The making of the Sitterwerk edition «Alibi Alibi» by Sabrina Chou
Sabrina Chou, a Taiwanese-American artist from Los Angeles, California, lives in London, where she is a lecturer at Central Saint Martins. She recently completed her PhD at Oxford University with the title Constitutions, in which she presents a series of texts and documentation of artworks that attend to modes of constituting social bodies. Sabrina’s artistic practice unfolds in physical objects, spatial installations, and texts. The broader context of her work and writing is an investigation of structures and systems of belief, and how we perceive our surroundings.
Sabrina was a guest at the Sitterwerk Atelierhaus from July to October 2022. In this time working in St. Gallen, alongside new works, she produced the edition Alibi Alibi in collaboration with Sitterwerk Foundation. It is an edition that consists of two elements: a carved wooden salami cast in bronze and a St. Galler-Bratwurst, a typical local sausage, directly cast in bronze.
The following video shows the production of the edition Alibi Alibi, 2022.
When we met to talk about the edition, Sabrina opened the conversation with a quote by the media philosopher Vilém Flusser: “We get closer to this opposition hyle/morphe or ‘matter’/ ‘form’ if we translate the word matter as ‘stuff.’ The word stuff is both a noun and a verb (‘to stuff’). The material world is that which is stuffed into forms; it gives them a filling. This is much more plausible than the image of wood being cut into forms. For it demonstrates that the world of stuff only comes about when it is stuffed into something. The French word for filling is farce; this makes it possible to claim that, from a theoretical perspective, everything material in the world, everything made up of stuff, is a farce.”
Barbara Biedermann: That quote is closely related to your work because it talks about two different ways of finding form, and also about the semantic value that’s present in every form.
Sabrina Chou: While carving this series of sausages over time, I have been thinking of them as representations of abstract processes, or perhaps not even as representations. Rather, they embody these abstract processes, the stuffing of sausages, and, on another level, the fragmentation and division of bodies. I think of this in terms of social forms as well as in terms of actual bodies.
You are dealing with the sausage as an object in a very literal way, the sausage as a physical, stuffed object, and also in a metaphorical way, as a symbol for social processes.
I think through the material world. I am interested in political and social forms, specifically in thinking about them materially, because ultimately, we live in and deal with the material conditions of the present.
I’d like to follow up on what you said about the sausage being a representation of fragmented bodies. Would you say your work speaks about the body as a place where social and political issues are negotiated, and that the sausage is a representation of this?
What interests me is the body as a manifestation and grounds for the contestation or opposition of different forces. In my work the sausage doesn’t necessarily represent all of this, but I do think that it’s open to reflections on these questions. Earlier you mentioned the semantic value of form, which I think of in terms of the potential shifting of meanings. In my works, each time a sausage is formed or each time it is placed in a configuration with other elements, it enters a set of relations. That relationality is what opens it up to these other concepts.
In the edition you present two different forms that have now been cast in bronze: a carved wooden salami and a real sausage, a so-called St. Galler Bratwurst, that you bought here in St. Gallen at Metzgerei Schmid. Two different techniques were used for the casting: classical lost-wax casting and the direct casting method. Direct casting means that there is no silicon mold, but instead, a real object is put into the chamotte directly and then burned out to produce the negative form. Can you talk about the idea of combining these two techniques?
When I arrived and we started talking about the edition project, I was thinking about how to inhabit the form of an edition, or the multiple, and not just take it as a given. So, what I am excited about is that we have a stable element, which is the trussed salami, a lost-wax cast of a wooden sculpture that I carved especially for the edition, and an unstable element, which is always a unique element, the grilled bratwurst, that is cast directly. Each of the bratwursts is different from the others.
When we first talked about combining these two different types of sausages, we mainly spoke about the differences that would be manifested in weight, or appearance—in an aesthetic instability, so to speak. But the material process itself also involved instability. The direct casting turned out to be far more complicated because there were more uncontrollable steps.
Yes, we thought that casting the real sausage would streamline the production, but it wasn’t necessarily true. There are many things in the process that I couldn’t control. For instance, I could choose the raw bratwurst forms, but once you grill them, the forms shift—and then another time once they are cast. The specific shape cannot be determined.
Finding good sausages was quite a journey, and along the way, you saw—and also ate—many St. Galler bratwursts. The first surprise was that a cold, grilled sausage doesn’t look that appealing anymore.
We tried different approaches to casting the real sausages. One was buying some grilled bratwursts and immediately shock-freezing them. But that didn’t work because they shrink in the freezing process, and then they don’t look so delicious anymore. So, the next approach was to buy raw bratwursts. We grilled them directly in the casting workshop, and then immediately put them into the chamotte. As the chamotte sets, the bratwurst is still warm and is not a rigid form yet. Putting it into the chamotte helps set the form.
