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In the 7th episode of the ARTIDOTE podcast, Vashik Armenikus speaks with the Austrian photographer Stefan Draschan. Stefan is an award winning photographer and author of the ‘Reflections on Art’ photography series. In this interview he talks about his journey to becoming a photographer after first working in music journalism. He also shares his favourite masterpieces of cinematography, fine art and literature.
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In the 7th episode of the ARTIDOTE podcast, Vashik Armenikus speaks with the Austrian photographer Stefan Draschan. Stefan is an award winning photographer and author of the ‘Reflections on Art’ photography series. In this interview he talks about his journey to becoming a photographer after first working in music journalism. He also shares his favourite masterpieces of cinematography, fine art and literature.
Listen to Reflections on Art - Stefan Draschan by Vashik Armenikus MP3 song. Reflections on Art - Stefan Draschan song from Vashik Armenikus is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 56:02. This high-quality MP3 track has 320 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 7 Jun 2023. Stream and download Reflections on Art - Stefan Draschan by Vashik Armenikus for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
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Austrian photographer Stefan Drachen captures photographs of people interacting with artworks in museums. He draws inspiration from Brazilian photographer Alessio De Andrade, who spent years photographing visitors at the Louvre. Stefan's photography showcases the genuine emotions people experience when encountering masterpieces. He started photography relatively recently, using a small camera and later a Panasonic Lumix. Stefan believes that seeing and reacting are his main talents, and he captures moments of art appreciation in museums around Europe. He shares his work on Instagram and Tumblr, finding Tumblr to be a more diverse platform. Stefan emphasizes the importance of seeing and the combination of visual art forms and senses in his work. He enjoys capturing moments and wishes to exhibit his photographs in museums and galleries. Due to COVID-19 and Brexit, traveling to different cities and exhibitions has become more challenging. Stefan has favorite cities and rooms in exhibition Hello, everyone, welcome to the seventh episode of Arquidio podcast. I'm your host, Vaso Karmenikas. Before I introduce you to my guest, I would like to tell you the story of Alessio De Andrade. He was a Brazilian photographer who spent 39 years of his life taking pictures of the visitors of the Louvre. The result of his work was incredible. He took 12,000 beautiful photographs, many of which got included in the famous Magnum collection. The reason why I admire Alessio's work so much is because his photographs weren't staged. He captured those genuine emotions that people experienced when they saw masterpieces of art such as Mona Lisa for the first time with their own eyes. Okay, the reason why I'm telling you all of this is because I believe that this episode's guest integrates all of this Alessio De Andrade's philosophy into his own photography as well. This episode's guest is Austrian photographer Stefan Drachen. He has a series of beautiful and stunning photographs, which he calls Reflections on Art. Stefan travels to the galleries around Europe and captures, as Alessio did 40 years ago, how people interact and what emotions they experience when they stand in front of the masterpieces of art. This conversation quickly evolved from Stefan telling about his journey of discovering photography after working as a music journalist for quite some time into a whole kind of a discussion on the influence and impact of different types of art on an artist. We talked about music, we talked about literature, we talked about painting, and of course, photography as well. I hope you'll enjoy listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed speaking with Stefan. And once again, I would like to welcome you to the seventh episode of Artidote podcast. Thank you for coming to my podcast and I'm a very big admirer of your work. I discovered it like six months ago and I really loved your photographs because I'm a fan of galleries, of art exhibitions a lot. But I go there just to look at the art, you know, and I'm more kind of the subject of your photography. I really loved how you captured those moments of how each person admires works of art differently. I wanted to ask you if you can give a kind of a story of how you started with photography because from what I've read, you weren't a photographer all your life. You started relatively recently. I have to admit, I had analog photographs for some time, but I never got into it. It was too technical, too complicated, and so I stopped it again as a journalist. Sometimes I wrote concert reviews and I had to take a photograph. And then the iPhone came up and for me it was perfect, like this small machine and you just tap on it. So for one, two, three years, I was just documenting my former life in Vienna. And then my brother made me a present, a camera. It was like a Panasonic Lumix, which you can fit in a pocket and for two or three