When I first came across Lilli’s artworks the first time I was mesmerized by them because they radiated powerfulness but connected with vulnerability and the more works I looked at and the deeper I sunk into the world of the works, the stronger that feeling got, which touched me deeply. They are open and honest and moving to the core.

For the following I asked Lilli if she wants to do an interview with me:

Luna Maluna Gri: Tell me a bit about yourself and your work.

Lilli Brontë Falzoi: I’m Lilli Brontë Falzoi, I’m a painter and also an educator. I studied at the University of Arts in Berlin and I graduated last year with a very wonderful duo of two painters; Nadira Husain and Marina Naprushkina. I’m a figurative painter and I have been for most of my practice. I always think a lot about this possibility of figuration gearing towards abstraction in painting, how painting can be innovative and creative and also sometimes a little dissecting with what we perceive as human figure and the power of that. I think there is so much potential in looking at painting as a conceptual space, as a space for projection, as a space for interpretation and as something that plays a little bit with your perceiving of truth and space. I have a big love for the technical aspect of painting. I have always been in love with the practice, with the embodiment of the practice, with the taking up of space of that practice. You can also look at it from an angle where you can criticize the ecological aspect of storage and transportation, not being able to rent spaces in which you can paint, it’s definitely a practice that needs a lot of space but I like that, I like that invitation to move your body in front of a canvas. In painting I found a ways to translate the theory that catches my attention but I have not found anywhere else. I work a lot in that way that I read interesting literary pieces, interesting queer feminist articles and theory and then I try to find a painterly language and I think there is something really powerful in that moment of something that is probably perceived by many as ‘oh I can relate’ or I understand, I feel seen, I feel a voice, I feel like I read something that I also know and then to find a non – linearity in painting for those thoughts.

LMG: It’s interesting to see what can be done with painting and also go out of the borders.

LBF: Yes I like that a lot and I think, on a philosophical level but also on just a materiality level, it’s so interesting to think about this expansion of a room, of a conceptually bordered space, you have the limitations and to burst them and go beyond them and maybe also lay them bare. Lay bare how constructed this is, how we are limiting ourselves to certain kinds of borders, just because that’s the norm. To burst that a little, to go beyond to make the figures uncomfortable in these four little lines and make them fill out the space. Either theoretically with your thoughts and with your gaze or also sometimes quite literally in putting something outside of the canvas that interacts with the canvas, putting painterly elements or making the painting a little bit more into an installation.

LMG: Does the process of painting also have a performative aspect for you?

LBF: I love performance and I feel like there is so much power in performance, I think it’s one of my favourite art forms to look at, to experience, but I don’t do it, I’m not a performer. I feel like that’s the beauty for me in painting, that it’s not about me anymore. It’s not about my body, it’s not about my embodiment in this world, it’s not that I get to become the canvas but I get to be not looked at. I like to make the people aware of their bodily presence, so sometimes maybe that is a performative aspect.

LMG: I feel like a lot of people in our daily lives are not that aware, like presently aware of their body that much.

LBF: But I think that’s exactly that thing that interests me because there are some people who get to not be aware a lot and then there are certain people who have to be aware at all times because they’re always being looked at, always politicised. If you look at flinta bodies for example, who move somewhere between hyper-visibility, always being very made aware of ‘you are moving as a flinta body’, and then also being always overlooked. It’s not a balance, you are moving in these two extremes.

LMG: How and why did you start creating art?

LBF: Art was always in my life, it was always something that I needed, looked for and I feel like this is just a lens that I carry within me, the spaces that I was moving in, the friends that I was surrounding myself with, there were always projects and then obviously Art University. I always wanted to find some meaning, find a voice and I feel like painting is the way I can communicate the best.

LMG: What role does creating art play for you?

