SA: For Speech Matters – the group show curated by Katarina Gregos for the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale – you built up a wooden extension to the original space using materials left over from the last Architecture Biennial. You often re-use materials that you find in situ. Is this just a cheaper, more practical solution or are there other reasons for it?
TK: Using recycled materials isn’t a must or a dogma, but of course our present, high-consumption mode of production is not what I aim for. Re-using materials – sometimes considered ‘waste’ – is something I quite like for several reasons: ecologically, to produce less waste; economically, as you mention, to save money; and last not least it is a nice contradiction to the notion of artistic ‘values’ with high price tags.

SA: You carved portraits and scenes relating to current political events in the wooden floor. How did you select the subjects?
TK: My idea was to create a work that generates its intensity from the contradiction between open structure and sinister content. I built a sort of romantic place in amongst the greenery; a sub-pavilion and an anti-palazzo that invites people to have a rest and stay for a while… but when you enter the space you become aware that it’s heavily loaded with social problems and political conflict. Like real life: desire meets reality. In the floor-cut I focused on the fact that sections of the extreme right in Europe have managed to draw near to the centres of power. Within the last decade this has happened in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and France. Some European governments are now dependent on the votes of the extreme right in parliament – with devastating consequences. This trend is represented in my piece through portraits of conservative and right-wing politicians. Another focus is the roll-back on the ‘freedom of speech’, censorship and media manipulation. The Danish anti-Islam cartoons, the new Hungarian media law and others.

SA: A ‘Speaker’s Corner’ was set up as part of your pavilion. How was it activated?
TK: Everybody visiting my Pavilion for Revolutionary Free Speech can use it – but because there’s no amplifier it needs personal power to actually get heard if you want to make a statement. I quite like the fact that my megaphone sculpture can be used in both ways: to speak and to listen, for example, to what people are talking about at the entrance of the Swiss Pavilion.

SA: I saw some Italian personalities among those present in the woodcut. I was then considering the fact that the Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters without Borders in 2010 ranked Italy at number forty-nine together with Burkina Faso. And right now the attempt to stop the anti-phone-tapping law drafted by the Berlusconi government is a serious issue. Being an Italian who’s concerned about the situation in my country, I can’t avoid thinking how appropriate it would have been to bring the issue to the attention of the international art audience on this occasion…
TK: I wasn’t aware of that when I was ‘digging’ up my floor. But it totally fits because there’s no ‘freedom of speech’ under state surveillance or wiretapping. It’s a shame I didn’t know about it.

SA: You lived in Florence last year as an artist on the Villa Romana fellowship, and you often come to Italy. How do you see what’s going on in Italy and the engagement of Italian artists in political and social debate?
TK: I don’t know the Italian art scene very well, but I am surprised about the circumstances for example of the Italian Pavilion in Venice. Vittorio Sgarbi’s approach to contemporary art seems clear: he wants to demonstrate how bad contemporary art is. The disturbing or irritating thing is that he was able to find some prominent support from intellectuals like Agamben… It seems that the art scene for the most part does accept the whole show with him. This is the corresponding attack of the Berlusconi government – against the poor, the migrants, the justice or education sector – but here the attack is on contemporary art and the cultural sector. I think there should be a far stronger stand and opposition against this policy. But somehow I had the feeling that the Italian cultural field is unlikely to move from its inactivity and tends to remain more or less calm.

SA: I find the intense physical effort you put into disfiguring and reconfiguring spaces very interesting; the way you carve floors to turn them into matrices that represent historical and political issues. And I was wondering how political engagement and activism influenced your artistic practice.
TK: The physical aspect of my work is a matter of fact somehow. Initially, when I started my floor-cuts, it was just important to have more resistance in comparison to charcoal drawings I’d made. My self-perception as a young boy was dominated by a feeling of physical weakness and I think this was deeply inscribed in my subconscious. To reach my physical limits and to exhaust my energy by working on my projects seems a necessary challenge and a way of overcoming this feeling. Later, as a young adult, I got involved in left-wing and environmental activism for a decade or so. Empowering myself through direct action… These years in part shaped my personality. But working as an artist is something different – doing art is not doing politics even if your work reflects social and political issues. They are other ways of dealing with those issues.