hundred euros or pounds, you can start taking great photographs, which you can, for me, it's important that I can print the stuff as fine art and also sell it. And so it was in 2013 that I got this camera and then I just, I found out that my main talent is not like, I thought it's writing or music, which are talents, but nothing so great, then seeing and reacting, yeah, it's like this. And so, and I moved to Berlin, which was one of the best decisions of my life. Berlin was still changing a lot, there were like, you know, a lot of buildings not built. There was enough space between the buildings to see, you know, the sky or some sofas or parties, it was still happening. Like this East End London atmosphere, Hackney Wick, I can remember 10 years ago, where things happen, like where poor people can do something kind of also. And I was also cycling a lot. And for me, it's still for me, the greatest thing on earth is just to cycle as peacefully as I can. Also in Berlin, there are more and more cars, it's quite terrible. And then I always went to museums, but I studied a lot for myself, like on Tumblr, and I profited a lot of technology progress, let's say, without iPhone and Tumblr, I wouldn't be where I am, I have to admit. I love analogs, of course, but for me, it's not about the technical issue, it's about the seeing. This is, for me, the main thing. And then comes the techniques. And so I started all kind of photography history, also Facebook, you know, there's this great guy from London, Stephen Elcock, and Jackie Elcock, his wife, they have also published books now. And he's like a digital curator. And I could study a lot of art history via his Facebook page, kind of. And yeah, photography is just like 100, I don't know, 180 years, or in the 1840s, I think it started, or in the 1860s, you can find some digital stuff. And now, also, if it's just a small JPEG, it doesn't matter, I would love to see it in a museum or in a gallery, but it's okay for me. I cannot see everything in museums or galleries. So it's okay for me to see it in the internet, like to have a small piece, it's like reading a book, I don't need the original one. And when I found out, okay, there's some space, that everyone made like one or two or three great photographs in museums. From Henri Cartier-Bresson, they even like from Alfred Bierstadt, I think, like, there's a couple, like two kids sleeping in a museum from 1972. Everything happened already before a little bit. Or Martine Frank, the wife of Henri Cartier-Bresson, she made some stunning photographs in museums as well. And yeah, so this is how I came into photography. I love it. For me, I love the visual effect of life, kind of. I don't know if you know the photographer that was active in the 50s, 60s. His name is Alessio De Andrade. He's a god. He's one of my gods. Yeah. Sorry, if it is too evident, you know, like, kind of like, obviously, you might know. For me, it was his photographs were a big discovery six months ago. And it was very coincidental that I discovered your Instagram account and yeah, and his photographs at the same time. I love him. The people in the Louvre, he also has a book. No, I know him for like, also 10 years, kind of. Everything for me started 10 years ago, let's say. Also the discovery of Alessio De Andrade. And I loved his photographs, like the three nuns in front of the three graces I would now remember immediately. And it's also like, as you discovered me via Instagram, I discovered him via Facebook. But also originally, I've now two books and one in English, so three books, one in French. It's also, it depends how you discover things, like, there hasn't been a museum show, there have been gallery shows all over the world from my work, but not in museums. So I have to also thank Instagram, because otherwise you would not know me, kind of. And but also Instagram is changing the perception of photography, because I cannot, some photographs I cannot post, they just don't work because of the format. It's like a little bit, it's different to the camera. And so if some details in the low are missing, and I have to crop it a little bit, or it crops automatically, so you cannot see the full information, and you cannot see all details. And because I do full frame photography, you can print them 1 meter 50 to 1 meter, kind of. It's quite a big photograph. And you don't know all my photography, because I cannot post everything in Instagram. So it's kind of, if I do more than one post a day, sometimes I do, but it's too much. I have completely different series on my Facebook album, so on Tumblr, I have 20 blogs, so. Is it easier on Tumblr than on Instagram? Do you think that Tumblr allows more diversity to your work? Yes, I love Tumblr. It's like, for me, it's the, it's really an amazing, because it has no commercial, not really. It's more structured from the design. It's elegant, kind of, for me. It's like, Tumblr is, for me, my, you know, like Herman Melville said, the whale ship is his Harvard and Princeton, kind of. And for me, Tumblr and Facebook, like, for me, this is all like university, kind of. There's all information of the world is there. And it depends if you can get it out. Tumblr is hard to start, but if you have your, I only follow 30 blogs, and they are so amazing. If you like gay guys in Syria, in