SMAC: Have you already exhibited together? 

Olivia Berckemeyer: Yes, we’ve actually exhibited together in a few exhibitions — recently in a group exhibition at SAC Bucharest, which was curated by Thomas and Alex Radu, and also in "Individual-all around" at Garrison Command in Timisoara, Romania. In Bucharest are pieces hung opposite each other. Our work is very different, not only in terms of style, but also in terms of content, which is perhaps why they work so well together. I find it very nice to exhibit together with Thomas. We meet by chance every year when we go hiking when we stand opposite each other on the slope. And now we meet again in the exhibition.   

Thomas Zitzwitz: Quite often! In addition to the exhibitions mentioned by Olivia, we exhibited for the first time together in 2006 in an exhibition designed by Olivia for her Schickeria project. Favourite books of the participating artists were shown here. I always particularly liked Olivia's wonderfully unusual ideas! 

Olivia, in an expansive installation you show black and white porcelain shoes on a reflective dance floor. What is the work about? 

OB: The work was inspired by Andy Warhol's Dance Diagrams. They show black and white shoes or shoe prints, one for the left and one for the right, which indicate the step sequence of various dances.  

And what kind of shoes are these? 

OB: They are casts, mostly from the studio shoes of artist friends. In the beginning, I only asked men because they have bigger feet and the porcelain shrinks by almost 30% during firing. But then I decided that there was also a funny beauty in the fact that the artists become children again, so to speak. But there are also children's shoes. These little boots there (points to a pair of incredibly small children's boots) belong to Horatio, Gregor and Alicja's son. Inspired by Warhol, I always made a white pair, a black pair and a black and white pair, which are like the dance steps, but in the installation at SMAC you can only see one pair at a time, except for the boots of Thomas (Zipp) and Lisa (Junghanß), which imitate the dance steps. 

Shoes also have a strong symbolic value. And a collection of empty shoes can of course also easily tip over into the uncanny, especially here in Germany …

OB: At first, I had the shoes on a bare wooden floor, but it didn't work like that. It looked like war, the shoes automatically represented dead people. The shoes should carry the spirit of the person as well as the gesture of transience. The shoes are a shell, especially the studio shoes, I've had my own studio shoes for ten years. They live your life with you. They are companions and they also represent your life. Most people wear their Atelier shoes forever. Dirk Bell's shoes, for example, are 20 years old, and what's particularly nice about them is that we've known each other for just as long. Originally, I was also inspired by the shoes you find on the street. When I started with porcelain, I had the idea of collecting rubbish from the street and recreating it in porcelain as an allegory of the throwaway society. But it didn't work out so well. I made a coffee mug and a few other things but, in the end, I got stuck on the shoes, which are often lying around in the streets, especially here in Kreuzberg. 

The high heels probably aren't studio shoes, are they?  

OB: No, but Lisa, whose shoes they are, used to wear heels all the time. They're not dogmatically only studio shoes. But the previous owners should be able to identify with them. They're not all artist shoes either. But most of them are, and that makes sense because of the Warhol reference; to let the artists dance, with their respective forms of expression, with which we all compete on the same dance floor.  

... And also to dance a little to Andy Warhol's tune, who is often used synonymously as a metaphor for commercialisation. 

OB: Yes, exactly, that's also quite fitting. 

Is the series finished? 

OB: I don't know yet. But for now, it's at a good point. 

Are your and Thomas's own shoes also included? 

OB: Yes, there's a pair of each of our shoes in the current exhibition. A coloured pair of Thomas's is at the bottom of the stairs, by Thomas's fragrance work. 

Thomas, what was it like to hand in your studio shoes and then see them later as objects? It almost has a childlike magic for me; the idea that these studio shoes are charged with the wearer's art practice for years and then - poof - with Olivia's help they turn into art themselves. 

TZ: I found it particularly interesting to see the casts of the other artists' studio shoes. I know many of them personally, and the style of the shoe usually suits them. Curiously, I had sometimes been asked by gallery owners and collectors whether I wanted to give away my studio shoes, they were so full of colour. Fortunately, I always declined. Now I've given my shoes away for the first time, but only because Olivia has created something new and poetic out of them. 

You are best known for your paintings. What's your scent work about?  