SA: Straight after the Danish Pavilion I visited the Swiss one by Thomas Hirschhorn. When I read the text the artist had written about his installation, The Crystal of Resistance, I liked how the concepts were expressed in a very simple and direct way. These included the question of how to involve a ‘non-exclusive public’; art as a form of resistance; the possibility of the work being frontal in order to avoid the viewer moving backward and gaining distance. I think somehow you share similar concerns. How do you see art’s capacity for wide communication, resistance and frontality?
TK: Well, for me, Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation is one of the strongest works in Venice. Maybe our approach to art has something in common? I don’t know. But if the environment I work in is unfair, violent and hierarchic… my work might become resistant and sometimes even frontal. At least I try to reflect the environment and the world we live in, and the transformations I long for are towards the implementation of more social equality and less use of violence and power. Of course art can communicate this; it has to. To what extent this might lead to broader reflections or transformations within society is another open question.

SA: Since you mention the context you work in, I’d like to ask you about After the Butcher – the space you run together with your wife Franziska Böhmer – and particularly about the participation of this space in the Based in Berlin exhibition. But perhaps I should ask you to say something about this project space first…
TK: After the Butcher is a not-for-profit exhibition space. Our main focus is to present those artists we personally think should be shown more often. And we encourage the artists we invite to develop new works relating to our space in one way or another. I consider After the Butcher one of my on-going art projects. I very much hope to be able to continue with it for many years to come. It should be experimental, fresh, critical and daring. When After the Butcher was invited to Based in Berlin as a ‘sub-curator’ this year, we decided to ask the artists we had already worked with whether to participate and collaborate or not. While we shared the critical attitude that was taken by the artist initiative Haben und Brauchen, we also felt that just saying ‘no’ to participation would be too easy. We at least wanted to try to find a way that would make taking part make sense, if under protest, for it is and remains a controversial or even bad exhibition. After some very intense discussions we came up with a concept for our participation: six different groups of artists conceived six time-based performative projects. Besides that, the third floor of the Kunstwerke remained empty, only one piece was shown there: Allegory of Government, a photo of the Mayor of Berlin by the artists Clegg & Guttmann.

SA: What’ s your next project?
TK: I would like to realize my project A LIGHTHOUSE FOR LAMPEDUSA! in the form of a life-size model in Lampedusa itself. This project was set up in 2008 for a show at dispari&dispari project in Reggio Emilia, Italy. I then presented it at Villa Romana in Florence, in the exhibition Transient Spaces in Naples and Berlin, at the 4th International Architecture Biennial, IABR in Rotterdam, at Mediation, the Biennale for Contemporary Art in Poznan, and this year at Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi again in Florence.

SA: What's the difference of showing this project at art-galleries like dispari & dispari or Palazzo Strozzi or in Lampedusa itself?
TK: I think it's a huge difference showing it in Lampedusa. It would interact more 'directly' with the social and political situation on the ground. The problem is very actual and for everybody there more or less physically present. On the other hand Lampedusa is a place you rarely find contemporary art. The questions "to what extend can art intervene in such a social conflict?" or "Can art help to encourage emanicipatory activities and reflections here?" might find interesting and different answers if the project is realized in Lampedusa - on site, in the conflict-zone. I think the project could even develop a huge positive potential and impact for the island - and for the public awareness of the conflict as a whole. I hope the installation will create a place of social relevance - a place where people from Lampedusa will like to meet with each other – a place of exchange of ideas, interaction and learning from each other. At the same time I hope its light will be an orientation on sea but foremost I hope it will be received as a symbolic welcoming sign.

SA: What do you need most to realize the project?
TK: Most importantly right now is to find a local partner, an art-institution, a museum or so... that wants to develop this on-site project with me, that can do negotiations with the municipality and organize the funding. I very much hope this will be possible.