Canada, or lesbian in Tunisia, I follow all diverse style. It's amazing. I love it. What about the audiences? Do you think, like, that the audience of Tumblr is very different for your work than Instagram? Or do you think it's more or less the same? One Tumblr like is, for me, like 10 Instagram likes. It's more quality people. It's like, you know, Tumblr has 400 million people, Instagram has one point, I don't know, 4 billion now, or Facebook has 2 billion. Everything changes each year. I prefer Tumblr. It's more quiet. It's like really like a blog. I came out of this blogosphere, kind of, yeah. Also, in Facebook, for me, it's like a blog, yeah, and the main meaning for me to start social media was, as I lost once from a language class in Seven Oaks in London, but I lost my, you know, in the 90s, it was still analog, yeah, I lost my contact to international friends, because for me, the greatest thing on earth is to discover international people, kind of, or to see the world and everything, or what is the same, what is diverse. I like both kind of things, yeah, so I also like Twitter, really, now, since Donald Trump is not really, not using it any longer, I really started Twittering, yeah. Do you remember when was your first, kind of, gallery photo that you are making right now? How did it start? I can't exactly remember, it was 2014, and it was, I was doing completely different stuff. I had no intention of doing a museum photograph or anything. I was just there for the art, but I had the camera with me, because it was small, and it was like, I did not take the photograph, it's like, it was a Schwarzbrach, yeah, in the Sammlungshaf Gerstenberg in Berlin, Charlottenburg, and I did not even know how, you know, the deep, the deep, the deepness, the focus, how, I had it like on 1.8, because it's very dark in museums, so it's no perfect photograph itself, because the background, the photograph is unsharp, very unsharp, yeah, but it still worked, kind of, yeah, but I know now how to do it better, yeah, also the camera I use now would allow to make the photograph better, but it was already, it was, the shirt and the painting, they were exactly the same, and I loved it for myself, yeah, and so if I do it for an audience or not, I would love to see this moment, yeah, this is for me life, yeah. It's also like, it's interesting how it combines two visual art forms of two different ages, of old and new, as you said, the photography is only, is practiced since 1840, as you mentioned, and while like painting, like I'm oversimplifying, but it was kind of a photography of the past, you know, of capturing the moment, and your photographs contrast those two ages, two epochs, do you think like you are, you see the world much differently in contrast to before starting the photography? And in photography I have to capture the moment, and sometimes I see, of course, okay, beautiful moments are passing by, and if I'm too slow, or not in the mood, yeah, it depends, or when the camera, once it was in repair, and there was the perfect match of Piero della Francesca, I never have, I never had a photograph of Piero della Francesca in the Gemelli Gallery, and then the woman with the perfect shirt was in front of it, yeah, and I just had my iPhone with me, and I did not, so I cannot use this photograph, yeah, and you have those moments, and sometimes I capture the best photographs, once I was in Paris for an exhibition and a book presentation, so I was stressed a lot, because it was, and I took four days of Louvre photographs, and I had this perfect photograph, yeah, Cherico, and the woman with the alliance of Theodor Cherico, I don't know if I pronounce him now correctly, and the woman with a shirt with lions, and with huge eyes, kind of, it was this perfect photograph, I showed it to 10 or 20 people on my camera at the book presentation and in the exhibition, and then I had only one, how do you say, for this, a memory card, I had only one in, and it broke, it was, it could not be repaired, anything, so this is just now in my mind, and in that of 20 people, but anyway, I love seeing, yeah, and there's also this great quotation, I think, from, first, you need to see with your ears before you start to see with your eyes, I don't know now, it's from an American photographer, but, so, you know, all senses always work together, yeah, I also listen to people, yeah, I can, you smell people, yeah, seeing is only one visual, the visual is only one aspect of life, yeah, and also you have the feeling, because when I see someone, and I know, okay, in 20 minutes of time, this person could be at the painting, which I have already in my mind, yeah, where it would fit, and then, yeah, and it happens, yeah, I also dreamed once a photographer, hey, this would be a nice combination, and the next day, it really happens, yeah, so it depends also on your knowledge, this is all preparation. When you're telling about these things, I start to, kind of, it brings me back to the time when art exhibitions were possible, because the last art exhibition here in London that I managed to attend was Titian's exhibition at the National Gallery in London, and it was in October, I think, late October, and since then, all exhibitions are cancelled, and when you describe those moments, it makes me miss those days, when