[ ELI SUDBRACK ] All of this,
the work in general,
it's about being free.
You should express yourself the way you want it to be.
Go after things in your life that bring you pleasure.
Gay politics, human right politics, whatever,
it's always about being free.
We're making a series of 58 drawings
for this art fair in Sao Paulo.
So this was my proposal email.
Me and Christophe are making cyclops trannies portraits.
Trannies– transvestites– portraits.
[ CHRISTOPHE HAMAIDE-PIERSON ] We had the concept,
"Okay, let's make all these portrait of cyclop trannies."
We had to work separately.
One of these few project where, actually,
I did 20-something drawings,
and he did, like, 20 other, like, something drawing.
and then they were all, like, framed together
and displayed on the wall.
I always like this thing of leaving your ego behind
and merge with other people.
I think that's something quite magical.
I love this idea of collaboration.
In 2005, we were invited to be part of this big show
for the L.A. MOCA.
This is the first ever project that we did together, full-on.
We conceive everything together,
so that was always driven by this collaborative dynamic.
We spent three months in L.A.,
and it was also during the Bush administration
and there was all these thing going on with Scientology.
And so we decided to connect all this different information
for that installation.
We decided to turn all of the museum into a disco
and wanted the disco to actually function as a nightclub
during the course of the show.
[ ELI SUDBRACK ] This disco was an homage
to the birth of gay rights in America,
which, a lot of it happened in the disco space,
like this communion, you know, of people of the same sex,
and, like, quite often, very hedonistic,
but also, there was a lot of politics happening
at that– in that environment.
That was the first time
we actually worked with this tranny symbol.
We want to turn everybody into trannies,
so we gave out the tranny masks
with these pictures that another friend of ours took
of these trannies from Paris.
These masks–they have this special lenses
that multiply the amount of light spots.
People were fascinated,
because once they put the mask on,
they would see all these different colors
and different shapes.
[indistinct conversations]
- Remember I was doing, like, the thing with–
pumping the ink from the thing? - Yeah, yeah.
- That's what this was.
- Oh. - That's where that came.
Can you tell which ones are mine
and which ones are Christophe's?
- Um... - I think it's a bit obvious.
But I'm not sure people--
- This is Christophe. - Yeah.
- This is you. - Yeah.
- Christophe, Christophe... - Yeah.
- Christophe. You?
- Yeah.
The thing is, I-- - You're more...
- Yeah, I'm more...
- Intricate. - Intricate.
This one is in the catalog.
Actually, this was the very first one I made.
- Oh, yeah? - Now I remember.
This was the very first one, the one I made here.
And then...
[ ELI SUDBRACK ] When I was three years old,
I was fascinated by this magazine
which was called Disneylandia,
which is "Disneyland" in Portuguese.
My mother would read it for me,
it would be gone in five minutes,
and I would get really frustrated.
And then my father taught me
to cut the characters out of the magazine,
put them on cardboard, and I could make my own stories.
And that evolved along the years
to Marvel superheroes, especially the X-men.
So I would cut the little characters out of the magazine
and the power rays or the architecture.
And I had a board, and I would lay on my bed
and start playing with them and create my own stories.
[indistinct dialogue]
I think it's a lot related to the wallpaper.
It's the same sort of flat-surface approach
to the imagery.
My father was really my creative connection.
When I was born, he was already 60 years old.
He was very social,
but my memory of him is this guy who's always at home.
My father was a general from the army.
He was not in favor of the military dictatorship.
He was forced to resign.
He was also a literature critic and a poet
besides being a dentist.
He would constantly tell me,
"Oh, my god, you have to do something with color.
you're such a colorist."
My mother was, like, quite the opposite.
Super-conservative, but she didn't have much education.
My father had been rewriting his last book forever.
He would be typing little pieces, different words,
and pasting those words on top of the old words.
His last book is a whole collage
of different words that he'd keep replacing.
[indistinct conversation]
He spent a whole year in '68–
the year I was born, which was the year
that the dictatorship got more oppressive—at home.
A lot of what I do nowadays is due to him.
