Stelio Manousakis, NGM interview
Interview host: Shih Wei Chieh
2022.11.05
Hague, online

Please tell us something about Modern Body Festival now
We put a pause because we were also a bit burnt out because we were doing so much and it was just the two of us. So we had this amazing idea to not organize a biennial in 2020. And then the pandemic came and we were like patting ourselves on the back ‘how good of an idea was to not try to do this.’ We organized another event, a smaller scale event, as we had promised it. We have a different problem in our hands. The Netherlands is saturated, there is too much going on, so it's hard to get audiences too excited, or to show up to the extent that we want them to or to the extent of the effort we're putting in. And we're also practicing art, so it has been good to not have to organize stuff for a while. I think we're probably going to do something at some point, but we don't have a plan coming too soon.

Sustainability is a problem. Basically we were working for like a year and a half for the biennial and then the other half of the year we were wrapping it up and regaining our strength from not having slept for months at a time. So sustainability is a big thing, and also what you get from the effort that you put because does it make a difference? Or how much more can I do as an independent artist when I'm not spending all my time organizing? That is for me, at least personally, the biggest question at the moment. It is nice to organize things. I had a job recently where I was I was helping with the technical production of a festival, that has nothing to do with my work, and that was really nice, I like assisting people but my investment was much different and also I got paid like much better than I'm getting paid for our festival because for our festival we want to do all these other things, so we end up not getting paid well at all for it.

So we had our first edition of Modern Body Festival in 2014 and it's a festival that we called Intermedia. It's not multimedia in that we don't put different media together, but we're trying to find the place where different media converts and come together as equals, kind of where they collide and to see what happens when this media collide. So we've had so far three big biennial editions: in 2014, 2016 and 2018. Each of them has a theme that we is very central to the programming that we do, we pick works and we pick the way that we present them to respond to this theme, and also the way that we make the festival is really important. We also had a sister edition of the festival in 2016 in Taipei in collaboration with this architecture platform, the festival was called Space Media Festival. And those were the three big biennials. As I said, in 2020, we decided to take a step back and not do that, and that was good because anyway we wouldn't be able to do a biennial because of COVID.

We've started a smaller series that's called Modern Body Laboratory, which is more focused on local artists and its smaller scale. Events have lasted several days, but it is a more modest scale program, and we've done three of those and those can be anything, as part of the festival we've done symposium, exhibitions, performances, workshops, sometimes altogether, sometimes at different moments. So we are really interested in this kind of multiple outcomes and multiple types of processes. The festival itself is more centered on experience and completed works, at least for the works that we present, not the Symposium. The laboratories can be a little bit more open as to what happens. That's the gist of it, and in terms of the outlook it has a lot to do with how we experience the world, we are interested in very embodied works that's all actually, also something that we interestingly struggled a little bit with the last laboratory that we organized that was almost a year ago in November 2021, and the kinds of works that we like to program are often very intimate and very close up and personal. So with COVID we were for a long time wondering, ‘okay, we can't do these things because it's not safe for the transmission of this disease. We can't put people face to face and do the things that we want to do. We can't have a performance with many people congregating together, so that was an interesting side effect of being in this space with COVID.

How did you make the Modern Body Festival so popular at the first place?
We had the major response through our open call. I don't remember the numbers now, but we were really surprised. There was so much response that we were trying to download the responses and Google was blocking us because they thought there's suddenly so much traffic on our Gmail account that we must be a bot. I think it's due to the combination of the themes and the wording was very important I'm sure, because one thing we realized was that we had more women responding to our open call. You know new media is a very male dominated field in many regards, and that was like in 2016. And I think the wording was open, and the event is not a technology festival, we have a lot of things with technology, but we did not present it as ‘This is a technology festival where you're going to get all kinds of male nerds that are behind their computer responding’, no, it was much more about the human condition in a way, and then we had much wider response from all kinds of people. So I think that was very important from what I've heard. Having a Website that looked nice and professional was also important, people saw it and they thought, ‘I want to be part of this.’ We didn't have a call in the first edition. The first edition was basically in a shoestring budget, we had a tiny amount of money. It was all people we knew, and that were in our network. But all were really, really great artists, really great work, so I think that also helped. When we did the open call people could refer, they looked at the previous edition. They were like, ‘Oh, this looks really cool. I want to be part of it,’. And we made it clear we're going to pay people. That's also important because. As an artist I see many times that you have these open calls where they basically tell you ‘Oh, you're going to have exposure or whatever’ and that happens at big festivals also. We are artists, so we hate the idea of not paying artists, we've always paid our artists for presenting work, and I think that's also something that really helps get the word out. We didn't promote it, our PR budget was minuscule, because our budgets were very small compared to other festivals. But we got a lot of responses, the call was being translated in other languages without us having to do anything.