you could be around him too. I never went to a museum in London yet, this is still missing a lot for me, I went to Edinburgh, I could take great photographs there, yeah, like, but I never managed it till now to go to London, yeah, for some time, and now with the Brexit, you know that I have even my Brexit series on photography, I only share it in Facebook, like 80 photographs of people, since this horrible Brexit vote, which hurt me a lot, because for me, it's better to have everything as simple as, as connected as possible, and not as, it's simply, it's not COVID only, but it's also difficult now with the visa and all this stuff to go to London for me. I would love to switch to go by train within, I don't know, 20 hours from Berlin, where I'm now, to London, yeah, we could meet tomorrow, kind of, yeah. It would be also environmental, great, if it's just with a train or anything. Yes, so, and here some museums are open, then now they're closed again, it's changing the whole time. I know you're feeling, because I usually get nervous, like I'm now, when everything is closed, after three days without art, I get nervous. I hope you enjoyed listening to my conversation with Stefan. Before we continue, I would like to thank you all who joined my newsletter after Martin Kolstad's episode. I was so surprised that in the first three, four days, since I uploaded Martin Kolstad's episode, there were so many subscribers, so many emails, the community grew, like exponentially. So thank you, all of you who joined my newsletter. And if this is the first episode of RTDope podcast that you have, you're listening to, and you haven't heard about my newsletter yet, which is quite likely, I would like to introduce you to my newsletter, which I launched right at the start of the pandemic. I wanted to communicate and tell to my friends about the books that I've read, and I thought that the best way is to send a letter straight to the inbox with links about books and thoughts, and sometimes films and music that I like. Suddenly the community grew, and one friend recommended this newsletter to another. The audience of the newsletter has grown significantly since then. I launched this podcast as a supplement to the newsletter. I thought I'll bring the authors of books that I read and I admire to this podcast, so they can tell about their works themselves. If you would like to receive a summary of everything that I create once a month, with the links to the latest podcast episodes, with the books that I love reading, and the thoughts and ideas behind them, consider subscribing to my newsletter. The link, as always, is in the description of this episode. I realized how important is art and exhibitions when, after three or four months of lockdown, I went to this Titian exhibition, and I was like, oh, I'm finally in the National Gallery. And then literally two days after, everything closed down again. But that moment, I think, was revelatory for me. I wanted to ask you, you took pictures and photographs in different locations. I wonder if you have, like, favorite cities and favorite, not only museums, but also favorite cities. Of course, museums are important as well. But I wonder if you have your favorite location. I do. I mean, I still don't, I was always good in geography and history, like, I was best in school in both things. So, but like, you know, when there was in class, when there was, I'm really bad in chemistry, physics, and other stuff. But I looked, I looked on the map and thought, hey, I still would know now 10 cities in South Africa, or in China, or in Australia. I went to university, I studied history, I went to Brazil, I went to Panama, I love this. And I had an exhibition, for me, the most spectacular in this, with 80 photographs, all framed in Novosibirsk, in Siberia. I never thought that I actually ever will go there, or can travel there, I'm no real money guy. So, so I'm dependent on also exhibitions, kind of. And of course, I have my dream, but I have my dream artists, I have my dream paintings, I would say also, I said it in the, in the, in the Elle, the French magazine, Elle, they did an interview with me some years ago, I said, I would love to live in the Musée d'Orsay or the Louvre. I would really love to have there a room in the museums already. The Louvre for me, now I'm getting older, you know, I don't go to clubs or anything any longer. But when there's a crowd of people, I see all those possibilities. I don't seem like that now that I can catch it, I got really terrible colds in my life. And if you, if I would know which museum has a too heavy air condition, so if you stay in six hours, you will probably get sick. But so of course, I would know where all Jan Vermeer paintings in the world are, in which museums. I have not been to Delft, like in the Netherlands. I have not been to, I have been to Amsterdam, but I was, as a teenager, I was more interested in other stuff than museums. And so in each city, I would have my favorite kind of, yeah, I have my, my favorite room in exhibitions even. Just a few days ago, I was in Potsdam, in the Museum Barberini, which is like, like the Museum Barberini in Rome. And there's like a woman I know for four years, I got, I get friends with some of the museum guards, of course, everywhere, kind of. And she was, she's