LBF: I had a very long talk yesterday with a friend of mine who works in theater and we talked a lot about this and I think deep down in the core I believe in the power and in the meaning of political art, of communal art, of aesthetic experiences, experiences that widen your perspective or put you out of your own perspective. I think art has something so deeply connecting, you are being invited to take part in a dialog. There’s definitely also thresholds, like there’s a certain language that you need to speak sometimes, there’s outfits you need to wear, there’s money you need to have, there’s a habitus you need to carry. It’s definitely so exclusionary, very many aspects of it all, but I feel like that’s maybe just part of the art market, of the money area and not of art. When I think of the powerful potential to voice things, to make things visible, to make people aware of certain beauties or certain horrors. It can be so soft. The other day I was sitting in a gallery and I was watching this hour long art film about mushrooms and I was deeply engaged and so at peace with that moment. It’s so powerful in it’s potential to involve your eyes, make yourself aware of what you’re seeing, make yourself aware of that what you are seeing on a daily basis is not the only way to see the world. There are so many things that are happening in our world and I think art is very important to be engaged. If you look at developments of our world, it’s very often fueled by efficiency or hatred or capitalism or patriarchal values, values of a colonizer and eurocentricity and in art there is so much room to have different value system at work. It’s a huge invitation to look and to listen and to be and to come together. I think there’s a lot of approaches towards things that come from an artist’s perspective that are very valuable if not fully needed for our survival.

LMG: What does your creating process look like?

LBF: I don’t think I have “a” creating process. That’s something that I learned pretty late in life. My creating process is always there. I look, I see, I talk, I read all the time, I want to understand and I want to learn. I’m very happy if I’m invited to find new little ideas. Sometimes it’s little words or I hear something and I’m immediately writing it down, that is obviously not me going to the art studio in the morning, making myself a coffee, putting the brushes in order and starting but that also leads up to it. There I also had to learn with time how my educational practice is also part of my artistic practice. I work a lot with kids, mostly with some who learn german at the moment, so it’s not so much the art teaching that I had the opportunity to do but you need to think; how do I bring things across. How do I make things approachable, understandable and what might be interesting. Sometimes it’s there that I get such new ideas of a simpler way or of a more direct way, ‘cause I also think it’s so outdated to make everything hard to understand just to keep it on some pedestal. In general I read a lot and there are all these little drawings that I put into them when I something interesting catches my eye and I mark the words that interest me. Then I go into the sketch and I sketch a lot, I work so much with drawing, I love drawing. Drawings are so powerful in their easiness, in their fastness, you can throw them out your window, you can send them anywhere, you can hide them so easily, hidden messages. I then start painting from the sketches very often. Sometimes I also use a little bit of photography because we are living in a world with a lot of digital images and I don’t wanna say I’m outside of that so obviously also Insta and all the other platforms are forming my aesthetics, my visuality but I rarely work fully with photo. It’s more like sketches and words and then I have a huge wall of everything pinned up and somewhere between is a canvas and I always work on multiple things at once, because I work very slow. I work in layers and then I let the layers dry and I work on top of them and very thin. It’s a longer process.

LMG: What inspires you?

LBF: Definitely my community, just people, that’s so cliché and cheesy, but I love cheesiness. People just inspire me, I’ve such inspiring friends, I’m like wow! The people around me, the community around me, the fights they’re fighting, the love they’re giving, the vulnerability they’re allowing in their lives, it inspires me, not only as a person but also as an artist. Theory. I don’t think there is anything more inspiring and more amazing in my life than reading and talking about what you are reading, being in a seminar and talk about a page for 90 minutes, that’s wild to me. Other artistic practices also definitely inspire me. I’m very happy that I live in a city where there is always something amazing going on, always a new space, a new invitation, a new demonstration or a new protest. There are so many movements that one can join and that inspires me, the potential and power of that. Colours. I walk through this life and I’m seeing all these shades of blue in one day and I’m wilded out by that and honestly I know it’s weird to say because I live in such a big city but nature, nature inspires me a lot. I never lived outside of the city for longer and still, even though I probably cannot name more than five trees, it inspires me so much. Just being there and looking and understanding that’s where it comes from, this is what made people want to create because nature is so beautiful. It’s so humbling and so interesting also. There everything intersects, it’s like a symbiosis of everything. You have a tree bark and you wanna understand how it grew and you see all these layers and then I layer the things on my canvas and I try to imitate certain kind of structures and surfaces and materialities.

