{"id":20883,"date":"2015-04-27T16:59:26","date_gmt":"2015-04-27T14:59:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/?p=20883"},"modified":"2015-04-27T16:59:26","modified_gmt":"2015-04-27T14:59:26","slug":"interview-rivkah-gevinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/de\/article\/interview-rivkah-gevinson\/","title":{"rendered":"Choreographing An Experience: An Interview With Rivkah Gevinson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Rivkah Rivkah Gevinson. Photo credit Nicola Beuscher<\/p>\n

More subtle, less panache, perhaps thanks to her Norwegian roots and Jewish upbringing, Rivkah Gevinson has been drawing and creating images from an early age. She bears a striking resemblance to her youngest sister Tavi, of Rookie fame, but Gevinson\u2019s work puts her mostly behind the camera, creating animations and videos free of plot but heavily focused on nostalgia and the passage of time. In 2013, she was awarded a grant to travel throughout Norway for three months, wrestling stillness and movement as she photographed the country. This month, her ideas and concepts will be executed by Belfast artists with Catalyst Arts in an experimental collaboration called Basic Operation<\/a>. Meticulous and instinctive, Gevinson tells us about her the inspiration behind recent videos, and why she\u2019s more serious than her little sister, Tavi.<\/p>\n

Hello, Rivkah. You\u2019re originally from Chicago, but you moved to Berlin nine months ago. What do you think of the city?<\/b><\/p>\n

Berlin is a good city to be in. I was in Oslo last year, and that was really nice for other reasons, but it didn\u2019t fit me quite as well. I knew I wanted to be in a place where I felt more myself. I think my ideal when I decided to move here was that Oslo is really expensive, and I think that has a big influence on the culture. I just didn\u2019t feel a lot of space to be messy and poor [laughs]. It also wasn\u2019t going to be possible for me to make art every day. And I saw that in Berlin there was a community for that, and I could do it here as long as I had enough money to keep me going for a while. So that was pretty much my goal. To save a lot of money and go to Berlin, and start making art everyday.<\/p>\n

You have a very interesting and creative family. How did your childhood shape your creativity?<\/b><\/p>\n

My mom, there\u2019s something about her that is specifically Norwegian in terms of her values and what she\u2019s fascinated by. She\u2019s always been good about turning our eyes towards light and fresh air and things like that. She turned our basement into a craft room, and she bought all of the art supplies that she could get. It was really nice. There were shelves of them. And both our parents left us alone. And not in a bad, horrible way. I just had a lot of freedom and I feel really lucky about that. I specifically remember drawing pictures of my sisters with titles like “Miriam in six years” or “Tavi when she is my age.\u201d I would imagine how they would look in the future. They were always both my friends and my pets. I think I was probably really controlling in our games, as I still am when I make things, but I liked having these partners who could offer things I lacked. We all had an irreplaceable role in those games. I was always very serious and earnest (the home videos are embarrassing), while Miriam and Tavi were much more light-hearted and funny. These trends persist today.<\/p>\n

\"Rikvah Rikvah Gevinson, Memorium, Lake Michigan, 2015. Excerpt and stills, duration 4 mins 7 secs<\/p>\n

Discussing \u201cShut Eye,”<\/b><\/a> the stop-motion video you made for the band Stealing Sheep, you said that you don\u2019t often approach your work with a premeditated theme or narrative. So what does your daily process look like?<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s definitely a little different everyday. It\u2019s hard to get a routine about it, because a lot of what I do is follow things that come up. Mostly because, if I try to make a plan, or say this is a project I\u2019m going to make, I just start to panic. I get really bored. And I also find that, if I already know what something is about, then I don\u2019t want to deal with it anymore. I don\u2019t follow any visual or aesthetic things. I try not to think about themes so much when I\u2019m actually making something, and if something makes me feel weird, or surprised in the process of making it, then I follow that. The thing is, there\u2019s so many things that I\u2019ve started, and very few that I\u2019ve finished, you know? There are the things that just actually capture your attention enough to make you say, \u201cOkay, now I can spend a couple of months just doing this.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your favourite medium that you\u2019re currently working with?<\/b><\/p>\n

My favourite thing right now is making videos. Which has made a recent comeback. I hadn\u2019t really done that in a few years.<\/p>\n

What are you currently working on?<\/b><\/p>\n

I just finished one video and am planning a screening for it. I\u2019ve been working on it for a few months, but it feels new still. It\u2019s the first thing I\u2019ve started and finished in Berlin. I\u2019ve had to turn the video into an animation. It\u2019s 2,000 frames, and I take each frame individually in PhotoShop to change. The video is really visceral. Every video is, but this one especially. To know what\u2019s right, I have to tune into that feeling. It\u2019s hard because I have to look at it like I\u2019ve never seen it before, seeing every frame disconnected from the rest. It\u2019s taken two weeks finishing the edits in slow motion, so I know it really well. I have a sense of what it looked like before and what it will look like. I\u2019m just trusting that I\u2019m doing the right thing — feeling it would be hard to be wrong. Being decisive and saying, \u201cThis is correct.\u201d Everything I make is time based and very focused on the consciousness of time. Choreographing an experience, and doing that without being didactic, without forcing it on someone. It comes through in the actual content and work itself. It\u2019s really important to me that there\u2019s an openness, but a balance between openness and specificity. It takes a certain amount of choreography, and decisiveness, and then chance.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n