originally from Uzbekistan, started in Vienna, like, and then married to Potsdam. Yeah, but we were talking a little bit, and which was good. And I reminded her, hey, we both knew this one small room in the first exhibition there when the museum opened in 2017. There was a Edvard Munch room, yeah, there were six paintings from Edvard Munch in it. And it was really like, it was spring 2017, I was sitting inside there, and it's, Potsdam is outside of Berlin, it's like, you know, it's province kind of, yeah. And I had the feeling, wow, this is, this is the center of Europe, at minimum now, yeah. Being surrounded by six of these fucking great paintings, like, wow, it was like, my brain, I had this feeling like if it was melting, yeah, like, wow, yeah. And I would, so I would have more interest, I would love to have photographs in the series. And People Matching Artworks is my main series, let's say, but I have 20, 30 series, yeah, some, even some, one series, I only make, I only send it to Kasper Koenig, this famous curator, not that I've been in the show yet, but he discovered one in an exhibition, sent me a postcard, yeah. And he let me, he let ask if this are only single photographs, or if it's a series. And it's something I've never, so, okay, I put it on Instagram, you could see one, those two photographs from the exhibition, but not the rest of the series, 10 photographs also, which I took in Rome and Naples last year. And also, and I'll keep, now I'm dragging away, but I have, but People Matching Artworks is my main series, it's the largest, 1,600 photographs almost. And I still would love, and for me always was the goal, everywhere I go, I want to take a photograph for the series. And for me, what is great on my life as an artist now, and I had different lives before, is that everywhere where I go, I can work. If there are like people, if there are cars, if there are car wrecks, if I take photographs of, after the rain, of reflections, anything, I can work everywhere, I would love to take photographs in Reykjavik, in Rio de Janeiro, in Chongqing, I don't know, everywhere. In Nairobi, anything, for me, everything is interesting, everywhere something is possible. When I see Chinese people in Crete, there are new combinations between the history period of the, complicated now to change from German to English, like 2000 before Christ, like the Minotaur, you know, I even don't know, but so everything is, gives new combinations and new prettiness, and new value, so, but still my main, my greatest love of museums are the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. It reminds me like of a quotation when you were saying about your favorite paintings and the location is also considered with your favorite artworks. I don't remember who said it, but the quote sounded something like this, that each photographer also has a kind of their own painter, do you have like a painter who influenced kind of your colors, your vision, what painters do you think visually kind of like inspired you the most? I've read, I've practiced my French in some French interview, you said Caravaggio, that you can spend minutes in front of Caravaggio, I wonder if you can tell a bit more. We have to spare now the other arts, but like in film, it would be Fellini, Visconti and Bunuel, also some French and also Catherine Bigelow, but like from painters, yes, even if it's this critical, you know, Caravaggio also, he stabbed two people, so he was a murderer after some time and he had a crazy life kind of, but it doesn't change for me anything on the work of art, and it's now a period of 400 years, and you don't know from many painters or people in the past what they did or if they have been nice or not, but it wouldn't change anything on the painting itself, which is as you see it now, and thanks for reminding me because, yeah, I'm not having my best day, as you can listen how fast I took a walk before, but I was not, there's a weather change back to fucking winter, so I'm depressing my body, it does not, the museum's closing anyway, but yes, but for reminding me on those Caravaggios, and it's, I don't like, it's like only a few Caravaggi, the one that Madonna with the Rosenkranz, it's like, I don't know in religion, it's like if you have a cross on a... I'm trying to remember myself, English is my third language. What is your first one, is it Russian? Yeah, it's Russian and Armenian, the first kind of native language that I grew up with, then I studied Czech and now English, so it's kind of third and fourth. Okay, okay, also different. Difficult to, I know, so like I think, I don't understand what you're mentioning. But Madonna is for sure, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, it's really, in Naples, there's like in the, it's in the small chapel in the main museum street, there's like, I could spend one hour twenty, the first time I spent one hour five minutes in front of it, and it's just from the composition, it's for me, it would be, if I would be as a person, if my eyes would be separate from me, maybe my brain, and I would be in the universe between the stars and looking on the perfection of the cosmos kind of, it's like a cosmic feeling I get, like, wow, it's this perfect construction, constellation of everything on this painting on those, it equals beautiful