LMG: What is your experience with the art world?

LBF: As I said I was lucky enough or somehow I managed to get accepted in an Art University. I was young, I got accepted and I didn’t have my first hardship already there. Then in Art University you kind of feel like you’re acting in this parallel sphere where everything is possible. I grew up in an absolute wild patchwork family with a lot of fathers around or not around, let’s say it like that, and a lot of art available. My mum is a writer and she was a single mum of three children trying to somehow survive monetarily of art and it did not work. So, from a very early age on I knew that this is hustle to the max and that surviving within the art world is almost impossible. I studied art, also with the option to become a teacher because I knew I needed not only the monetary aspect but also to not be in that somehow very toxic scene and space all the time. When I graduated I was very quickly very aware of how hard it is. I continued to work at the Art University as a tutor. That is also so inspiring and I love being engaged with other people who just want to work on their own practice and have these long talks about their practice but Art University pays unbelievably bad. You either get a gallery or you don’t have money, that’s my perceived reality of it. I love off – spaces because they wanna break that apart. There is such a huge discrepancy of artists need to survive and art as an investment. I feel like there is an art world or an art scene where there’s a lot of interest in communal practices and off – spaces and collaborative exhibitions and projects, zines, fundraising, informing one another how to fundraise and learning all these very important financial aspects about surviving as an artist.
It’s hard to stay connected, it’s hard to find monetary compensation to work and do something that pays is very little or nothing. Then to still find time to have an artistic practice, so you basically work in a job to be able to afford to have an artistic practice but then you don’t have enough time to have the artistic practice. Especially in a city like Berlin it’s still so affordable compared to other cities but you need to basically pay two rents if you wanna have an atelier. And I don’t wanna say that there are not people out there who directly after art school find a gallerist and have these solo exhibitions and make it and are being seen and perceived and I’m very happy that this exists but it’s such a minority, such a small percentage. I’m understanding now why some people who start to study art have rich parents because it gives you a safety net. This is not to be supposed to be a rant about individuals, I feel like we are all just part of the system and somehow there’s an art world that handles art as investments and a way to safe taxes and there are so few people who earn so much money in contrast to the rest. Also for example artists who are parents and them needing a break from their artistic practice to be a parent but that is perceived as something bad and to support a child on an income that is so low as an artist. Often all the work that is behind exhibitions or working as an artist is also not visible, all the paperwork that goes into it, all the office work, all the applications, all this unpaid labour. I feel like the art world is inspiring but unfair, so unfair.

LMG: Is there something you want to change about the art world? If yes, what and why?

LBF: Art is always about change, you always wanna move, you never wanna stay so you change. I think there is definitely things about the art world that could be changed like everything we talked about in the last question but also aspects of how you do your project, who is actually perceived, who is is the canon. We have this stupid focus, this obsession with the canon in Germany and I’m so disinterested in that because the canon is the same white, dead man all over and all over and all over again and it limits yourself so much. I think there are such deep discriminatory practices in the art world, just outright discrimination and exclusion but also tokenism and fetishization and so many things. I wanna be aware of these structures, I wanna inform myself. I had this a lot of times already in my years of painting and studying and educating myself that I very often ask myself: is my voice really still needed? I do believe in a landscape of artistic practice, I do believe in a multiplicity of voices and a multiplicity of perspectives, so I don’t wanna say; mhm I don’t have any new thing to say so I might say anything, that’s not what I mean, it’s more; am I taking up space that someone else could take up? Is the perspective of myself and my identity and all these things that I carry of a young, able bodied, german, white European queer artist, is this still a perspective that needs to be made space for or do we need space for other artists and is it not better if I just don’t take that space? That’s still something that I’m thinking about all the time. I don’t want to take up too much space with what I bring to the table or with what I have to say or want to say. That’s why I think it’s so important to stay in a dialog and manoeuver this. Make things more accessible. It’s so not approachable sometimes.




