Alexandra Navratil presents us with reinterpretations of popular culture and spaces of power. It’s not about the show, but about the backstage and expectations.

Maybe, when you see one of her short movies, you were expecting for that truck –that’s circling around the guy in the middle of the snow (Movie Goer), like a shark around its prey– to run him over, or for a duel to unfold between the old man and his multiple reflections (Extra). Alexandra presents us all these situations and gives us none of the conclusions, as just one of her ways to playfully deconstruct the medias she works with. This same process can be appreciated in shots of a car being hit by heavy rain that’s pouring from giant showers; showing us the machinery that makes the artificial seem natural is her way of warning us that we’re not facing reality, but an object of art. Her ways of telling us that this-are-not-pipes are many, and we enjoy every one of them.

But this artificial motiv is not restricted to the cinema. There’s a great deal of power-suggesting in architecture that she translates in her collages. She takes the individual elements that enforces certain values on our edifices and re-orchestrates them in way that tells us that even our marble-clad floors have a story to tell. For example, huge, closed spaces, solid structures and gargantuan buildings give us a sense of control and power above individual capabilities. In her case, the results are artificial landscapes for multiple dystopian futures.

Maybe you are not what you eat, but what you construct. If that’s the case, Alexandra is for us smart and complex, yet transparent and sincere. We hope this translates well in our interview.



Let's begin this interview by describing yourself a little.

I am an artist currently living in Amsterdam. I moved around a lot, originally I grew up in Zuerich, Switzerland but I left when I was 19 to move to London. After London, came Barcelona and then London again and somewhere between that and my current location I did some shorter residencies in Vienna and in Dublin. Right now, I enjoy having the routine of just going to the studio every day and working on my projects. The best part of my work as an artist is that I have the time to research and to read whatever I am interested in. At the moment it is everything related to the history of optics and optical tools but also on Albert Speer and on the history of marble, for example.

What inspired you towards this architectonic?

The architectonical collages are actually thought to represent totalitarian spaces of power but at the same time they look like set-designs from many 30ies Hollywood productions. The 30ies in the US were the times after the financial crash of 1929 which was followed by a big depression. The set designers of that time used art deco but also modernist architecture, an architecture that was originally conceived as a socialist utopia, to create spaces of luxury as backdrops for the performances of the Hollywood stars. What interested me is that correlation between theatrical space and the spaces of power. If you look at representative cooperate spaces nowadays, you can find the same use of modernist architecture, symmetry and central perspective to convey wealth and power. And there are often tropical plants involved to fill these symbolic spaces.

Related to the last question, how do you see the future?

The future is a kind of accumulation of loops, things are constantly being reworked and reinterpreted: history repeats itself. I am interested in this layering of history and of meanings that occur through this process of repetition.



Who are your three favorite movie directors and why do you love them so much?

Favorite movie directors: This is difficult as it changes a lot and there are many individual movies that I like by different directors so I will name 3 movies by three directors which stayed important for me over some time:
Exterminator Angel by Buñuel
Teorema by Passolini
Le Mépris by Godard

Speaking about that, we love the silence on your videos. Ironically, it turned out to be a pretty powerful sound effect. How do you see the relation between silence and moving pictures? What were you trying to convey?

I think about this question of sound a lot. For example I never use exterior sound in my videos, that means that all sound always comes from within the frame, maybe from a radio nearby or from another source, but I never add a soundtrack to it. The sound shouldn't be there to enrich the image, it is either the image or the sound but they shouldn't compete somehow. In my last video for example I used the sound to summon up a completely different space (the space behind the camera) than the one that is visible in the frame. Also there are different kinds of silences, there is the silence that we hear when it is quiet but that is nevertheless filled with small sounds and then there is the complete silence of the sound turned off.

When there's no silence, what music do you like to hear?

The Magnetic Fields and We have band amongst other things

Name three cities you would like to live in.

Brussels / Berlin / Vienna (and London, with money)

Text by Oscar Gomez Poviña @ VNFOLD