Jaynus O'Donnell: Can you explain your interest in participation and interaction with others, especially as it pertains to performance art?

Kirsten Forkert: I feel uncomfortable with the term 'performance art' as it implies doing something in front of an audience. I don't like those implications in terms of spectacle and theatricality, and a kind of heroic role for the artist. And we all know the clichés: taking your clothes off, setting your hair on fire etc. It can be quite anti-intellectual, because it privileges live presence, the body, etc. I'm just sick of seeing those clichés played out again and again and I think they're pretty unexamined. The problem is that often festivals privilege that kind of work, and then it affects our understanding of performance art.

In terms of interactions with others, I'm interested in working with social relations as a material. This is partly because I'm interested in the politics of how we relate to each other: how do we speak, listen, pay attention, delegate authority or responsibility, how do we agree or disagree, how do we make decisions, etc. And of course how we relate to each other is affected by ideology; I think that we are living in a culture where we are not encouraged to make collective decisions (something I have noticed with teaching when I have given students collaborative projects). Nor are we encouraged to take responsibility for our actions when there isn't a boss, or teacher, or parent, or some kind of authority figure telling us to do so. I was just emailing Luis Jacob, an artist I just wrote a catalogue essay for, and he came up with this great phrase, "capitalist social relations".

I find Chantal Mouffe's ideas of 'agonism' quite inspiring. By agonism, she means situations where parties acknowledge that power relations exist (instead of denying them, which she says that liberal democracy does) but are still able to speak to each other. This is different from 'antagonism' where parties don't share any common ground at all, or 'consensus', where there is agreement but often at the exclusion of other points of view.

But also it comes out of being interested in involving others in the process of the work; because people often respond in interesting and unpredictable ways that I often find more interesting than if I were to strictly follow the parameters I have set. Also, in situations where I'm traveling, the audience has local knowledge that I don't have. For example, I did this project in Edmonton a few years ago that involved walking with a group of people around Edmonton, wearing dripping backpacks. At one point, one of the people in the group told us about a show suite for a loft condo. He said, let's go there. So we ended up checking out the loft condo as though we were potential buyers, wearing the dripping backpacks. This would not have happened without his participation. So in some ways it's about opening up my process to others, and collective authorship. For me this means 'unlearning' all those lessons about the autonomous art object I learned in art school (it's funny how there is still a kind of modernist dogma in art education).

But also I feel it's connected to my involvement in collaborations. I've been collaborating with John Dummett (the other half of 'visible art activity', he lives in the UK) for the past two years. Although our practices cross over in many ways, our collaboration is also about how we bounce off each other (coming from different cultural contexts). I've also collaborated with Peter Conlin, and am trying to organize a panel discussion on public art with Ellen Moffatt for an upcoming conference. I'm also involved in a collective called 'Counterpublics'.

I do find Nicolas Bourriaud's theories of 'relational aesthetics' useful in certain ways, but feel uncomfortable with how a lot of the work is very feel good and uncritical, and doesn't challenge its relationship to institutions and the market. I think that we're living in an 'experience economy' now (where lifestyles, trends and brand names function as commodities) and so some tough questions need to be asked about how some of the work just becomes lifestyle.

Jaynus O'Donnell: "Misplace" contains aspects of exploration, discovery, data collection and education. How do these parts of the project function within your greater art practice?

Kirsten Forkert: My practice is quite broad; I'm also an organizer, and a writer, and a teacher. I feel there are aspects of my practice that cross over into critical pedagogy, activism and certain forms of research (like social geography).

I'm interested in looking at how we experience time and place, and the city, etc. what we think of as a direct perceptual sense, and then looking at how this is affected by ideologies we've internalized. So that means looking at how we experience space in the city, what our habits are, etc. and how our behaviour is affected by the design and planning of city spaces (for example, we may never go to certain areas of the city even though we might live there our entire lives) and in general living in a capitalist society.

While there might be similarities with for example anthropology, I don't claim to be objective or to prove a theory. With Misplace, I became the guinea pig of my own experiment.

But it also does come down to creating and facilitating spaces for asking questions.