nature. And the second time I spent one hour twenty minutes in front of it, like, it was last year and the first time I was there in 2017. And I don't know if I blink or if I breathe in between, it's just so beautiful, like, wow. And also the second time I could see other people as well, the one couple I could, and for me, I'm happy because I could add it to my photography series, I have this Caravaggio, I have a couple standing in front of it, and they were admiring the same way like me, they were twenty minutes in front and didn't talk or anything, and they returned after one hour, and I was still there sitting like this. And so, yes, but also the beauty of Félix Vallotton, in the Musée d'Estade, there's also a room with Félix Vallotton, it's so soft and sweet and wow, it's like poetry kind of. And so, yes, Berlin or Vienna, there are no William Turners, I love William Turner paintings kind of. I would love to see some stuff of this. Also, to the former question, I would still love, I was only for one week in London, I'm in New York, two years ago, also in London or in New York, I would like to spend one, two, three months minimum there and take everyday photographs in the museums or in the city, because I could add, in the two hours I've been in the museums, I could add great photographs itself. Like some television only took from nine photographs they chose, seven were from my New York week there, kind of, and I was, then I was only one or two hours there, so there are so great possibilities. Also, if you see in the Musée d'Estade, there's this one Van Gogh, the haystackers, if you see this in original, it has a power, like for two meters in front of it, you still freak out, because it is so great, so good, like so wow, where you really understand why people want to be gods or why you need religions, kind of. If you compare it to other stuff, there's amazing stuff. But it's also, we could have the same discussion in films we had, but in music, you know, some things like Bach or Beethoven, even after hundreds of years, I think the oldest Japanese music on earth, Gagaku, it's like 1,500 years, it's still amazing everything. You know what the old Egyptians did or the Aztecs, everywhere in the world, Angkor Wat in Australia, it's amazing what in reality also humans can do in a positive way. It's our attempt to kind of get as close as to God, something like divine. Yes, you find in some of those paintings or in art, you find those things, this perfection. I would like to thank Audible for supporting this podcast. I've been an Audible subscriber for seven years now, and I can't think of any other subscription service that I've used so continuously for so many years. I'm currently listening to a book called Pure Invention, How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World, written by a Japanese artist, and it's called Pure Invention, How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World, written by Matt Ault. I also recently enjoyed Sam Harris' book called Making Sense. It's a collection of interviews from his famous podcast. You can get your first Audible for free and get access to all Audible original podcasts if you click on the link in the description of this episode. When you said people are looking at paintings in different countries, in my own experience, I'm vastly generalizing here, I don't have a statistic here, but I remember I was very surprised of attending an exhibition on Rubens in Moscow. When I looked at the crowds, the average age was 20s, early 30s, and I was surprised that so many young people are interested in art just because after London, when I look at age of the people who attend exhibitions in National Gallery, it's much older, it's people in their 40s, 50s and up. In your experience, I wondered what did you see in different galleries? What was the type of people who attend exhibitions? How do they differ? I question myself this, but from the chicness of dressing, nothing can compare with Paris, but you see more hierarchical people or anything like this, you would still see it more in Berlin. A little bit more older and conservative would be Vienna. I would also differ if these people are probably from there, usually sometimes I listen to some voice if they are in a group or not always they are alone, so I can get a glimpse of which language they speak or anything or other hints. But in general, from the fashion, and speaking with Oscar Wilde, appearance is something important, no matter how you think of the inner values, of course, but in the visual field, it does not help me. I would know that the fastest people in museums are Tibetan monks, kind of. They always escape me, kind of. Priests are also difficult to capture, it's interesting. But there are some, the chicest dressed people that I always encountered, where I still see fashion combinations that I've never seen anywhere else, would be France, Paris, kind of. So this I would really say, there comes fashion from, Paris is famous for its fashion. It really is. If it's young or old people, they have some combinations or anything, hairstyles or anything that is a little bit, from Asterix and Obelix, to this comic, Lutetia, but also some fun. But when I think of Paris, I also think of Paris in the 15th century. I think of the palettes of François