Conversation with Rosa Jaisli in her studio
Bremen, May 2019
You were born in Chile and have lived in Germany for many years. Where do you feel inwardly rooted? Between South American and European culture?
Chile is my homeland, but a long time ago I wrote to my mother that I had found a place where I feel at home, and that place is Bremen. South American culture still occupies me deeply, but I also engage with European history. I am interested in my origins and in the beginnings of humanity in general. We are shaped by the past more than we are aware of, and perhaps more than we would like. I want to get to know this heritage, these roots. When I was a child, my mother bought a large encyclopedia from a traveling salesman. Through its pictures and texts I immersed myself in history. Since then, the traces of ancient cultures have never let go of me. Only by knowing where we come from can we consciously live toward the future.
You first began studying economics in Bremen and then decided on art. What prompted that decision?
I realized that theory alone was missing something essential for me. I want to turn my ideas and inspirations into something tangible and visible; I want to work with my hands. Even in my youth I was fascinated by direct engagement with things. I wanted to shape something, to bring a form into the world.
Your work encompasses different techniques, materials, and motifs. Many pieces revolve around the theme of the house. What does that mean to you?
Settling in a place, founding a settlement, is a fundamental human need and a central event in life ever since people became sedentary. Houses and settlements are testimonies of life, records of individual biographies and of the character of communities. In my art I try to trace individual existence while at the same time exploring the forms of society of different eras. The passing of time inscribes itself into buildings that originally arose from a desire for permanence. Houses bear traces of former lives; the private as well as the public becomes visible in them. Their forms reflect practical necessity and aesthetic sensibility, different stages in the way human beings deal with their living space. In my sculptures that echo buildings, I ultimately also see houses of the soul. Through architecture we can enter into a spiritual relationship with our early ancestors.
The forms you find combine the geometric and the organic. At the edges one still sees the natural stone. In your clay structures you look back toward early cultures and the spaces of indigenous peoples. Your works appear as sign-like and at the same time natural vessels of life. Is symbolic power your main concern?
When I cut into stone and build my architectures, I construct, but at the same time I mark the character of the material. Building form and organism remain legible; constructive lines and the veins grown within the stone stand opposite one another. Sculptural intervention and natural material, which acts like a storage medium of time, encounter each other. This makes the relationship between human beings and their living space, and the foundations of their lives, visible. Architectural sculpture is an image of a basic human activity, but also of artistic work. In the clay structures it seems as if the earth itself rises up and offers shelter to human beings. In my group of works Vasos Comunicantes, settlements appear like a social organism whose elements correspond to one another somewhere between planning and growth. A site plan of the settlement of El Caral in Peru, discovered not all that long ago, was one of my inspirations. There people found remnants of one of the oldest cultures in the world, comparable to Mesopotamia.
So are you practicing a kind of aesthetic archaeology through sculpture?
I would not call it archaeology. I do not research systematically and I do not use scientific criteria. But of course curiosity and the spirit of discovery guide me. I do not actually want to know too much about my subjects. I let intuition and experience lead me. I place sensory perception at the center, although it can naturally raise the material and physical to a reflective level. Perhaps one could say that the archaic is my guiding motif: prehistory, what continues to live on inside us, binding times and spaces together. In remembering those cultures I want to point to what we carry within ourselves and what therefore touches us so deeply, what continues to work within us beneath the level of consciousness. Unlike archaeologists, I do not want to solve every riddle. What appeals to me much more is the power of the mysterious. I want to make the narratives of myths and rites come alive, and I would like my archaic sculptures to be, just like archaeological sites can be, places of poetry — mirrors of humanity’s early ways of relating to the world. We should approach them with respect. From them we can learn something about our nature, our basic needs, the fundamental relationship between human beings and nature, but also about our longing for a metaphysical shelter, for a higher context that gives meaning to our lives.
Alabaster is one of your preferred materials, but you have also worked with paper and even tar paper. How do you arrive at a material, and how do substance and form relate?
For me, alabaster is a very sensual, vital material. Its organic quality can be read directly from it, and it allows a living corporeality to emerge. One might call this graceful, but therein also lies a special challenge and danger. Alabaster can easily become pleasing, not least because the material has often been used for charming subjects. For me, however, precisely this suggestion of skin and veil gives alabaster its special attraction: shimmering light, a visible exchange between inside and outside. Paper, too, has long interested me as a material for sculpture. At first I tore and layered papers. The organic effect of the edges and the light, mobile build-up of volume accompanying the structure fascinated me. Paper sculptures also create a transparent corporeality, a luminous presence that enters into an open relation with space. When I began to engage with the old masters of painting, I discovered that I could draw with a scalpel, a procedure related to sculpture, with which I could clarify and abstract the sources. The result was works that open up a new view of the originals but also stand on their own as relief-like, graphic, plastic images.
You have addressed the subject of war twice.
Yes. In one case, rather atypically for my work, I used neon tubes and installed them outdoors. I attached dates of wars to facades, from the Thirty Years’ War through the world wars to the wars in Bosnia and Iraq. I wanted to act in public space with a medium that usually serves as advertising and attention-grabbing signage. In the second case, I cut silhouettes of weapons used in the First World War from tar paper. The material marked the technical, mechanical, impersonal, but also inhuman and demonic side of military mass destruction.
Alongside archaic settlements, other existential themes also have a place in your work.
I have engaged with the Bamberg Dance of Death, in which I am especially fascinated by the close connection between form and content. I also find the attitude toward death readable there remarkable: death was constantly present in everyday consciousness, and people of earlier times faced it with an almost defiant vitality. At the same time, the theme of the tree fascinates me. For nature-based peoples and also in our early civilizations, trees marked places with a special function for both the community and the individual. Trees are witnesses of our history and stand for our connection to nature, not least for our dependence on it. They are an archaic sign, one of the first motifs we paint as children. We are connected to trees symbolically and spiritually as well. From rootedness to branching, our language lives through tree metaphors. And of course wood has been one of sculpture’s fundamental materials since ancient times.
You have now discovered film as a medium as well.
Film has always interested me as a form of storytelling. My sculptural work, too, opens up pictorial possibilities for narratives. In the short film Pueblo Del Alma, which I made together with Yuliya Tsviatkova and the musicians Anni Ranta and Jemma Thrussell, I take a look at my own sculptural work. My sculptures appear as scenery while also acting physically. The basis of the film narrative is a letter in which a daughter tells her mother about an encounter with an archaic settlement. My clay structures in the film, with their upright forms, act like stand-ins for prehistoric beings made of earth and destined one day to return to earth. These archaic architectures appear like nests temporarily won from nature and eventually reabsorbed into the natural cycle. In the text that accompanies the sequence of images, the connectedness of human beings with nature becomes the theme, nature not merely as the sum of natural phenomena but in its essence, as process. I wanted to show that we should not imagine our ancestors only in the struggle for bare existence, but also as musical human beings listening to birdsong as music. The film, and the collaboration with the other artists, was deeply inspiring to me. It is a poetic homage to poetry itself, to the human need to create forms that endure in the flood of time.