Ene-Liis Semper asks 10 Questions from Killu Sukmit and Mari Laanemets

	1. You work together, both names are in the credit titles. My personal experience is that any kind of co-operation, if it works, involves an intuitive cognition of each other. Still, in the end one voice will be stronger than the other(s). What is the relationship between you two? K.S.: Instead of intuition I would talk about intonation here: both of us have a rather intonation-sensitive feeling for words. Guessing what might be in the head of the 'other', this so-called intuitive cognition, as you say, that's around all the time anyway... M.L.: Would you dare or could you make a distinction as to where the thoughts of just one of us might begin or which ideas belong to which one of us? Maybe we even know that ourselves, but that's not important when working together. We really do not create much from intuition or from a bolt out of the blue, hardly ever. Our co-operation is more or less rational. K.S.: I don't know, for me it does come like a bolt out of the blue! At the same time, I can't imagine that we could create something while we are in some sort of a dream or in a state of lethargy. M.L.: I could try to describe it: first an idea is proposed (either by me or by Killu), then we do some brainstorming during which all kinds of different ideas will pop up and in the end we agree on something. If everything goes well. At other times the process is really irritating, with slamming doors and all the rest. But that's a part of working together - a few years ago in Vienna I did an interview with two female artists who were also working together. I told them that I also co-operate with someone, at which they responded with a very agitated question: "Do you constantly argue too?". Yet, this might be one of the reasons why people do work together. There are no compromises here, if I had to name it somehow, I would call it a synthesis. K.S.: One thing that became a serious question already in the beginning of our co-operation was our education, that is me being a visual artist and Mari an art critic. If for one of us the picture is able to explain itself on its own, and for the other this can happen only through text, then I think in the beginning of our co-operation there was a sort of tendency towards visualising some written theory, which is, let's be honest, just a perfect presentation of some book-truth. Only, such things are so fucking safe, so as a reaction to it you would like to steal some young mother's dream to have a few puffs at a cigarette. M.L.: Meditating with some kind of hazy visual effects is a thing I cannot put up with. I don't understand what you mean, I believe it is very safe to take refuge in some visualisation. And it is good for artists to use it - they are the only ones who are aware of what it is about. K.S.: ...so, a few mouldy book-truths... And now something completely different...
	2. Would you describe an ordinary day of shooting a video? M.L.: There is no such thing as an ordinary day of shooting. Even though you can nearly always take for granted that there will be some trouble with the camera. Usually it goes like this: you take a cab and fetch the camera (which is already being used by someone else), that's what you start the shooting day with, and when you come back from the shoot, somebody is already standing by the gate or door, to take the camera on another round, of course. This might be an ordinary shooting day. Behind the scenes. K.S.: The worst thing with this way of working are the batteries - if you are going to do some shooting outside, you must also recharge the batteries. And if you have borrowed a tripod, you will surely forget it somewhere, and later you must go from one location to another to find all the stuff you have forgotten. When we were filming the first version of our video The Cure, one well-known Estonian punk-artist was our cameraman. Because digital cameras are so light and fragile, he used some brown tape to fix a brick to his hand so the camera would not shake. And as we were so caught up by work we did not even notice it in the beginning of the shoot... And when we were looking for overalls for the same video, we still did not have any for Mari even when we were already on our way to the set. With an immense effort we managed to find some, but these were extremely tight. When we were on location we had a major row because Mari thought I was picking on her because of her tight trousers. So we just hung around there looking morose for two-three hours, it was getting dark and the light we needed for filming was almost gone... and then we had no option but to get this damned dancing filmed... M.L.: After shooting The Cure it was quite impossible to walk. Not enough exercise... K.S.: Yes, that was really terrible. Imagine dancing folk dances for three or four hours, without having even an elementary experience of exercise...