Villon, kind of. And the life of François Villon, which has some incredibly funny aspects, where I think, wow, what a great guy, how crazy this guy was, blah, blah, blah. But I can see the fun of a city, and you know, French is very soft from the language, kind of. For me, as you mentioned, your second language is Czech, and Czech, I started to like it in the recent years, much more often. I often travel from Berlin to Vienna, and sometimes you go via Czech, and I would always take the train, and I have one hour, 20 minutes in Prague to change. This gives me 10 minutes on the Rental Square. By walking down, I would know which Art Deco cafe to watch. To have a little bit of different aspects, and also, you know, we are one human family, and still, we don't need language to communicate, kind of. If you smile, if you look at someone, hands and feet, blah, blah, blah, you can communicate. I had this feeling when I was in Siberia, and there were much younger people. In Vienna are the oldest, kind of. I'm glad to hear this of Moscow, that the young people go to Rubens. Paris would be the same. But I could not say, because many museums are really in New York, you have to go to the Metropolitan, so it's of course, or the Guggenheim, it's of course mixed. Old cities like London or Vienna, the crowd is really, the older people go, I don't know. But it's also something maybe, Austria is for me politically quite poor. It's a small country, it's at the border. In Vienna, I would feel trapped, kind of, a little bit. There was the Eastern Gate, and the language 50 kilometers away is different, but you don't tend to learn Slovakian, or Hungarian. It's too complicated, but so you're a little bit divided. And it's still the only capital. Other cities in Austria, which are smaller, the western part is much more progressive. Younger people go, but it's also about the open-mindedness. Vienna is for me very conservative, and there are no trees, there are too much cars, there's too much asphalt, this is not good for the mind. And you can see on many aspects of our environment, how the environment is treated badly, that if you are not connected with nature, but still also young French people, there is something, I wanted to say, in the language, but from the softness, there's almost nothing like French, and Italian, kind of. One says it's palatal and velar, those are if you speak more from the back, like me, kind of. Palatal is more from the tongue, some languages are softer, some are tougher, but the climate is a little bit more mild, it's better, kind of. If you're in Italy, sometimes you say, there are really not many reasons to live north of the Alps, when you experience the winter over there, I don't know, it's not so funny, but also in Mexico, I've been to Cuernavaca, La Ciudad de Primavera, it's always 25 degrees, those cities exist, in the mountains, you always feel super fine. All differences are everywhere, but for me, everything is quite interesting, or beautiful, I can see this everywhere, but now, with the climate crisis, everything is in danger, so it's kind of, I don't know, climate will change, fashion will change, people will change, because I love Naples so much, there's no wine, the wine grapes are drying out completely, and within 6 years they will be desert, so I'm suffering a lot of this, and things will change, but still, art will probably remain. There are a lot of changes right now happening, and there are so many things, especially over the past year and a half, that made us adapt to this new reality. To me, art form helped, while you're stuck at home, reading books, and looking at photographs like yours, it helps to wish for better days. It's great to hear, because I really had also panic, that I cannot work any longer, museums are closed, you should not go out, you could not go out, so for me everything stopped, kind of. But then I went into my archives, and I tried to support, I thought, ok, what helps in crisis, I put every day a photograph, which I considered as good, I put every day a photograph, since the crisis, in Instagram and on Facebook and on Tumblr, what I did not do before, I did not have to do it, but I really went, I thought, ok, give people something to look at. It's great that you went to the archives, and you found some gems, and I wonder, do you think that this pandemic created new projects for you? Have you seen the reflections on art series? Reflections on painting? Yes. Because if there are no people, I have to look more carefully on what I see on the artworks, kind of. I would see more details in this way, because I cannot look so much on the people and also creativity sometimes comes out of negative experience or anything, and I'm taking out of this negativity, but also I need to solve my depression that comes up or anything, and then sometimes I can put it in creativity, like this Brexit series, so I can work off this, it's like doing some training or some boxing, I'm from the Republic of Austria, I'm Austrian originally, and I have 15 articles claiming that I'm French, I've seen and said that I'm German, nothing is true, kind of. I love myself to be a puzzle, I'm part of everywhere, and I like to deal with Chinese people, and with Eskimo, with Inuit, but I have now interest on how do Navajo people, how do they like my art, do