Interview: J&K

J&K (Kristine Agergaard & Janne Schäfer): Egyptomaniacs, 2007.

Egyptomaniacs is your first larger exhibition. Also it's the culmination of your residency in Cairo. I'd like to know something about the process – what expectations did you bring with you to Egypt and which experiences did you come home with?

Kristine: Well, that's a large question....

Janne: Actually, we had this sort of speculation before we went – we had this idea that many people travel to Egypt on holidays, and that the first thing you think of when you go to Egypt is quite obviously pyramids and Pharaos. We had a suspicion that probably the contemporary society of Egypt had nothing to do with all of that. And we wanted to sort of research on that: what's the relation between this ancient stuff, that you think about as a Western visitor, and the contemporary society. Are there any connection between them?

Kristine: When we were in Egypt we actually decided that we wanted to try being totally open without any agenda – just be there and experience whatever. We wanted to be intuitive and basically not plan beforehand what to do. During our stay there this constallation that Janne just described - this clash between the Western fantasies about Egypt, and the actual reality there – it became an observation of this sort of Triangled figure with three quite seperate positions. One was this Western fantasy, this certain gaze upon ancient Egypt and everything that is projected into this fixed image – all the ancient stuff, the mythical egyptian religion etc. Secondly there was this turist world - and of cause we also went as foreigners and was identified as such – but it was quite absurd to observe the turist world in Egypt because it's so exclusive and isolated from the rest of the society. I mean, I travelled quite a lot, and I'm sure that it's like that in other places as well, I just never experienced it so strongly. It's almost like ghettos for turists. A totally isolated world with certain Western standards – aircondition, busses to the sites, miniskirts and sungear from Sharm el Sheik – without having anything to do with Egypt. The third part of the Triangle was the contemporary Egyptian culture.

Janne: The charter turists would first visit the pyramids, secondly the Egyptian museum, and if they really wanted to do something they would maybe go to this turist marked og bazar, which is made to live up to the expectations of how an oriental bazar should be like. And most of the things you get there are just imported – Kasmir shalls and such..

J&K (Kristine Agergaard & Janne Schäfer): Egyptomaniacs, 2007.

You show that in one of your works - the dioramabox exhibiting things you collected from the bazar...

Janne: Yes, the object box comments on that situation: this Oriental bazar in a globalized context.

Kristine: Consumer goods and turist consumerism. But anyways this Triangle, we were interested in, I mean, in a way it was a very simple observation, but we were interested in somehow standing in the middle of. As some sort of projection surface where we would try – of cause it's all our observation, we also have a fantasy about all theese things and we're not trying to make an objective observation – but we wanted to try to sample elements from the three different positions. Some of the thing are made with that in mind. E.g. we took the Nubis and Horus figures to a bazar wearing traditional womens clothing but with Abibas-brand, which is of cause this weird appropriation of Adidas. It becomes this weird mix of Western fashion, traditional clothing, and then we were wearing ancient masks.

Janne: And again, these ancient masks are actually made for turists by copying old original masks. They come from the Pharaonic village, which is this themepark in Cairo, where everything is fake – extremely bad plaster copies of original things all in this really tacky style.

Kristine: Very, very discount.

I really like that work. It's quite absurd that you're sitting there all dressed up, but the man in the background aren't really responding to that. He's just minding his own business – a normal everyday life situation. I like that clash.

Janne: That's another thing we realised because we were first – scared is exaggerated – but a little bit weary of how it would be to do performative interventions in a restricted society and in a public space. But then we realized that because we got percieved as turists we could do anything! They're used to these freaks coming in from the resorts, running around in miniskirts. Not everywhere, but there was a very strong perception from the Egyptian society of Westeners – and Western women also. That gave us a certain liberty because they thought “Well, okay, of cause Westerners want to be photographed wearing Horus and Anubis masks.”

Kristine: You asked earlier what happened when we came back. We had been taking shitloads of photos. So many photos. We invented these different characters along the way. It was like: “Ah, here's the profet, and ah this is a missionary.”

J&K (Kristine Agergaard & Janne Schäfer): Egyptomaniacs, 2007.

You didn't have any plans made out before you went to Egypt?

No, no, as I said before: we was very open and intuitive about how it all came together. The basic of the work was photography, performance, and intervention. We walked around Cairo and would say: “Ah, that's a really funny donkey whip, and ah, look at these dresses, and ah, that's a really great American vintage jacket. We'll buy it.” I mean, we were not thinking: “We have to compose these characters.” It was more that all of a sudden I had these like orange bedsheet pants, an American vintage jacket, and some cloth wrapped around my head, and then I became the Holy Hip-Hopper. And Janne had a vision, and made a drawing, of this Abibas-dress mixed with weird heads from the ancient Gods. We had read books about these mix of deities – what happens when you mix an animal and a human? There's a lot of that in the ancient Egyptian religion. Janne made this drawing, and we thought: “Ah, that's really funny – lets go and get these masks.” So we didn't have any masterplan at all. We ended up with about five different characters or personas when we left Egypt.