TZ: For the exhibition La Valse, conceived by Peter Ungeheuer, I wanted to create a very specific atmosphere with the fragrance work. I went to the opera a lot as a child, my grandfather was a chamber musician, so it was part of the family tradition. In addition to the music, I was also fascinated by the many different perfumes I could smell from the rows. That magical atmosphere before a performance, when the curtain is still closed, the voices and rustling in the hall become quieter and the scents of the audience mingle... That's the kind of atmosphere I want to create. 

Is this the first work of this kind you've done?  

TZ: I conceived my first work with scents in 1995 for the exhibition Multimediale 4 at the Centre for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. Back then, I had perfumers from Paris make me the scents lime blossom, medieval pitch, gummy bear and castoreum. An inventor designed odour machines for me that could emit these fragrances. The scents were accompanied by sounds that I had collected on my travels: a conversation between an old man and a girl in a bar in the south of France, the sound of an action film in a provincial Italian cinema, noises from a New York subway station mixed with the sounds of a marimba player... Later I worked with the scents of candy floss, the street after the rain, sharpened pencils and daffodils (to name but a few), sometimes combined with video or as a pure scent installation. I invented a narrative for each of these works. A few times I also mixed the spray colours for my paintings with the scent of tuberose or angelica roots. That way, my paintings gave off a very light scent. 

“That magical atmosphere before a performance, when the curtain is still closed, the voices and rustling in the hall become quieter and the scents of the audience mingle... That's the kind of atmosphere I want to create.”

How did you get from idea to realisation?  

OB: It's a real decision and also a lot of hard work. For example, I've now made over 200 shoes, and it takes four days per shoe. Everything has to be planned in advance. You have to be very committed to the work.  

Olivia, you are known for your bronzes. How did you get into porcelain? 

OB: Precisely because I am already so associated with bronzes, a friend told me that I should try out a new material. I thought: why not change things up again? I actually always model in wax, which is soft. Porcelain, on the other hand, is a very hard material, which I quickly became enthusiastic about. It is fragile, but also incredibly strong. Ceramic is not my thing, it's too rough for me. Porcelain is finer and translucent. I try to think and work on it continuously. 

There is also one of your bronze ships in the current exhibition. You've made several of them. Tell me, how did you come up with the ship as a motif? 

OB: I started with the Frozen Endurance. That was Ernest Shackleton's explorer ship that froze up and this story is beautiful because Shackleton fought so hard to get all his people out again in one piece and managed to do so. He and the whole crew then had to watch in their little boats in the middle of nowhere as this huge ship practically burst before their eyes. There is even film footage of it, which is over a hundred years old, where you can see how everything is frozen and the ship is falling apart. I find that very moving, because the ship was also the crew's home and there is something so extremely existential about losing it and yet it looks so great. I also made a submarine that comes from the depths. So the works are about home and also about being exposed to the world, nature and the sea. The first ship was created in 2009, when I also had an exhibition at KWADRAT GALERIE, Martin Kwade. They were still made of wax back then and the first one, the Endurance, was immediately bought by Christian Boros. 

And the equestrian figures? 

OB: They're about power and battle. The Napoleon is also a very early work, Napoleon riding through the Brandenburg Gate and Hussar General von Zieten, Napoleon's adversary. It shows the conquest and reconquest. On the one hand it is an equestrian monument, but on the other it dissolves, like power itself. It was created at the same time as Saddam Hussein was captured and all his bronze statues were toppled. Bronze eternal and my idea was to let it fade so that it also represents materialised transience. In the end, my work is always about vanitas. About coming and passing. That's also the case with the shoes. They are also like yin and yang, which is why they are black and white. They are two parts that form a whole.  

With Shackleton it's care, with Warhol it's commercialisation and the equestrian monument is a social-aesthetic-historical category all of its own: how political do you perceive your works to be?  

OB: They are not really political. But I would like to bring about sustainability and more considerate thinking with my work, perhaps to counter the rampant egoism. 

Are there any recurring motifs or themes that you carry with you over long periods of time? 

OB: Yes, the vanitas theme in any case. I come from Nuremberg and Dürer is of course very important there and for me too.   

Who else is important? 

OB: Many. But the Renaissance has always been very important to me. I was always a big fan of the great masters. When I was at school, I often went to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg to draw during art lessons. 

If you had to choose: process or project? 

OB: Process. For me, the forms emerge from the making. 

And form or concept? 

OB: Form. It all starts with an idea, a concept, but the form is created during modelling. 

Interview: Hilka Dirks