LMG: What do you think is/are the role/-s of art and artists in our society?

LBF: I feel like a lot of this has also been touched upon, like the communication aspect, that coming together, holding space, understanding, asking questions, listening a lot and I think creativity is very important for us. The creative potential of engaging art in our world is so important. If you look at things like how AI is booming right now, I think it’s very important for art to be a creative intervention, not to shut it down or police it or whatever, just be an aware and creative force in certain kind of things. Like a mediator. But maybe that’s also just a part of society. I think that question can be read a little bit like ‘oh, art is such an important part in our society’ but maybe that’s also not it, very integral but ‘a’ part in our society, like a lot of different roles are important. This aspect of ‘let’s think, let’s creatively think, let’s look at the problem or at the solution’, let’s not go with all the ways we went before but let’s try and see if there’s new routs to take.

LMG: What artist/-s would you like to meet (dead or alive) and if you had one question what would you ask them?

LBF: I would not do this ‘one artist’ thing. Because I’m really not interested in this genius thing, in this ‘the one person who has all the answers’. I would really like to organise a dinner round or something and sit down with a bunch of people and talk to them and compare experiences. One of the first painters that I was obsessed with was Alice Neel so maybe I would invite her. One artist that I’m obsessed with currently is Frieda Toranzo Jaeger and I would love to invite her and then I recently listened to an interview with her and she talked about how her practice is so family involved because she has a lot of embroidery on her canvases, so I would invite her entire family too. Then maybe some writers. I remember when I first, years ago, read something by the Combahee River Collective and I was like wow, text can be written in union, in a collective practice. I think there are some people that I would invite as painters and some people that I would invite as your thoughts or your brain. I would also love to invite this artist who I listened to a talk to called Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and she is that amazing painter. I once years ago saw some canvases of her in a small little gallery, it’s these ballet dancers, you read the bodies as male and it’s so soft and there’s such a love for colour and you see the pleasure in the paint. I would love to have a roundtable of; let’s talk about art and thoughts and experiences from different times.

LMG: Is there something you want to achieve in your art life? Dreams? Future plans? Or projects you would like to do?

LBF: I have to start this new thing of having a balance between an artistic practice and a job. Right now I just want to give that some time and I don’t want to put any pressure on that. That took a while to realise but right now I feel very happy with just that. There is this long, long dream of when I’m 70 or something I wanna be somewhere far gone from everyone, like Agnes Martin for example, just have my canvases and be with my thoughts, be with some people that I love, grow old together, stay connected, stay curious with a couple of people that might also come from artistic practices but also just critical thinking. I really do have one thing that I want to do, which is like a life dream of mine, I had smaller collective projects but I wanna have one bigger project, one bigger work, where there’s a lot of people involved and where there’s voices coming together in one work, that is something that I want to do in my life. Another dream is I would love to curate an exhibitions at some point. Do all the background work for people that I love and admire.

LMG: Do you think there is something you can bring to this world through your work as an artist which you couldn’t in any other field of work?

LBF: I think that’s hard for me to answer because I don’t think there is a lot of other fields in this world in which I would want to do something or bring something. Everything that I can hear and see and translate and maybe empower in other people, everything that I am not saying and saying, I can only do it with the things I’m doing and as the person I am. I don’t want to say that everything I have to say or everything I paint is so valuable, I think there are a lot of artists out there who, especially in current times, it is more important to look at or listen to but the small little things, the small little contribution that I can do, to me is only possible in the ways that I am expressing myself. Moments of connection, moments of feeling somehow understood. I think what I hear a lot from friends or people who look at my work is, there is some softness and vulnerability but some radicality to it and sometimes it’s hard to allow yourself to be this fragile in a very empowering way and to embrace that. To allow these ambiguities of resistance but still softness and if people see that and feel a little more happy and free to do that, then I’m very happy.

Copyright of the last photo: Lola Grunert

Copyright to all other photos and artworks: Lilli Brontë Falzoi


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