	3. 'Cure' and 'therapy' seem to have a central position in your joint work. Cures can be directed either at oneself or towards others. Which is more important for you? K.S.: In 1997 we had an exhibition in Narva together with Marko Laimre and Andrus Kõresaar called An Exhibition of Healing Pictures and at that time our concept stemmed specifically from the environment in which we were going to have the exhibition. That is, the audience was going to be Russian-speaking people who knew rather little about contemporary art and most of whom worked in factories. And one could suppose that they would like to see something beautiful. At least not photos of industrial landscapes and graveyards or slides of a wedding ceremony, as we had planned. So one could say that we grafted a concept onto the exhibition and showed, despite everything, our art. And when we told them that these were healing pictures they were looking at and if they looked at them for a certain time it would have an effect on headaches and poor eyesight, then people believed it. And took us seriously. M.L.: The Cure is also the title of one of our videos. It is just an improvisation on folk dances that we interpret as healing. This is also how we relate to the big Estonian folk dance festivals. But it is important to make a distinction here that this is a video about cures, but the video itself is not the cure - it does not cure anyone, as some erroneously suppose; when the screening ends there should be no changes in one's personal condition. Even without us there are already more than enough people in Estonian art who are dealing with those kinds of things. K.S.: Cures were also one of the main themes of our exhibition Nurse with a Wound in 2000, but we actually produced one healing picture. And embroidery, which as a handicraft activity is characterised as embellishing something... Only this was no longer simulation or drawing energy charts to put on the wall next to the pictures, there were no diagrams depicting how much energy a picture contains like in Narva, but instead stitches of one very concrete needle through one very concrete hand. And this created pain. To cut it short, the Rubik's cube was born. And just as the Rubik's cube is finite, at some point you will get all its colours together, so was the healing picture embroidered on the palm of the hand. It's one thing to embroider a healing picture on your palm, that is to feel pain, it's quite another to believe in supernatural forces, in some holy picture or not walking under ladders. M.L.: The wounded nurse is an agreeably contradictory character who is embodying two roles simultaneously. She is a healer, but she needs to be healed too. That meant that our interest was turned also to ourselves. Maybe not on such personal terms, but we simply got the idea to map out the phenomenon and techniques of healing, which brought us to the nurse as an exemplary embodiment of the idea. So for everything to be perfect we decided to ask, "what if the nurse herself has got a wound?". It was a cunning moment of resistance. We invited some nurses to the opening; they gave a course about wounds and first aid. One of the reasons for doing this was to be productive (people can use this knowledge later on, anything can happen), not to retreat easily into metaphors.
	4. Who wounded the nurse? K.S.: The nurse is a separate entity, she is like a nuthatch or a woodpecker in the forest. She keeps going, it's actually a kind of sacrificial ceremony, isn't it, in this sense the nurse in addition to ourselves can really form a trinity. One gets the impression of her as a kind of revelatory character, someone straight from Sunday school or something... As far as I am concerned, it could be the woodpecker who wounded her, it would change nothing with regard to the nurse. She and Walter Benjamin live next door to each other. M.L.: I would not rule out the possibility that she did it to herself, but of course this could not take place in any trivial way... The nurse is vulnerable, weak, that is what we wanted to show, it is not important to pursue the actual criminal in this case. The nurse is a sort of agent here.v K.S.: Who wounded her? Maybe it was the busy working schedule. And later on maybe it was the fact that the nurse was forced to hide herself in a burkah from head to toe. By the way, a large proportion of the women who lost their jobs during the rule of the Islamic extremist Taleban and who are now claiming their rights, are nurses. They could also get back the right to laugh in public again.
	5. For me (and probably for most people), concepts like 'clinical' and 'hospital' relate to an environment which is oppressing, sterile, smells of ether and thus cruelly sucks the life out of you. Have you consciously related your image as artists to this psychophysically fatiguing challenge? K.S.: What? The one who consciously related us to it was you right now. Anyway, we have not taken up any challenge. When we start working, we work with paper and pencils, and then with the 'material', which in this case was human skin. I mean, when the script was ready, it was fun reading it on paper, but what next? Who would dare to stitch three centimeters of their arm with a medium sized needle? Actually, this 'psychophysical' of yours is a bit wrong, it would be correct to say psychological, because while carrying out the operation I did not notice pain as such. And as one viewer didactically mentioned in the gallery, if you know the right points, you can push a thick nail through one hand with your other hand whilst watching MTV or a direct broadcast from the Estonian parliament, there's no difference. M.L.: There's nothing much for me to say here, because, honestly, I thought it wasn't possible and for me it was more a kind of poetry - something very beautiful and painful, let's say romantic. Then Killu suddenly grabbed the bull by its horns, that is she grabbed the needle (we had already counted on the actor refusing to do it). It is much more realistic on the video, it is even startlingly disgusting, I cannot watch it easily myself without feeling uncomfortable. But in the end that was what we needed to capture. When you say that we as artists have such an image then this frightens me a bit. Like any image. Regarding the characteristics you proposed of the hospital, then I can partly agree with it, this is maybe a slightly Foucauldian attitude, while there also exists an alternative, in which the hospital has been displaced as the setting for a certain fantasy - and the nurse is the desired and threatening star of that dream. Our subject is nevertheless healing, which is somehow wider and more ambivalent. By the way, we have the Blood Donors' Day in store - stunning material, but we haven't had the right opportunity to use it yet.
