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of “performative queerness.” Do you see any
relationship between your work and hers? How
do you situate yourself as a female architect/
artist in relationship to the larger structures
and institutions in which your work intervenes?
aesthetic that you’re working with in a different context
too, you weren’t trying to build the next Guggenheim.
in Iceland for almost 5 years before moving to New
York. Now I am working between these two places.
There’s something about the dynamics of changing
TH: I don’t really know that I relate to her, although
she’s someone that I respect immensely. I know
little of her relationship with Le Corbusier but
there’s definitely a whole issue around the female
architect. The contemporary landscape of superstar
architects is predominantly male. But then again
that might not be the most interesting place to
be. I recently heard an interview with a Danish
modernist architect Knud Holscher. He spent a big
part of his career doing public projects and some
product design for example toilet seats of which he
spoke with dignity and pride. When he was asked
which project he would have loved to do during his
career, he answered that he had always wanted
to design public housing. That I respect deeply.
Much of the contemporary architecture we see in
glossy magazines is so much about ego and capital.
Obviously there are amazing female architects and
practitioners, but in the dominant media, they tend
to still stand in the background. Perhaps except Zaha
Hadid and Kazuyo Sejima. When I tell people that I am
also trained as an architect, often I am met with “Oh
so do you do interiors?” as if it is difficult to imagine
a woman being a building designer and easier to
connect her to the realm of the (domestic) interior.
I think it’s super problematic that there’s these
gendered relationships in practices, but I don’t know
that my work relates to this whole aspect directly. I
think that in certain ways a queer / feminist reading
of some of my work has occurred mostly in terms of
the three installations in Iceland. One reading has
been that it’s a feminist gesture or insertion of a
feminine presence in urban space. Someone has
also made a queer drag reading, saying it was like
a building in drag. I think that’s super interesting
and I really enjoy these readings and how they can
expand the project. I’m interested in thinking along
the lines of - is the project within the boundary of
this physical object or does the boundary extend
to where the readings start and end? Meanwhile
these ideas are not something that, at least on
a conscious level, I have charged the work with.
KC: What stands out to me about your work
is that you marry what I’d term a hard-edged
European conceptualism with healthy doses
of imagination and whimsy, where does this
come from? What artists are you looking at?
TH: This is a really old school and male reference
but I’m definitely looking at Dan Graham and Gordon
Matta-Clark. Obviously if you come out of architecture
then it’s really hard to not look at Matta-Clark with
great respect. I think his work is really about taking
architecture out of the boundaries of functionality and
all these kind of modernist tropes that architecture
proper has to deal with. More viewing architecture
as a kind of semiotic system, which is very much
at the basis of my practice. Others I look to with
admiration are for example Matthew Buckingham,
Chantal Ackerman and Rachel Whiteread.
KC: One thing that you said earlier was that you
originally wanted to do set design which puts the
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013
Parallel Memories (2013), installation view, "There's No Place LIke Home", Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany.
Photo credit T. Arendt.
TH: I think that’s interesting in terms of the relationship
between art and architecture. My relationship to
temporality is very different, a different relationship
to monumental permanence. The whole process
of drawing an architectural work and then building
it is an incredibly long process. I’m interested in a
kind of temporariness. The first of the installations
in Reykjavík has lasted now since 2006. In the wake
of the last winter, the hurricane recently on the east
coast came by Iceland as well, the very last sequins
blew off two of the pieces. Now they’re these naked
structures left in the urban space, which sparked
a whole consideration about what to do with them
and could they be restored. After a long process I
have decided to take them down. It seems like a
very right and natural thing to do because they were
so much born out of a certain moment in Icelandic
time, the years leading up to and following the big
global economic crash that was specifically violent
in Iceland and the several years of excess that led up
to it. Also the sort of commodification of everything
that could be commodified in nature, which was
what these projects were about. Because they’re
so specific to this moment in a sort of a geographic
time of Iceland as a culture and also a specific
time in my personal development it just feels that
it’s right to take them down. Even the material has
a natural time. So, great that the last sequins are
gone, it’s fine. Not everything has to last forever.
KC: I understand you’re quite the nomad
these days. What is your relationship to
notions of the local, homeplace, nation and
territory and how do these shape your work?
TH: These aspects of place and belonging and relating
to a place are really at the basis of my practice. I
have very strong relationships to 4 very different
places, of course they are all western cultures so
they are not so radically different but each has its
own specific logic. I’m half Czech and half Danish
so I have very special relationships to both these
places. I grew up going back and forth over the iron
curtain traveling to Czechoslovakia as it was called
formerly and Denmark where I’m born. Then I lived
place and changing the situation from being inside
and part of a situation to looking at the same place
from the outside, which I think opens a possibility
for a more a critical distance. I just finished a
new video work called Parallel Memories, that is
partially about that. It’s about returning to the site
of an inherited trauma, tracing the structures of
real places with the psychological structures of the
memory of a place. This is a project that I started at
the Whitney Program and it is currently on view at
a group exhibition in Germany at the Westfälischer
Kunstverein. The exhibition is actually called
“There’s No Place like Home.” When I was doing the
project in Russia I accidentally met a Russian guy
around my age who had grown up in Czechoslovakia
as the son of a Russian soldier who was part of
the occupying forces. My history is informed by my
mother immigrating to Denmark in 1968 before
the borders closed. There was something about
the tension between these two subject positions
– this became the framework of the project. They
seemed as if they couldn’t be further apart but at
the same time these two stories overlap within a
kind of common space of childhood and a common
experience of a geographic and cultural place
embedded in a specific time. The video is becoming
quite structural in that sense. I’m filming through
an architectural maquette and trying to see if the
structure of shared space and memory is aligned
with or just framing the reality of now. - So there’s
always both an exterior and an interior, - always
this kind of parallactic dynamics of spectatorship.
KC: Is he a subject in the video?
TH: There’s not a dialogue but there’s a voiceover
which is two voices, his voice and mine. The video
is a documentation of me going back to some of
the places I remember myself and also retracing
some of the places that he is talking about. There
are sites that I have never been to within this
former Russian base that is outside of Prague. I
tried to put myself into another subject position.
There’s a blending of the boundaries of subjectivity.
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