I mean we are acting as the pandemic is over, but it's not over in way, we've just decided that it's probably not a very serious threat anymore, so the borders are not very clear, and we for two years you couldn't do anything in real life, so people got a bit unused to doing things we got unused to meeting people, so that's one thing. I think, maybe people got a little bit more mainstream. Because they were sitting inside watching TV or Netflix, or whatever. And there is a kind of attack on normal people's livelihoods, on our wallets, not just the artists, everyone. So with COVID big companies made a lot of money doing specific things, small shops closed because there was no way to sustain it. Big companies could afford to buy them out. And now we have the excuse of the war in Ukraine that ‘Hey everything is more expensive’ because blame Putin while you see that all kinds of energy companies have doubled their profits, there are some more structural things at play in our society, but I think we're also in more uncertain times. In terms of ‘are we out? Are we in? Where is the world going?’ So it's just a little bit of instability, but I think people are interested in the arts, and they will be interested. If I want to be optimistic, I'm sure we'll bounce back, but the world is also going to a bad place, so we'll see. I don't know. But industry is part of the problem. So when I'm saying like the world is not going to a good place, there is a very practical thing. The planet is suffering because of the way we're treating it, there is a climate crisis and a huge reason for this climate crisis is the industry, because the industry only cares about its shareholders, and this is the most important reason why we're in this, because shareholders care about the short term profit. I would say that the more artists are tied to industry, the less value its message has, just in philosophical terms. So if we are tied to whichever industry, like if we're working with E-textiles, we are tied to a big factory. What does this factory do to make the message of the art you make pass through? How does this help us? Because art ideally helps us learn things about ourselves. In the Netherlands, the money source is subsidies, the money is given by the government but is not handed out by the government, so you're not tied to the government for the kind of art you are making, industry has very little to do with it and the public has some things to do with it. But you don't need to make your living out of tickets because there is an understanding that art has a value that should be supported because it's valuable for what it is. I understand this is not the case in other places, like in the U.S., for example, you have to approach the industry or you have to do something very commercial so you get a lot of people, or you have to go into the academia and have a university support your research, and then your university gets its money from the government, or from the industry, or from funders. So it is different in different places, even though we live in a fairly globalized society, so I don't think there is a decision you can make for all places just because the source is different in all ways, but just philosophically that's perhaps one of the reasons why I stay here, because I don’t have to go to an industry that destroys the planet, to ask them for money to make art that supports the opposite idea. That's putting it in very binary terms, very like black and white terms. Of course, things are much more complex, but that's always on my mind. I'm sure there are other types of industries also, there has to be, but then it's a matter of finding them I guess.

I think humans need art all the time. There is a matter of finding a source to make your art and finding a way to make it to pay your bills as a practitioner. Because inevitably, someone gets money to do art that is meaningless, or that's just an advertisement for an industry, and then that's the only art that exists, that's an extreme example, but that is one possibility. But I think there is always space for art and there is always space for art that goes against the grain, for art that is helping the world move forward, or the art that is experimental and is open to figure out what it is that we want to do. I think in the world at large there is a push to turn us more conservative and more fascist globally you see that,
but that's also happening because I feel there is an inherent necessity of people, the more access we have to things we are also getting a bit more radical and open and free, so then there is a push, ‘Oh, these people are getting more free’. I saw this in Greece. Maybe you know that there was a neo-nazi party in the government in Greece, now they're behind bars thankfully. They were in the Parliament and it was really obvious to me living abroad how this came, there was a radicalization of society to the left of Greek society because of the austerity measures in 2008 to 2010. And then it was really obvious that piles of money were thrown at these Neo-nazis, promoting what they did to convince people not to go radical to the left, and to go radical to the Neo-nazis because they were getting old at that time and all these things. So you see it in the U.S. for example with Trump, you see it in Brazil, Bolsonaro just lost, you see it everywhere. There's this extreme right which is funded by billionaires and industries. I mean it is a Hitler himself didn't rise on his own. He was part of the German industrial complex. They supported him. They were like ‘This is the guy who's going to put our interest forward. And if he kills six million Jews in the way, whatever, we're going to be rich in the meantime.’ So I think there's always the need for the stuff to go back. There's always lots of people who are interested in art, that is independent in art, that is avant-garde and experimental, but then it's harder to find the money. I don't have an answer, I don’t live a rich life.

Again, what we do is worth at least as much as what other people do and get paid for. So I think you know, we should try and get paid for it as much as that's possible because this work deserves it. Art is not an afterthought. It's really important for how we understand the world. It's really important for how we manage to survive in a world that is depressing in many other ways. In some ways, it works as a simulation of things in a safe space because you can experiment. And no one is going to die, you can present a different paradigm, and that applies to all kinds of arts, you read a book, and then you're immersed in this world that doesn't exist in reality, it's a figment of your imagination, but you can live within it if it's a good book, and then it shows you ‘Hey, this is a way to develop empathy with a different character, or to become part of a different society or a different way of living without actually being there.’ But then this has repercussions in how you leave your world when you come back to normal life. So I think it is fundamental to us as a species, so we should demand that it is treated as us.

About sustainability, how do you deal with the nonprofit and profitable part in your organizing jobs?
What is for profit and what is nonprofit? I don't know how you perceive it, but I do know that in our art world, depending on the context, it can feel dirty that you're getting paid for your work. But getting paid for your work as an artist is not for profit. We have the right to make art and be able to afford rent and buy groceries. This is not a profit, getting by is not profit. When you're creating whatever you're creating, you're making art, you're building this network, you're being an organizer, your labor should get paid, and you can still be nonprofit. A nonprofit organization pays its employees, it does not consist of volunteers. You can still be nonprofit, and make a living. Making a living is not a profit. Here in the Netherlands it's pretty self-evident that people have to work and get paid. In Greece I know places where art doesn't pay, so it can feel kind of weird, ‘Oh, I'm making art and getting paid, maybe that's wrong.’ and no, it's not wrong. Nonprofit doesn't mean that you have to undercut and undervalue your work, because your work is important. Ideally, this is the thing that should pay you to keep doing it because otherwise you get burned out or you'll get too busy doing other things that are less in the long run, like the Taiwanese government when they give you this money, it behooves them that you create this network and there's like a more vibrant, artistic scene because then people are happier to live, people are happier to go there, it has a value, and we shouldn't be afraid to stand behind it even within the context of normal society. Art is not something that happens on the side. Art is very important for humanity because if it wasn't, we wouldn't have it. It's something we've had for as long as we know humanity exists, so it's not something to be thrown aside. It's something that is fundamental to being human. So let's claim our worth and not be shy because a mainstream society gives more money to a 9 to 5 jobs, they don't have more value than us. There is a thing called cultural capital, if you think about it in these financial terms. Financial capital is one thing, but cultural capital is also a thing that has value, and you can ascribe a financial value to it within the capitalistic society context. We don't need to do that, but it has a value, culture has a value within the world so we shouldn't be too modest and too afraid to claim that what we're doing has a value for society, and that even has a value within this capitalistic context. I mean, how much money did the US pour during the Cold War to prove that they had the best, freest art scene, in that they're like the leading civilization? That's kind of investing in cultural capital just speaking in the most cold and capitalistic manner. There is a value, even within this context of making money and gaining power, that our world lives in.

What do we deal with the of power and hierarchy relationship in the collaborations with funding sources or other partners?
There is an inherent amount of power, let's say, if you have the money to organize something and you're organizing it, by default, you're setting the agenda, but I don't find this so fundamental in a way - if we want to do the same things, and if we get along and if nobody is trying to impose their agenda on others. It's a framework for working together, and if you are the one who's coming up with the money and then you're having a bunch of people going to Taiwan to work on something, then, yes, you're defining the agenda and the framework, but I don't see this as a negative. It's really cool when you're invited as an artist to go to a residency and someone's paying for you. It's not necessarily a relationship of power. It's also a relationship of gratitude, like, ‘Hey, it’s amazing that you've brought me here and let's do the thing that you want to do.’ I'm doing this short residency in Brussels in three weeks or so, and they engage with each other through a set of collaborative principles that I've found were very interesting, and I've seen this elsewhere. Being a racist or sexist or all these things are not acceptable, there are rules of conduct or something like this, which I think is very interesting. If you are having problems with how people interact with one another, it can be an interesting thing to establish this. If you're building a community, you could show people the guidelines and tell them that is how we work well together, and then you can immediately reference if someone is acting like a jackass, you can say ‘Hey, don't do that because we've all agreed that we're not going to be doing this.’ I think it's simple and it's also very complex, in a way it's never solved, because as long as you work with people, then you have to deal with the relationship of people with each other, and that's just the fact of life, even if you have to deal with your own self, sometimes you'll annoy yourself or be mad at yourself, it's a part of life. If you see it as a problem, if you see that these things keep happening, then you have to find a solution for the things that keep happening, or even if it happens once you could think about how you could prevent that from happening again. But you will always be surprised with new things, because you meet new people and each of us has their own personalities. The only way for people to invest equally in something is if they serve the vision equally, or that they feel that they have things to gain equally. So if you approach someone else to organize something, it is your vision, so more often than not, you're going to have to put most of the effort, and it’s going to be frustrating because from your perspective, maybe this is amazing for everyone, but would this other initiative have happened had it not been for you initiating it? I think that's one way to look at it. So ideally, you find someone who wants to do the same things, and is eager to do it or maybe get support from you to do something. And then you come in as equals in terms of vision and in terms of what it is that you want to achieve, and maybe it's not easy at all to find that. If as an artist, you don't have the possibility to grow or make the things that you want in a different manner, then your only way to make a living is by going the commercial way. This is a problem, and it's a problem in many places. In the Netherlands we have state subsidies which luckily don't care about this commercial stuff because they have understood the notion of cultural capital, so they are proud and ‘sell’ as the country's profile that we do crazy experimental art. So you can do that and we have the liberty to do this to a certain extent. Of course, you have to send subsidies that are written in a certain way, it needs funds, has their own things that they want to hear, and depending on your practice, some funds will like what you do and some funds will not like what you do and you'll have to tailor it to that. but we don't have to go the commercial way, which is very liberating of course. In Greece, nobody cares about art, so there's no way to engage any industry because the industry doesn't even exist. I'm not, of course, 100% familiar with the context in Taipei, but I'm sure there are ways to find people who want to do things, the way you want to do them, because you can't be the only one on the island that operates the same way, of course. And maybe it's also not a matter of being the only one in the island, maybe it's a matter of finding people abroad also. For that you have a big network, a big international network, or also finding Taiwanese people who are not tied to the hierarchy or who don't have to play by the rules of the hierarchy. It's being able to have an interesting conversation with your peers, to be able to discuss what you are working on with them, and have an enriching conversation and not have to talk only about the surface. This is something that we in the Netherlands are very lucky to have.

Avoiding local politics in the local art scene
The Netherlands is very not uniform, at least in the arts, there are so many international people. It does not make sense to talk about Dutch politics, first of all, because the Dutch don't care about the politics because they are rich, and when you are rich you don't want to ask too much why you are rich, because you'll find things about yourself that you don't like, but it's also very international, so we don't have the same things that we care about, or that bother us. In Greece, the major problem of Greek culture is ancient Greek culture, because most of the money in Greek culture goes to ancient stuff, and this is very deeply ingrained. And it benefits all the conservative, right-wing politics to stress that, and I think every culture has that a little bit, like when I had this residency in Vienna and I realized that Austria has the music scene of Austria – they have the classical music, they have The Viennese School, which is the classical classical music, and then they have the Second Viennese School, which is Arnold Schönberg and his movement in the beginning of the 20th century. So there is very little space for weird contemporary stuff. So there is this very classical music that is the thing that gets funded. And then there is a massive improv scene because as a response, people are like, ‘you know what? screw your scores. we're not going to look at music. We're just going to improvise and do wild stuff without a second thought.’ So every culture has to fight this to a certain extent. What kind of strategies do you find to escape that without having to enter a conversation where it is very easy for you to lose, that is a valid question. Then you got all these people coming to you and saying ‘No, no, no, this is the most important thing in the world.’ So I think bringing people from abroad is a very useful way of making this question irrelevant essentially, because we're not going to bring all these people from abroad talking about this very specific thing, as humans, we can talk about so many other things. So I think it is a good strategy. But you could also find more support locally because I'm sure there's a bunch more people in Taiwan that are fed up with this and want to do other things, and this just inhales all of their attention. When you speak with people that share the same culture, it's very easy to know where you stand in all these things, so the differences are small, but the small differences can be very defining. But when you talk to someone from the other side of the world, there's so much that you don't share, you might actually radically disagree with each other on politics, but because these politics don't come out in the specifics of what you do, maybe you don't recognize them or you don't even care it since they don't come up, because you don't have the immediate understanding of things. That always happens in terms of our work, there are many relationships, so I think that is just another of these facts of life.