	6. The heroine of your video Lucy is a girl flying in the air. A voice behind the screen asks: "Where are you going, Lucy?"-"To heaven". Why is Lucy 'Lucy'? Why not 'Mary' or 'Killy'? MTV or SAS, the airline? K.S.: But the girl's name is Lucy! Well, this Lucy for whom things turned out a bit badly, first she got too deep into drugs, then she ended up in heaven. What bloody SAS? SOS! You are not a cold person, you could have a bit of compassion. M.L.: Here it was important to point to that concrete case. On the other hand, we are dealing with an ingenious paradox: the girl is falling, that is quite clear, yet she claims she is going to heaven, that is in the opposite direction. Do you understand? Theoretically she should fall to her death, but she is convinced that she will reach heaven. And maybe she does, maybe this fall (to death) is her opportunity? However, we attempted to leave everything as open as possible. K.S.: But this SAS thing was pretty clever of you, because later it emerged that the cameraman who filmed Lucy had also made a commercial for an Estonian airline. There was also a flying girl in that. Anyway, only after being in heaven will Lucy end up on MTV and Kate Bush and Jimi Hendrix will ask her in harmony: "Hey, Lucy, where are you going now?". M.L.: With regard to your comment, which I understand as a reference to us, then let it be Mari and Killu rather than 'Mary' and 'Killy'. It's about them, but I don't consider this to be important, as I generally don't regard it as important that people would identify us with the characters in our videos. This is also why we used a double. Of course, the reason was partly also that two people falling would have been too much, a kind of humour, which we wanted to avoid.
	7. What are your dreams about? K.S.: Yesterday I dreamt I was in Photoshop and could not escape from there. All the time there was some sort of 'brightness' or 'colour balance' etc., it was worse than the labyrinth in some computer game. The whole dream was held together by James Last-like rhythms. M.L.: Are you asking about what happens in my dreams or what the dreams want to reveal? I don't consider myself much of a pro in that field. On the other hand, I am extremely superstitious and sometimes I am completely beside myself because of some dream for a whole week.
	8. Age? Time? Night? Day? K.S.: Here we will have a small pause and I would like to ask dear magazine readers to listen to Pure Pleasure Seeker performed by Moloko. If possible, watch the video too. M.L.: Run, run, we have to run! Is this a question about danger? Nurse with a Wound was our modest anniversary exhibition, so to speak, with guests from Amsterdam and Riga, as has lately become habitual in Estonia. really.
	9. Is the symbolic structure of Rocky - the skates, the dog, the red cross, Rocky - based on accidental associations or is there a complete narrative, a story behind it? K.S.: Isn't the story credible for you or what? Rocky is the name of the dog who has a first aid kit hanging around his neck, and a red cross is painted on it (for additional viewing I suggest the family series Lassie, the documentary series Four Tankmen and Their Dog and for reading, the book one Estonian children's author has written about the adventures of a dog called Nublu). Actually this one is a music video, we accidentally heard the Estonian Talking Heads, a band called Meggan, and instantly fell in love with one of their songs. And I think nothing characterises the song better than 'Rocky' on his rescue mission with his escort on skates (for additional viewing, I suggest the whole-family-series ER, Little House on the Prairie and Walker, Texas Ranger). People in the gallery asked, what did you have playing in the background there, Jimi Hendrix or what? M.L: From my point of view, Rocky is not the name of the dog, it relates sooner to the characters on skates (or double characters), the nurses, if you like. And it also includes the everlasting figure of Sylvester Stallone. To some extent this work really is fragmentary, a kind of bricolage, we tried to integrate as many different things into it as possible, collect together our 'leftover-thoughts', and you can see the result, but there is nothing bad about that. K.S.: What leftovers are you talking about? It would be possible to explain extensively all the details in the video, but apparently there is not enough space for that... Well, the skates are a leftover from the 1970s, definitely not a leftover of my thoughts; it's a kind of image from the 1970s, from somewhere in Valie Export's youth (Laanemets and Sukmit, together with Kadi Estland, under the name Valie Export Society, have made several references to the artist's early work - ed.). Can you imagine the sound that walking down a staircase on skates creates? M.L.: ...yeah, unfortunately we had to give up sound. Actually we hadn't even planned to have it - what we had in mind was again this imaginary screech of the skates, which is somewhat torturous and intolerable, like watching someone stitching their hand. In 1972 Valie was busy with experiments, in one of which she tried to sleep with skates on (in mountaineer's equipment, tied to the bed). In the film Invisible Adversaries that she made in 1976, the same motif appeared in a sickly dream of the main character Anna. It was a case of paranoid schizophrenia, we don't have space here to explain it, nor any reason to, because actually our relation to Valie is in this case limited to that (sound) motif. The stockings were also important, even though they don't stick out, and their white colour makes them maybe a bit childish. But there was a need to bring in the storyline of the prostitute, who is the perfect partner, doppelgänger and colleague of the nurse.
	10. How long can you hold your breath? K.S.: For 45 seconds. M.L.: Did you really get 45 seconds? Tried it on dry ground? Because for me it relates to some body of water or a bath and I can't understand why I can only manage to hold it for 23 seconds. K.S.: Did you really get in the bath because of that question in the interview? Unbelievably scientific! Killu Sukmit / Mari Laanemets Tallinn-Berlin-Tallinn
	| Estonian Art 2/01 (10) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2001 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |