Photography by Ferry Mohr.
Listening to Jorinde Voigt is like close looking. First, it seems abstract, but when you follow her words, a world full of colours, sounds, movements and discoveries opens up. Her choice of words is clear and concise, her language dense.
It is about relationships – not the relationship, but resonance and causality – about how we relate to the world around us. The Berlin-based artist is widely known for her conceptual art, in which she combines science, philosophy, history and her own distinctive way of dissecting reality into a sensual aesthetic.
We meet in her studio, a renovated industrial building with generous light and a view out to the Spree. As we walk through the many rooms, corners and interstitial spaces – filled with artworks, materials, books and furniture – it’s an atmosphere of sober lines, minimalist but never empty. Every wall colour, the golden brass doors, the black stairs connecting the different levels carry intention and form a loop back to the beginning. It feels as if we are balancing on the edge of a doughnut – torus – a shape that often features in her works. And suddenly, the rooms themselves seem like a physical extension of the ink-soaked paper into a three-dimensional moment in which we move through.
Photography by Ferry Mohr.
NISHA MERIT Your artworks often seem like snapshots of intense research, complex notations of inner processes. Are they also conclusions?
JORINDE VOIGT The process never really stops. Immersion began with the decision to explore a realm of experience beyond words – an area for which no terms exist. Like a body submerging in water, there is the simultaneous perception across the whole surface of the skin. The question was: How can I find a form of notation that refers to exactly that?
This immersion also takes place on the level of the paper being submerged in ink. Each situation is unique; experience is never neutral. This dyeing involves an acceptance of chance: everything leaves a trace. Building on this, further postures are added, each with its own notation system developed and then translated, one after another, onto the paper.
On the one hand, it is a complete recording of all physical movements, and at the same time a full inscription of the situational conditions. After drying, I draw a circle from the center of the format to the outermost edge of possibility. This line marks both maximum expansion and limitation, the desire for growth and the point of balance. The third action on the paper is to fleetingly trace the places where I touch the drawing – the outline of the knee, the hand, the arm, or the entire flank of the body. These body-space contacts are prompts for an additional operation on the following level of pigment application. There are shapes that stay with me for a long time – such as the torus, topographically a form in which inside and outside are one and the same. It resonates with the model of perception, with our magnetic field, and with the relationship between body and environment. For me, it is an archetype of many layers of our world. Then I walk through this emerging world again and leave traces with a coloured pen. As a result, foreground and background are constantly interwoven. Whether something lies above or below is determined by hierarchy and because it changes with every stroke, it is continually rearranged. In principle, it is a kind of interweaving. Even though I work on a flat surface, I enter a space that extends beyond three dimensions – both mentally and physically. The elaboration stands before me like a tableau as I work, and within it I discover the characteristics of these levels and processes. Ultimately, it is an experimental process – a field of play for thoughts and their potential – a way of making visible to myself the possibilities that lie within.
Photography by Ferry Mohr.
NM How does this performativity take place between you and the paper?
JV Our existence is inseparable from contact with space, from inter-bodily connection, from resonance with others. The process begins with certain bodily experiences, which are reflected upon and examined, together with an awareness that adjusts to them. It became increasingly clear to me that the body stores everything we experience in life. We are in constant dialogue with the body – it sends sensations as feedback, and these must be read, interpreted, and answered. I encountered this most clearly through boundaries on a physical level – through pain or post-traumatic symptoms that at first I could not read, that simply appeared as irritation. The body is an extremely complex system, especially in its feedback, and although it speaks its own language, it is remarkably clear and direct. It is not simply a question of whether something hurts, but of recognising it as communication – often appearing as a precise puzzle to be deciphered. At the same time, there is the idea of wholeness – that everything about me matters simultaneously.
NM Colour, movement and notations are essential components in your works. How do you develop your visual language?
JV Color sometimes prolongs a particular moment – like the yellow of a fig leaf in autumn – and I think: I have to mix exactly this shade, because I want it to keep shining. Sometimes color also replaces what is missing, for instance in the dark months. I have developed certain forms of writing to capture, for example, a moment of rotation or transformation. In the end, it is about describing a space as it actually is. What is implied there – in the form of directions, or descriptions of how such spaces are constructed – are deductions drawn from my observations of reality. I always assume that whatever I am looking at is in a state of change, and that at the same time, as long as you or I are alive, the act of looking is also alive. The question is: how do you write something that is in motion? For me, it is crucial to make clear: there is no single true view of a thing, and everything is already distorted the moment you try to pathologies it. That is why one must try to find a way to describe movement itself, and the fact that it changes with every moment. Everything must always be described as something that for example is expanding right now. Or something that is definitely in motion. Or at the tipping point – like water freezing at a certain temperature. And so each thing follows its own laws, determining when it changes its form.
Photography by Ferry Mohr.
NM Is this representation of possibilities the reason why you work in sequences and series?
JV Exactly, there is no other way, because it is always about playing through all the possibilities, or all kinds of ideas. It is always about the spectrum of something. Within this framework, the work naturally becomes serial, or takes the form of variations. It is always about this “again, again, again” – and each repetition is never the same. Often, even in a performative action – a physical action – I realise: this is perhaps not something you do once and it is finished, but something that only unfolds as a sequence. For that alone, space is needed – again and again. Then, for example, the action begins to tell its own story through its expansion across the space. If you only did it once, it would not be complete. Often, what is essential reveals itself in its own rhythm: with a kind of recognition – like a heartbeat, breathing, a sequence of steps, or the rhythm of day and night. For me, these are all fundamental musical rhythms of the space in which I move or which I describe – except that here, we are the rhythm, or elements from our culture and our environment.
NM What role do music, rhythm and beat play for you?
JV For me, this is especially important in times of great uncertainty. Music is like a flying carpet that carries you. Music is structure – like a net beneath a tightrope walker. You need a certain structure to move within your own space, yet you also need to allow for chaos, because in certain moments it is essential – structure can also become an obstacle. For me, it is about the moment when trust develops. Trust means letting go of the desire to control – and that is what creates freedom. It’s a theme that has occupied me for years. My next book is called Trust. I believe this is also a crucial social issue: we are deeply focused on science, yet our environment constantly shows us that we either know nothing about it or have no influence over it. We live with profoundly unsettling questions about why things are the way they are. There are some things we may never understand. To this day, we still do not fully know what water is – and yet we engage with it constantly. Certain phenomena may have a degree of complexity that exceeds what the human brain can grasp. The question is: how do we relate to that? Either we try to control – an act born of fear – or we manage to trust. But these are vast terrains still to be explored. We try to preserve, to take responsibility, and at the same time we do the opposite. We often think too short-term about the consequences of our decisions. And we often know too little about what we are changing irreversibly.
"I believe this is also a crucial social issue: we are deeply focused on science, yet our environment constantly shows us that we either know nothing about it or have no influence over it."
NM What are you working on at the moment?
JV I am searching right now. At the moment, I feel a strong pull toward light. When I wake, I often emerge from dreams in which everything carries a second outline, as if glowing – something for which I have no word, yet it is clear where it lies, where it appears, where I encounter it in my surroundings. I am currently tracing my own topography along this line – what it is, what qualities it has, and how it translates into me. For example, in the works behind you: the colours are taken from the sky – once even reversed, as if seen from the horizon – and layered over them are the rhythmic, performative sequences of gestural actions. Then the question arises again: how does the left connect with the right, and how does it relate to the caesura in between? These are rhythmic, temporal questions.