they have a good life, how were they treated in the past, also you live in London, England, with all this colonialist past, and imperialism, and Germany, and where the world was in Austria, a lot of history is not nice, there's a lot of brutality, but still it's part of human being, so I also take, and I think also Caravaggio, you can see how he dealt, and Rome, if you know about the porches, if you know about Rome in the 16th century, when he lived there, it was a fucking brutal city, if you look on, Villon was also killed in Paris in the 15th century, he just disappeared, they were everywhere, so life was always very complicated, and it will probably be, and we can try to be as happy, and have a good life as we can, but for me it's also this negative thing, I take out, sometimes I really get enraged, but on the next day I go photographing, and take really good photographs, and then it's okay for me again, so I deal with art as a medication myself, but when I'm in the creating mode, it's really something great and cosmic, and I feel, or when I'm in a museum, in a good mode, we could have all those discussions about great music and films as well, if you listen to a great concert, theatre play, a movie, it's like wow, and this is perfection, I mean everyone has medicines, you have this everywhere, in literature, yesterday I was checking quotations from Michael Lermontov, then I went to Petronius, I wanted to post a great quote, I read Sege Jung now, I did not know that he has also a Nazi past, a Swiss psychologist, so our life is complicated, and still we make art, or we create things. There was a book I recently read, the times of renaissance, and it showed how brutal was the life, when the people created these masterpieces, because we looked at those masterpieces in the galleries, and we kind of want to live in that time, to see how Da Vinci created, how Caravaggio painted, but we forget that brutality, was all around at that time, so it was like maybe there is a theory, that those dark moments, surroundings kind of like transformed into something beautiful inside the artist. I often ask guests towards the end, first of all where my listeners would be able to go and find your work, is there a particular project and series you would like them to check out, and I also ask about kind of inspirations, although we talked about inspirations, but we talked about paintings and photographs, and maybe you can tell about a couple of films, that you would recommend, that kind of you really like, that are part of you, and maybe a couple of books, one of the films by Luis Bunuel, and it's El Ángel Exterminador, which is about rich people, having in Madrid, and they are having a dinner, and they cannot move, and the poor people working for them, you know in the kitchen, they want to go out, and it's a lot about the social classes, also another film he made in Mexico in 1950, The Desperates, it's about the poor people of Mexico City, you know where the kids even rob a blind guy, and stuff like this, like disabled people on the street, which hurt me a lot to see, and Susana, so three films of Bunuel, and then Visconti, you should see every film they made, even if they are young or old, it doesn't matter, it's amazing, books I would recommend, Georg Büchner, it's like the German, he died at the age of 23 in Zurich, he was a German, like Lenz, A Nice Mean, this year I read A Nice Mean, I really like A Nice Mean in many ways, I read now this Sege Jung, this part I did not know about, that he was supporting the Nazis, but Georg Büchner, also Heinrich von Kleist is amazing, it's like in English literature, it's like reading, I went last year again, or 20 years ago to Rome to the cemetery, and go to Shelley and Keats, it's like poetry from Keats, I love John Keats, but there is so much craziness, I still saw his criticism, but also his lifestyle, still there is amazing stuff, from F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, I would recommend also, how life started, for me Petronius, it's like from, I did not read a lot of antics, but I love Sasso, and there is so little, one still has to hope, that sometimes some roles are found, and there is more poetry from Sasso, also from Petronius, it's amazing how progressive already, the minds and brains, and it influenced me also, from text and breaking bad, and photography is a lot of serious, because everyone can take one or two great photographs of anything, but the more you can take of the same, the more you can prove that it is there, that there is a lot of beauty there, one or two photographs of people matching others, I would not be, I would not have a special meaning, in my photography at all, I have enormous great masterpieces, in everything, I have my theatre god, which was Frank Castorf for some time, the important thing is to know that it is there, you just have to find it, you have to search it, kind of. I hope you enjoyed listening to my conversation with Stefan, if you would like to find out more about his work, and follow him on his Instagram, I added all the links to my website, which you can find in the description of this episode, once again thank you for listening to Artidote Podcast, and I will see you soon. Artidote Podcast www.artidotepodcast.com
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