic work is not the signed card, but the negation of it by way of my signature and its manifestation. It’s not that I don’t want to make any fixed statements, but I want to invite us to handle a certain topic and to think about it. These are always just snapshots and my thoughts can evolve or change at any time. Everything can be forgotten, overwritten and its thought ‘evolved’. My materials are my thoughts and this could be implied to be the transience of my work.
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If you’d like to read the full interview with Simon, you can order the Courage Issue#69 of SLEEK HERE.