And to my mother too, both of them.
It was a very good combination, in fact.
[alarm beeping]
[motor whirring]
This was the very first drawing I made for the show at Deitch.
The core concept of that show was demolition.
We were looking at a few different demolition sources
related to demolishing the city, because at that point,
a lot of the Long Island City and the Brooklyn neighborhoods
were being demolished
to give birth to these big high-rises.
Me and Christophe,
we were interested in the demolition sites,
and we were actually making a lot of installations
which replicated that imagery.
These are sketches from that show,
and a lot of these things
are actually things that we'd never end up producing,
Like this.
This was the DJ booth
made of all the trashed wood with plastic ribbons.
This was supposed to be a space that you go in.
There's, like, a staircase here, and it had a little door.
and it had– this is a sausage,
and these are french fries over here.
I don't remember, like,
why we came up with this french fries and sausage thing.
It was–I was sort of obsessed about that at one point.
Everything had a look of construction,
so there's, like, a tarp– Like, a blue tarp–
on top of the trash wood structure here.
So we create sort of, like, a shanty house structure.
We created this neon box.
it was like a hole,
and you would put your head through
and then you would see your face reflected.
You had all these neons around your face.
It was like a one-way mirror.
From outside, it was actually transparent,
so you would see this person's face
with all these neons around, flickering and stuff.
This is a zine that we made for that show.
And this was, like–
we had, like, 16 different people working with us.
A lot of our friends from Brazil were working in the show,
and we were giving out this zine,
so everybody had one or two pages for this collaboration.
There was one facade
that struck both me and Christophe:
these pink stones and, like, gray plastic shingles.
We spent two months collecting all the trash wood
from all these houses that were being demolished in that area
to use in that installation.
At the same time, we connected with Kenny Scharf.
And then we remembered nuke bombs–
paintings he used to make in the '80s–
and then I said,
"What if we turn one of his nuke bombs into a neon?"
This place was right on the water,
and it had this most idyllic view of Manhattan
right in front of you.
I said, "Let's nuke Manhattan."
"Let's put the bomb right in front of the skyline."
"The history of the city is being demolished."
"Let's point that out, and then let's point out
that people should also make their own history in the city."
Related to that, we brought another subject
which we were working on for a while,
which is the tranny, the transgender image,
and we used that as another symbol of demolition:
demolition of identity, a demolition of your own body.
We had this giant doll with a woman body,
but one side was a man face; other side was a woman face.
We wanted to reuse that doll
and to somehow demolish her as well,
because that's something from the past
that we wanted to connect this demolition idea–
we wanted to demolish our own work.
So we broke her apart,
as if the Brooklyn facade had just popped right onto her.
I can never remember which witch is the one
that is dead in the beginning of Wizard of Oz,
which you just see the shoes.
The west, the east-- I don't know.
A lot of what we make starts by writing
or ideas or words or lists of things I need to do,
and it's like creating a universe, somehow.
Working together, it's very–
it's lonely, because I'm– what happens that, you know,
I'm at my studio in New York,
and Christophe is in his studio in Paris.
and then we exchange emails.
I have an idea for a show, and I write–
I describe this idea in the email.
And then he writes back to me,
and then he gives me his thoughts about it
and I give my thoughts about his thoughts.
So we're always, like, kind of exchanging emails
about each other's vision or ideas for a certain show.
[percussive rhythm]
[ CHRISTOPHE HAMAIDE-PIERSON ] We were, in some ways,
meant to work together.
I think we have, like, the same sort of view on life, on art.
Eli is one person; I'm somebody else. [laughs]
And we have our own differences,
and I guess that's the great thing about collaboration, also,
is to have those two differences connect.
[indistinct conversations]
[ ELI SUDBRACK ] I think there's a strategy
in what we make,
which is for everything to become one.
the viewer become one with the installation.
The core of what we make,
it's not object; it's energy.
You know, we create this energy,
and then this energy, it's there.
It happens in one moment, and then it's gone.
You can't save that energy. You can't sell that energy.
You can share that energy in that moment.
But you can't really take it somewhere else.
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