Bridging gaps in levels of understanding
I mean it's also a matter of trust, and a matter of explaining in a way that it is accessible to someone's knowledge if they have no idea what you're talking about. It goes two ways a little bit, find a way to speak their language so you can make them understand what it is, we all struggle to explain what we do to people who don't understand it, but it's a skill you develop slowly. It's a process. You can't expect to meet the right people all the time, or in the beginning,. Things happen slowly. People are talking about this idea of decolonization more, but it's something that was not spoken about that much 20 years ago, and it takes people to keep talking about things. And then you know this curator, maybe it was the first time that they heard it from you now, and maybe there's someone else who comes in 3 years and talks about something, and maybe they read something, and then there's someone else, and then eventually they'll get it. Your effort is not wasted, it's just that the payoff is non-linear, maybe you're only going to achieve a certain thing. It goes slow and maybe you need to be on the lookout for people where you can go beyond the surface understanding, to go a bit deeper into the things that you want to talk about and that you're questioning. But there is a development. Then there are things that are happening and we are questioning globally, some of which eventually is going to reach the periphery, like Taiwan is a periphery, Greece is a periphery, and once these things are being talked about more and more, then they reach our places and it's easier to talk about it there without people being like ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ And it does involve bringing in outsiders to talk about these things and having locals be a bit baffled and bringing different perspectives. I think that is super important because otherwise you're stuck in this vicious circle talking about the same thing.

When I was studying in Greece, I found out at some point that there was an electronic music center in Greece. And I was super excited, that was maybe like in 1999 or 2000, I was super excited and then I looked into what they were doing. And we've had Xanakis, who is one of the most important electronic music composers globally. He was Greek, so there are people doing this stuff, there's more. So I looked into what the center was doing and their big project was a reconstruction of an ancient Greek water pipe or like a water organ, this is what they could get funding for. It was an electronic electronic music center and the funding they could get was to reconstruct an ancient Greek music instrument, so I was like ‘This country is messed up and I’m leaving. I need to go somewhere else to make something happen.’ And now it's improved, 20 something years later, there are things happening. It's a process, it takes time. If you're introducing new stuff, there are going to be people who absorb it.

And maybe they don't credit you because they absorb it in a subconscious manner. So they think like they came up with things that you told them, introduced them. It's kind of a thankless path, but it's not totally thankless because people know what you are doing and if you're doing this thing for a long enough time, then there's enough people that understand that ‘Hey, you're somehow always in the middle of these things.’And also, being involved means you have more chances of meeting like-minded people that are going to make your life much more enjoyable operating in this context because if you organize one thing, two things, three things, then eventually someone who has the same kind of or similar enough ideas as you is going to show up and you're going to meet them. And that's only going to be good for you. Being in the Netherlands I have the freedom to do stuff in a certain way because the context allows me to do that, the place allows me to do that, but then I don't have the payback of investing in my people because I live here for 15 years already, 16… whatever, I've lived here, but it's not my people, and they're never going to be my people. It is my community, but it is much different if I was doing this in Greece, it would be much more painful. But there would be a big pay-off when you see that ‘Hey things are progressing and I've contributed to that’, so that's something that you should keep in mind for yourself, as a kind of moral payback in the long term that you're investing for something. That is, you're making a difference at the place that you grew up in. I think that is important even if it's frustrating. It takes a lot of mental effort and psychological pain and having to explain to people things that are really obvious because they don't have the same context or the same outlook. If they're not there, you have to give them something that they understand so that they have the energy to follow you. So if it is important to have some strips of fabric that are physical and you can touch, and you can talk about, then this can be the entry point for the other thing. A physical outcome can be nice for everyone, I don't think it can be a hindrance to any process. And sometimes you can also produce it really quickly, just in purely practical terms. You can get a community together, you produce something physical and then this is a kind of bait for the people who don't understand you entirely, a bait so that you can talk about all this other stuff and introduce them to that, because it is a mental investment to follow something that you don't understand. It requires processing power in your brain and it requires the willingness to pay attention. So if you give them something that they understand and they can get excited about, then you can take them on a longer journey because they trust that, ‘Hey this guy just showed me something I've never seen before and it's really cool.’ Strategy is very important because you have to find money, you have to find people to work for you, you have to find people to read your vision and show up.

Links in the interview
Modern Body Laboratory