Victor Sira Is a Venezuela-born artist/photographer whose work has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He curated the show Photography Book Dummies at the School of International Center of Photography. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions, including the Rencontres d’Arles 2005 and the show De l’Europe in Luxemburg 2007. Sira is on the faculty at the ICP-Bard MFA Advanced Photographic Studies Program in New York, where he teaches the course The Book: Imaginary Studio, A Non Stop Process.
The great thing of a place like bookdummypress is to have an opportunity to get to know and support artists that ask questions, poke life, embrace it, change it, improve it, they make their mark upon it by making art and put it out there for us in a book form.
Tuomas Korpijaakko is one of such artists and it is a great pleasure for us to feature him and his work. Tuomas’s books possess a special kind of harmony, they float, they don’t try to seduce you, or deceive you, they don’t pollute but calibrate your mind, they are almost invisible.
bdp: What is the function of an artist studio for you?TK: The studio functions as an arena to exercise/exorcise what
otherwise might not be worked out/dispelled in relationships
surrounding the social, family, work, or home. That’s not to say
it can’t also function as a meeting place for all of those things.
bdp: Why do you make books?TK: I believe making books has kept my practice open to ideas
and collaborations that could easily have been dismissed by
a tendency to constrain certain paths of thinking. Because I have
created mostly self-produced publications, there remains a more
reflexive process of working that I have become partial to.
bdp: What do you think is the connection between your books?TK: Each publication I produce stems from either a conversation that has
been initiated through an exchange of material with other artists or
the relinquishing of ideas that seem to clog up my own working process.
At times the connection between these projects seem to be more of
a breaking away with what I believe is the right idea in order to follow
suit and see what questions and/or conditions take over in order to
discover otherwise unexplored trajectories.
bdp: When you work on a book, when do you consider it finished?TK: I will leave things lying around for some time, have others look at them, ask their thoughts, etc. in order to see if my intentions are clear. A book is finished when it feels settled in it’s concept and design yet unresolved enough for me to keep coming back to it to ask more questions. I think I restrain my idea of what is “finished” in order allow room for the next idea to come in.
See Tuomas’s work from here→http://www.tuomaskorpijaakko.info/
Tuomas’s publications are now available at bdp bookstore. http://store.bookdummypress.com/artist/tuomas-korpijaakko
bdp:トーマスにとってのスタジオ/アトリエとは何ですか
TK: 僕にとってスタジオは社会や家族、仕事、家などとの関係で払拭されなかったモノやコトを磨いたり追い払ったりする場所ですね。もちろんそれら全てが出会うところでもあります。
bdp: なぜ本を作るのですか
TK: 本を作る事で普段だったら制約してしまいがちなアイディアやコラボレーションに対してオープンなスタンスでいられるからです。今までほとんど全て自費出版してきましたがそれをする事で自分に返ってくるものも多いし、僕にはこの表現方法が合っているのだと思います。
bdp: トーマスの作品たちに共通する事は何ですか。
TK: 僕の本はそれぞれが他のアーティストと作品を交換する際に交わした会話の延長だったり、作品を創っていく上で溜まってしまったアイディアの廃棄物のようなものから出来ています。自分が正しいと思った考えからときどき離れてそこに疑問を持ち、新たな軌跡を見つけていくところが僕の作品に共通する事だと思います。
bdp: 本作りをしている時どのタイミングで完成だと決めますか。
TK: 本がだいたい形になるとしばらく放っておいてたまに人に見てもらいます。意図するものがちゃんと伝わっているか意見を聞いたりします。僕にとって出来上がった本というのは、そのコンセプトとデザインが決まってもなお程良く未解決な何かが残っていていつでも戻って疑問を投げかけられる状態のものを言います。「完成」の一歩手前で抑えておく事で新しいアイディアが生まれるスペースを残しているのかもしれません。
トーマスのウェブサイトはコチラ→http://www.tuomaskorpijaakko.info/
トーマスの作った本はbdp ブックストアからお買い求め頂けます。
NYのブックアーティスト、トーマス・コルピヤッコのインタビュー。彼にとっての本作りとは。下にスクロールすると日本語訳があります。 Interview with New York based artist
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