| ../Interviews | Catalogue Interview | Rough notes... | Edited interview... |
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Gordon Dalton: Did your selection for Venice 2003 pose any problems for your
practice, given that however which way you put it, you are seen as
representing Wales?
Simon Pope: It's a fact that i live in cardiff and was a lecturer here for the past 3 years. Since moving here from london i've tried to bring the connections that i had together with those that exist here - working with Chapter for 'art for networks' or the national BBC centre - i've been involved with people here as a producer, educator, artist, designer, writer, curator and now researcher. GD: can your (ambulant) approach be imposed on any city.Place - does it then become a critique of those places or help open up new avenues? SP: The idea is that i can travel to any place and start to work to make sense of that location. Previously i'd written about London, where i lived and worked and was familar with for at least the past 25 years. That can't happen very often in your life, so i've gone about devising ways of being able to have a take on anywhere. GD: Obviously your approach is based in a lot of research and theory, but are actual quite accesible and 'human', such a kissing. Do these individual approaches come out of the place, or out of the thery, or from somewhere a bit more 'pop' like 'lost in the supermarket'. SP: I think that the place you describe - somewhere, (wherever that is) between academic and popular is where i'm happiest: too popular and you become just an 'impact statement'; too academic and you end-up with only 5 people ever being able to understand you. In venice the 'kissing' piece that you mention is a 'device' to gather research data of sorts: this idea came from theory - that intimate acts between people is somehow more important than the data collected about cities is so much biased toward knowing 'where' rather than 'why' or 'how' you are in a city and also from the immediate context of the biennale: venice is where people come for romance of some sort or another - except in the case of poor old John Ruskin whose newly-wedded wife had a whole other take on the place. 'Lost in the supermarket' was made for several reasons: it harks back directly to 'London Walking' and the exercises it described - a cheap bastardization and 'mungling' of several academic theories; and i wanted to get at least some reference to the late Joe Strummer in there of course - he wrote the song of the same name on "London Calling'. |