Janne: We kind of found out during our stay that we wanted to work with photography. We knew that we would probably eventually make a collage-work, so we wanted to collect material. We always use ourselves in our works – these characters – so that's something we do anyways. That's sort of natural for us. We had all the pictures and the material lying around for a couple of months while we were working on something else.

So you do the work of a sampler? You collect and then sample items from different cultures, and in the end you'll make...

Janne: Yes, it's a lot about sampling. The references are sampled if you can say that. But it's not only sampling because we're also inventing and fictionalizing things. We're not being scientific.

Kristine: Anyways, we were doing this other work, and then we went back to the material we collected in Egypt. We knew we had to do this exhibition, so we had a period of one and a half moth where we stayed together. We build up a model of the space, and we had all the pictures. We already had the different characters that we invented – the Holy Hip-Hopper and the Black Witch – and then we just started. The first step was again intuitive. We made a lot of collages: “This could go there, and no, no, no.” After a while there was a story line presenting itself from the image material. So the collage-form was a pre-step, but along the way there was all these intermedia states with multiple possibilities and directions.

Janne: And then of cause there was some things that we really wanted to integrate in the work. We wanted to comment on the seperation of the turists and the actual society, and we wanted to relate to the global marked situation..

Kristine: ...and the post-colonial issue...

Janne..yes, and we wanted to talk about the pyramid-fetichism, that gets interpretated in many different ways. We slowly figured out the thematic groups of subjects we wanted to talk about. At the same time, as we had these themes we wanted to mention, we also had a more fictional level, where the story would evolve. There's a level of narration where our own characters can perform. It evolves through the exhibition: there's the prophet, the pact of the new tribal of Giza, and the 4th monotheistic religion, which is all some kind of future prediction we made. So it developes more and more into this future or fictive space.

J&K (Kristine Agergaard & Janne Schäfer): Predictions of a New World Order(detail), 2006/2007. 1450x360 cm. Collage wallpaper

In the way the exhibition space is constucted - you walk through a labyrinthic space, where you're bombarded with different impressions and possible meanings, and in the end the prophet is proclaiming the 4th new religion. Then the room opens, as if you had a kind of epiphany, and you're facing the New World Order. What is the 4th great monotheistic religion to you?.

Kristine: Well, it's very internal between us, but it's, like Janne said, if look at these five different thematic groups through the exhibition: the first two is observations we made, then there's a pact being made between the different characters, the next images depicts the prophet, and all of them are new possible players on the future world scene in our fantasy. The idea of the 4th monotheistic religion doesn't really have a content. It's more an idea to discuss what would actually happen if we had a 4th monotheistic religion with the same impact as the three already existing ones that all eveloped in the geographical area of Egypt.

Janne: To talk about a 4th monotheistic religion is a comment on the whole Middle Eastern situation. That all three religions are actually based on the same stories. Today they present themselves as different power constallations and they are fighting each other. They construct the global situation that we're in today. We want to put things into a historical perspective – this is the historical situation we're in today, but what could happen in another 5000 years if something just as powerful emerges.

Kristine: So the 4th monotheistic religion is a play with history. The world has a specific constallation right now, but it can easily shift. All we the knowledge of today could seize to exist - be transformed by new relations of power.

We fight each other but we share our roots and actually believe in the same God?

Janne: Yes, or not, we don't know. But everybody at least claim that their versions and believes are right.

Kristin: The 4th monotheistic religion isn't about anything, but it's an attempt to comment on monotheisme. To put religion into a historical perspective. Right now Islam plays a quite essential role in the geopolitical situation, but it's a relatively new situation compared to the whole history of humanity - that there're three large religions, and that Egypt being one of the cradles of them all. Creation has a much longer history than all we know today, through the history of religion – it's a bit abstract, but it's an attempt to overview the whole of history. Where we are today is such a little detail in the bigger picture...

Janne: It's all we know about. We only know about 3000 years or something like that. We know of fragments before. The pharaonic tradition was 5000 years ago - much longer ago than the Christian civilization.

J&K (Kristine Agergaard & Janne Schäfer): Horus and Anubis in Islamic Cairo, 2006/2007. 42x28 cm. Photo		J&K (Kristine Agergaard & Janne Schäfer): Deserted Beach Camp, Nuweiba, 2006/2007. 42x28 cm. Photo

You comment on the timespan by combining past and present into a possible future. You mix everything in one big constallation.

Kristine: I think that's also a sampling in a way - I'm sorry if this gets a bit spaced out - but now we're also getting really behind, behind, behind the idea of it. What Janne and I talked about would be interesting. It's something we tried to put into our work, but it's not something that has to be totally understod when you see the exhibition. It consists of different layers – it has a visual layer, and there's a textual layer with a lot of references and samples. And again behind all of that there's a room for our universe. You can peek through it, but it's not crucial that you get everything.

Janne: These are things that we're interested in genral. Civilization, and what that means. How religion has shaped specific ideas, and how religion is this field of conflict. Then of cause also this whole idea of making your own religion.

