(1) How long have you been making installations?
Kids are installators. Adults are installators.
The installation as action is a transcendent problem, and as such it does not belong only to art. Everybody does continuously installations and at all levels of “organisation”. Installation is my profession since I ever do something, and this would be the case even if I would have never became “an artist”, I could say that once born one is condemned to do installations.
Expulse from Paradise equalled damnation to make installations. Installation is as old as the Fall which is at the same time starting point of (not necessarily artistic) thinking. For this reason, not because of being art action, but as a result of a decisive moment of the thinking, making installations is older than art itself.
(2) Why did you choose to make installations and not anything else?
If someone is interested in the problematic of the relations - and not “only” from the point of view of art - he will necessarily start to think about installations, about specialised synthethic way of questionning, about interaction, net of influences, way of organising things, where a hypothesis of isolated existence would be almost excluded, where everything could be defined exclusively by its relation to the environment (of any nature), where emphasis would fall not on individual events, but on their connectivity to others, or at least on the exigence of such connection.
Installation is a plural genre determined by plural existential forms, it is a self reflexive extention of the plural way of thinking.
(3) What do you think of your own works?
If intention dominates a project, than planning becomes a very important moment as the most creative part of the working process.
Planning - the being-in-a-project means the projection of the future - which implies quitting the present time or offers the possibility of a temporary abolishment of time.
Stopping time is of course an utopia, therefore layout is close to utopia, and it represents in any case an idealistic point of view (of course idealism does not necessarily mean a positive ideal). Ideal, as a concept and as a circumstance is always personal and could be hardly generalized. It represents the summary and the synthesis as an exigency and not as a result.
My work consists of maintaining a being-in-a-project, of a nutrition from this state, of planning and utopian modeling. My main motive is the grounding of a system as a process and not so much as a method - the ars combinatoria, and not the l’art pour l’art.
(4) What do you think the difference is between your own work and other installations?
As an initiator (creator) I can influence the consistence of my work, but categorization is beyond my competence, it is not me who should decide whether my works are installations or something else. The relation between my work and its environment (its reception) will determine, denominate and classify my work into some kind of category.
If the audience considers my works installations, than they are the most probably installations. The material of the installation is not determined, neither it has any conceptual or formal definition, or restriction, therefore it is difficult, almost impossible to set up a homogenous system of criteria.
The elusiveness of the notion of installation points that installations can unlikely be analyzed exclusively within aesthetic (artistic) categories.
(5) What do you think of the relationship of traditional artwork and installation?
Traditional theory can hardly justify a genre which is totally contradictory to art conceived in a traditional way. However, the painting as a traditional genre, and the installation which seems to be its opposition, are counterpoles on the same axis. They are contradictory, but this fact proves basically that they are moving on the same straight line of representation. This line is constant and transforms all gesture of expression into consubstantial matter, even if these forms of expression seem to not converge or intersect each other. No matter that everybody speaks another language, a language is used. So that variance is a matter of language. I am not sure that painting should learn the language of installations, but I am quite sure that installations should integrate the pictorial language.
And if we consider paintings a traditional form of art, we include all other ways of expression into tradition, there are only traditional art forms, so to say. If they don’t look as such - that’s a temporary appearance.
(6) What is the size and material of an installation determined by?
A property-room takes shape and crystallizes with time, where the installator feels comfortable. The characteristics of this one automatically outline the sizes and the right proportions of a system. Size and quantity occur quite often (when about installations, they are important as such, but besides that they are relatives), but in my view in the general context of installations they are not relevant.
(7) Could you mention the installation you consider to be the largest and the smallest one?
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(8) Is there any object or idea that cannot be installed?
All objects and idea are part of the human culture, so that sooner or later everything and every idea can be installed. This of course does not mean that this would happen in a short installator-life, but if we look at the question on a long term and in a global scale, it is very probable.
(9) How does environment affect the installation of the work?
The installation reflects and mirrors certain relationships related to the environment where it is realized. Installation is depending on environment and dependence is also a relationship. This is why installations are site-specific.
(10) Do you know any fact that restricts the possibilities of installation?
“That I still have wishes, proves that I don't have a proper perception of the world, I hallucinate, I am very far away from the truth. People are prey of wishes.. only because they don't see things as they are.” (Emil Cioran)
I can start only from my existing circumstances, and my possibilities depend only on my capacity of exploring the given circumstances as systems of relationships, to such an extent that in extreme cases I can divert all circumstances into ideal ones. All creative action requires different ideal circumstances. If I could (of course I can’t make it) explore at a maximum level the possibilities of a moment, I could immediately work under ideal circumstances, moreover, I would permanently have ideal circumstances. First step to an ideal circumstance is to humbly limit my wishes, to accept to be limited.
(11) Do you like making installation for order or at request?
This never happened to me, so if I have an opinion about this, it is not based on experience. I would like to be commissioned, because I think that with the request the conditions would be granted as well. If this is true, than I don't see any reason not to fulfill a commission.
(12) What do you think of preserving an installation?
Installation depends on its environment and it is an ephemera, for this reasons documentation - the preservation of a thing through another thing is necessary. The memory of the installation gets fixed in an external medium.
Documentation is a gesture compensating almost instinctively the lack of durability specific to the genre.
The physical preservation of an installation should take place in ideal case right at the site that it has been conceived for, but generally this does not happen. Conservation means to move the work from its original place, this way the piece looses its natural environment and lands in a new milieu (which in some cases might seem better than the original one) and can add to it (or generate) a new content
(13) Can the value of an installation be estimated and how?
The value of an installation is related only to itself, more exactly values can be searched and found only in the relation between the question put into shape by the installation and the answer given by its realization. If an installation is asking well, or better to say it is grasping an intention and not something totally different, than one can affirm that it is a good installation.
(14) How does copyright apply to installations preserved only in documents?
None can avoid influences. And the mechanism of influences escaped till now the system of law. In order to formulate an effective copyright law, only one condition has to be fulfilled: the non-existence of authors.