And then comes the moment when you have to relinquish control. You can’t see into the form, and after the pouring, you unpack the work and you see how the bronze took shape inside the form. How was that for you?
Definitely surprising. Bronze is a very special material. It has its own sort of liveness. It’s so contingent, since it depends on so many things, like the form of what you are casting, the volume, and the temperature, which also changes because naturally we poured more than one. The first one is hotter and the bronze then cools with each casting. And then the most exciting thing is that the colors are so different.
For the two different types of sausages, you chose two different production methods and two different patinas as well.
It was very interesting: all of the bratwursts had this kind of reddish look, and the salamis came out kind of blackened. So, the patina eventually emphasized each of these aspects, the contingent results of the material process.
There are many processes of translation in this work. It starts from carving a salami in wood, thus imitating a real salami, and then casting it in bronze. The real bratwursts, on the other hand, which were raw when you first bought them, you then grilled, cast, and kept raw as bronze objects—with a raw-cast patina. Is there something you want to underscore with this?
The patina reflects the differences between the two. With the project as a whole, I was interested in these different moments of translation through material and form, and the patina adds another layer of transformation.
All these shifts of material and form also come with a translation that has to do with language, with accurately describing the actual state of the sausages throughout the production process. We had a lot of confusion and laughter when we talked about them during the project.
There’s also the humor of the leaving the bronze, grilled bratwurst in a raw-cast patina.
Humor is a strong element in your work. Are you playing with the sense that some people might look at the sausage as a silly, funny object?
Once in a studio visit, I spoke with someone about humor in my practice, also in relation to the humors of the body and how they are all fluid, similar to the way things move in my work. Through using humor, I don’t affix a particular status or a particular symbolism to objects, but instead, meanings and interpretations and experiences can shift. With the sausage, of course, I think that the initial encounter with it is possibly humorous. But I think—especially when the sausages are installed with other elements—that in relation to those other elements and in relation to each other, they can transform and become something else as well, or undergo an ontological change of state.
When you present your works you usually arrange them in spatial settings and you don’t present just one single object. Within this way of presenting the works, it’s fascinating how you can fill an entire room with only little bits of sausages.
For me, it’s always about how to inhabit and work with space, and also about intervening in and challenging space. As with most sculpture, the space around the object is also the work.
That leads us to the title of the edition.
The title is Alibi Alibi. One thing that I have been thinking about in the last couple of years is form’s alibi. In a text about Micha Zweifel’s work for an exhibition catalogue (Ringgummimatte, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Luzern, Spector Books, 2021), I wrote that form’s alibi is a deferral or deformation, and I was thinking about when things are fungible. I guess that’s part of this, that I am examining what social forms are, or can be. But to come back to the edition: I was thinking about the fact that we have these two bodies, and they are both of a kind or of a sort, but they are also so different. So, while they can take each other’s place, on what level can they do so, to what extent can they represent such types, such bodies? And it’s also a reflection on the material process of how they are cast: lost-wax, or lost-bratwurst. With the alibi, there’s the idea of a stand-in or, in a trial, a proof of your presence.
But also a proof of your absence—of being absent from the place of the crime. It contains both.
Yes. And beyond reflecting on the casting process, the sausages point somewhere else.
Are the two cast sausages also alibiing the brutality and violence involved in the process of making sausages, in other words the killing of animals?
I think the violence is implicitly there. I think any abstraction can be a violent process, because it’s so reductive, and, in some cases, it can take away differentiation or specificity. And fragmentation can also be a violent process. But, while I think this aspect of violence is present in the work, I am also looking to find ways that violence can be turned on its head.
To think about abstraction as a positive gesture?
And to think about how violence is used or, for example, with dismemberment, about how the space of fragmentation might be generative or have a communicative potential.
Your sculptures and installed arrangements have an ambiguous status, between aesthetic proposition, functional use, and absurd adaptation, as you describe it. I think it’s also this ambiguity that makes them so powerful.
It’s also about futility. That’s one possible effect.
Images
1: Dead Deferral, 2020. Carved stone pine, pvc-coated wire, brushed steel. Photo: Katlin Deér. 2: Crush, 2021. Carved stone pine, string, found cushions. Photo: Katlin Deér. 3: Platonic Assembly, 2022. Carved stone pine, PVC-coated wire, found metal structure, found cardboard boxes. 4 and 5: Amendment (II and III), 2022. Carved stone pine, pine timber. 6 and 7: Sabrina Chou is putting the string on the carved Salami. Photos: Katlin Deér. 8: St. Galler Bratwurst. 9: Alibi Alibi, 2022. Bronze, string. Photo: Katlin Deér.
Videoportrait by Jiří Makovec, www.jirimakovec.com, Instagram: jiri.makovec
The production of the edition was realized in collaboration with the Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen.
Supported by Kulturförderung Kanton St.Gallen and Bundesamt für Kultur BAK.