Kristine: I think we're interested in the fact that people identifies so strongly with different worldsystems and that's what actually constitutes the conflicts within the worldsystems. Different groups identifies with different religions, ideologies, or what ever, and as a matter of fact you're creating your own world all the time. You're able to construct your own ideas. You can't be totally independent from the rest, but there's always a possibility of creating your own potentials and act on them. We try to exemplifiy this. We try to make up our own new world order by creating our own version of it. It's suggesting that you're able to transform youself and in this way you're transforming the world.

And in this way you build up an open story line for the viewer to interact with. You suggest things, but you don't make any conclusions?

Janne: Actually both the tribal of .. and the monotheisme is not really suggestions. It's not really new ideas, it existed for so and so many thousand years. So it's not new suggestions, but repetition of what already exists anyways.

Kristine: We're not pretending to make up new things. But you can construct your own version of things without necesarily relating directly to bíg constructions saying “the world is like that, and you can only act in this way.”

J&K (Kristine Agergaard & Janne Schäfer): Guarding Sharm El Sheik or How the Missionary lost the plot in a tourist resort in the time of, 2006/2007. Threedimensional collage in dioramabox

Irony and humor are powerful tools for you?

Kristine. Yes, it's very strong tool for us. That's something consistent for all of our works – the humoristic view on things. Ironic, the irony can also be a bit cynical, but we try to apply it on ourselves so we're the fools. People would laugh but at the same time you can comment on things more serious because you can keep a distance through the role. When we use ourselves in our work we have to have this self-humor – we have to be able to make fun of ourselves to some extend. I find it very important that there's this kind of Divine fool as a player in the society. Someone who can point out different things without having to make a whole documentation of things. Someone who's free to joggle with actua lthings and problems in the world. Humor is a possibility to make a critical statement from a distance.

Janne: In a way it also works on a more subconscious level if you present something like: “Ha, ha, ha. It's so funny.” On the conscious level maybe you don't immidiatly get it but it keeps working in the back of your head. The classical fool figure worked for the king, making all these jokes, but actually he transported the criticism that the people wasn't allowed to make.

Kristine: Also that our intensions, when we actually made this work...I don't think you could really pinpoint an actual message or meaning. In that way we tried to poke to some sort of potentials, but what I would really love was if that potential would actually form a creative potential for the viewer. I think it's really important not to bring any fixed sollutions but to keep things open. And at the same time mocking the rational, sensible ways of imagining life as it should be led – again through the large constructions that people identifies with. Thats one of our main drives – just to shake it all a little bit would be fantastic.

J&K (Kristine Agergaard & Janne Schäfer): Re-enacting the Idea of Liberty, 2006/2007. 80x270 cm. Collage figure		J&K (Kristine Agergaard & Janne Schäfer): The Giza Pact, 2006/2007. Photocollage

You talked about the gaze earlier. How Westeners have a defined perception of the Middle East based on both a desire and a fear for the other, through a mix of identification and alienation. So your work comment on that as well - also because you yourselves are Westeners?

Kristine: It's very interesting because Egypt has...in the beginning of the 19th century when Napoleon went to conquer Egypt he discovered all these ancient sites, and started a sort of trend. The Egyptomania or Orientalism meant that artists, writers, and a lot of other people, scientists, came on large expeditions to explore. They were very interested in Egypt as an ancient place. Egyptomania was this focus on Egypt as the ultimate place of fascination.This intertwined with the colonial perspective - Westeners colonializing the whole area - at the same time being fascinated but also looking at it with anxiety, it's foreign and scary but at the same time really attractive.

Janne: But what the Western society extracts out of the country hasn't really anything to do with the Egyptian culture, but what we project into it. It has to do with our desires of Egypt. The title of the exhibition is Egyptomaniacs. Egyptomania is a phenomenon that already exists but we turned it towards ourselves. We're the Egyptomaniacs. We also have a Western background and perspective, but we're trying to look behind the scenes, and play with our own cliches and perceptions.

Kristine: Yes, it's really important to this work that it's about our own cliches and fantasies. We're not trying to observe how the situation really is because that's impossible for us. The work is performing antroplogy to ourselves being in a foreign country. We are in that context.

J&K (Kristine Agergaard & Janne Schäfer): The making of, 2006/2007.

Are you inspired by different forms of clashes? Clashes between global/local, mutating cultures, and what happens in these border-areas?

Janne: Yes, but also in the fact that you go to a foreign country, and you discover a lot of thing, but the more you learn the more opaque it gets. When we left it was in some severe state of culture chok because I thought I started to understand certain kinds of things but at the same time I realised that I knew even less than before. It got more and more complicate to understand.

Janne: But then in a way we didn't chose a position from which we would try to understand Egypt. We had the position of fictionalizing things and turning them into a stage for our fantasies. A kind of sci-fi situation where we completely had been ignoring e.g. the complexity of the political system, or the clashes between islamic movements, and the geopolitical situation in the region. All of that you could actually do research on, but we are not that kind of artist to investigate these kind of problems. Our standpoint is to reveal the absurdity of things and not try to document different little details. I think this work is the one we're we have played most with fiction and narration. Again our fantasies. I would love for some Egyptions to come and see this exhibition – what they would get from it. •