Alex Bennett: Though your work involves sculp­tur­al assem­blages of extreme­ly diverse mate­r­i­al, it’s curi­ous to know that film was your ini­tial inter­est. You even cre­at­ed your own Super 8 films. You’ve men­tioned Tony Conrad’s ​“Yellow Movies” as a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence for you; to start, can we talk about this inter­est and the migra­tion of par­tic­u­lar principles/​effects of film in your sculp­tur­al work?

Daiga Grantina: During my time at the art school in Hamburg I lived in a small attic flat. I worked in my liv­ing room, which was a lit­tle exten­sion of the kitchen. I liked the con­ceal­ment of this space, its den­si­ty. And there was an idea of a com­pos­ite between the filmed and the filmic mate­r­i­al. I made a space encom­pass­ing assem­blage that exist­ed only on and for the film. Like mak­ing a mold for the time-mate­r­i­al-enti­ty of the film. In Paris I worked in an even small­er attic room. It was here that the turn­ing point between pro­jec­tion and sculp­ture hap­pened. I stopped using a cam­era and pro­ject­ed snip­pets of exist­ing films to lay­er it with sculp­tur­al ele­ments in the space. The pro­ject­ed light cones defined the entire order of forms. Maybe it was a way to achieve more dis­tance from my sur­round­ings and to use the tiny rooms for a process of pupa­tion into a space of imag­i­na­tion. Somehow film was part of the small room; the attic room was an exten­sion into an inside world. The ​“Yellow Movies” can be a metaphor for an aug­ment­ed sens­ing and a joc­u­lar phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal approach to pro­jec­tion. Seeing that work shift­ed the way I per­ceived the idea of the medi­um. I want­ed to make some­thing more bare medi­um-wise.

AB: Conrad cre­at­ed a bor­der, with­in which a tem­po­ral­i­ty emerged — the ten­sion of stag­ing and mobil­i­ty is use­ful when con­sid­er­ing your work. I’m inter­est­ed in your approach to light as a pos­si­ble con­nec­tive tis­sue or imma­te­r­i­al spine through larg­er, decon­struct­ed assem­blages. How do you per­ceive and han­dle light as a struc­ture as well as a sym­bol? I’m think­ing of the light cone, for instance, and its capac­i­ty to behave as a sus­pend­ed space…

DG: Light is part and par­cel of how I under­stand sculp­ture. As some­thing that com­pletes form and can be form itself. In Venice I fol­lowed both of these strings in par­al­lel. I uncov­ered a large pal­la­di­an win­dow to have direct sun­light insti­gate and com­plete the process of lay­ing out the pieces. And I made light shapes that exist­ed in rela­tion to the sun­light and also by them­selves, depend­ing on the hour of the day. Rotation and a con­stant slid­ing of the ground were part of han­dling the light and inher­ent to the sculp­tures. So light is not exact­ly a sym­bol or a through-and-through sym­bol. I like light to be its own dimen­sion and embody all of mat­ter.

AB: Your manip­u­la­tion of organ­ic and syn­thet­ic mate­r­i­al undoes the fix­i­ty of its mate­r­i­al to pri­or­i­tize a gen­er­a­tive, mor­ph­ing sys­tem. ​“For What Eats Around Itself,” your new insti­tu­tion­al show at the New Museum, you refer to the prop­er­ties of lichen and the organism’s dual­i­ty: the fun­gus as pro­tec­tive lay­er, the algae as pho­to­syn­the­sis gen­er­a­tor. Their coex­is­tence and self-repli­ca­tion devel­ops its own organ­ic sur­face across all kinds of ter­rain. How did you choose to allude to the char­ac­ter­is­tics of lichen, both in the con­struc­tion of and mate­ri­als used, in ​“What Eats Around Itself”?

DG: My friend Athena gave me a dry branch with lichen, and it was dec­o­rat­ing the kitchen cup­board for a while until my cats start­ed gnaw­ing it and I had to pick up the pieces from all over the floor. The lichen was some­times leafy and some­times more bush-like. I found out that these kinds of growths were macrolichen. Meaning that scale in lichen is a ques­tion of form. Which I think is true for sculp­ture too. How is size deter­mined by shape? I often felt that a work makes itself, a swirl that seems inher­ent in its line, like a fre­quen­cy. So that self-repli­ca­tion is not adding or join­ing pieces but it is a ques­tion of mat­ter as such. The mat­ter is the join­ing.
I had in mind an under­ly­ing organo­met­ric struc­ture. A struc­ture that would not nec­es­sar­i­ly hold things phys­i­cal­ly togeth­er but still trans­mit my ideas of sym­bio­sis and con­ti­nu­ity. I used the over­lock seam to carve large pieces of fab­ric into shapes. It is a very strong seam that works more like book bind­ing because it joins the edges from one side. I didn’t assem­ble pieces of fab­ric but used one sin­gle piece so the seams are fix­ing a fold. The uni­ty of the piece is vis­i­ble with the inter­rup­tions of the seam. The seam is a mark­er of space. And it is pulling open anoth­er space. I chose a very dense fab­ric so that there would be no drap­ing with the weight when hung. The seam takes the sole respon­si­bil­i­ty for how the piece will take shape. The pieces work as glyphs in the larg­er pic­ture and car­ry ele­ments on the inside that extend inward out of the seams. They are float­ing hinges. I am inter­est­ed in lichen for they are the hinges between our soil and the atmos­phere. They make the atmos­phere.

AB: I won­der if lan­guage is one way of coor­di­nat­ing the inter­play of mate­r­i­al; you seem to engage with lan­guage for its influ­ence upon form as well as its own mal­leabil­i­ty of mean­ing. For ​“What Eats Around Itself” you ref­er­ence Rainer Maria Rilke’s rela­tion of ros­es to eye­lids: ​“Rose, oh pure con­tra­dic­tion, desire / to be no one’s sleep under so many / lids.” While in the much ear­li­er exhi­bi­tion, ​“Legal Beast Language” (2014) at Galerie Joseph Tang, the title ref­er­ences a glos­sary in Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String (1995), which col­lects rede­f­i­n­i­tions and invents new terms (such as CLOTH-EATERS). Following Rilke, the dynamism pro­voked by both sleep and vital­i­ty, weari­ness and excess, is inter­est­ing; how do you like to use lan­guage? Is there an impulse to decen­ter or inter­ro­gate fig­u­ra­tion and the anthropomorphic?

DG: At this moment I am expe­ri­enc­ing very close­ly the becom­ing of lan­guage in the ear­ly stages with my daugh­ter. It is imbed­ded in ges­ture and action of the body. It is sound and song, ges­ture and dance. If ges­ture and fig­u­ra­tion extend from the same line, then maybe cadence is what links lan­guage and fig­u­ra­tion, so fig­u­ra­tion can bring res­o­nance into being as much as a sound line. I would like to con­nect this thought back to lichen. Can we speak of a musi­cal scale in lichen? Is scale the con­nect­ing ele­ment in sign sys­tems? The sign sys­tem of lichen would then be a pos­si­ble cat­e­go­ry of lan­guages, a lan­guage of trans­fig­u­ra­tion maybe. I am inter­est­ed in Ben Marcus and Rainer Maria Rilke for how they exceed the iden­ti­ty of lan­guage. Through their work I can read lan­guage as part of a larg­er sign sys­tem to unlock expres­sions of the heart.