Violette Bule
Violette Bule is a conceptual artist who goes beyond documentary recording, enhancing the fantastic within reality, deploying satire to take a critical look at social issues, and examining the structural power that shapes everyday life. By creating fictional narratives staged in urban spaces, she highlights the complexity of topics such as migration, imprisonment, identity, social justice, and nationalism. She produces sculptures and social and new media photographs, incorporating common objects such as mirrors, soap bars, and cutlery. She is committed to the power of image creation to anchor memories and confront the viewer with a shared reality. Drawing from her experiences as an immigrant in the United States, Violette is interested in expanding the boundary between art and life to amplify vulnerability as a potential form of empowerment.
IL: Violette, if you had a question for yourself, to start discussing your own work, what would it be?
VB: I would ask myself why I do what I do, that is, why create the work I do and not something else. Where does the courage, persistence, and necessity come from? To this question, I sometimes find an answer, but most of the time, I prefer to respond with a physical gesture, something that allows me to escape the question itself, letting the body take over. It's a question with zero to many answers.
IL: Do you remember any of the physical gestures?
VB: Two ways, one in the materiality of the work, for example, when I started to create "El Helicoide," I knew I wanted to work with wood without having any idea how to start. I knew I wanted to create the sculpture, but I followed intuition, experimenting with different materials, with strips of flexible metal, with wood, drawing or stacking wood on top of each other. This involved a lot of time of physical action, creating a puzzle that was heavy not only in its concept but also in its volume, in the power that the form contains. The experimentation in my work is a combination of physical and conceptual. The other way is walking for long periods, tiring the body with movement, literally physical.
IL: In the power contained within the form, you say. El Helicoide, more than a prison, is a torture facility for political prisoners in Caracas, Venezuela, operating under the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Through a device, the sculpture can be scanned to discover videos about this place. How did the idea for this piece come about?
VB: Let's say that my first experimentation with technology was with #Requiem200≤, a sculpture that works with augmented reality. It pays tribute to and commemorates the lives of over 200 people who died during protests in Venezuela against the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Without political distinction, this piece displays the faces of the repression victims from the years 2014 to 2023 (it's constantly updating).
El Helicoide, 2020
After putting this tool into practice, I wanted to create a piece that offered the viewer the opportunity to uncover information by themselves when interacting with these artworks. El Helicoide speaks about the political prisoners in Venezuela who today inhabit a building that showcases the failure of the dream of modernization, which only served as a facade for the squandering of oil wealth in some Latin American countries in the late 1950s. The Helicoide I create is upside down, the spiral descends, the initial idea of this architectural feat is inverted from what it intended to be – a place of consumption and entertainment that never became such. Instead, it is now a site of human rights violations.
The intimate relationship with our phone, with a device that shows us things and that only we control, scrolling up or down, was the main idea behind the functionality of these works. It aimed to connect information with the viewer's intimacy at a moment when the user discovers what is within these sculptures in a memorable way. So, with the help of a device containing a computer, a camera, and a screen, the viewer can scan the surface of the sculpture to find videos about the history of El Helicoide and its current situation.
IL: What role does photography play within your work?
VB: It's fundamental. Looking at how photography is the punctum of my installations.
Playa huequito, 2009-2011
Vernaculus Tupac-Marus, 2013
IL: Would you say it's a starting point?
VB: Yes, it's a starting point and often the final object or an essential part of my research.
Al Uno / Al Otro, 2013
IL: I was noticing that we have several things in common. I'm also an immigrant here in the United States. In fact, this decision to immigrate, even with all the advantages I've had like having legal documents, has been tough. You know what I mean, right?
VB: It's not easy, despite having the privilege of having a visa; there are those who experience migration in more complex ways than others. People cross illegally because obtaining a visa is not feasible, and the immigration system is outdated and dysfunctional.
As for myself, I can tell you it has been challenging; however, I've managed to use that precariousness as raw material for my work.
IL: We also shared space in "Soy de Tejas," an exhibition curated by Rigoberto Luna earlier this year, and I was wondering if the concept of "being" holds any significance for you, especially in the context of the exhibition's title. How might the experience of immigrating change the meaning of that word for you?
VB: I found the title of the exhibition curious, and of course, I felt honored to be considered from Tejas. But the truth is that I am from many places as well, and I am much more than just the bureaucratic and institutional territory. I recycle memory with the patrimonial/traditional aspect of a specific region to blend it, as I bring my experiences and language with me, which is constantly reconfiguring. I don't like those boundaries of here and there, but in this exhibition, I saw many possibilities of being from Tejas, its attributes, struggles, and contradictions. That's what I loved, being part of a complex mass that stings and spreads.
IL: In the exhibition "Day Jobs," curated by Veronica Roberts for the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, the conversation revolved around the jobs that artists have to take outside of the art world to survive... In your contribution, you shared this wonderful image and an installation made of many forks called "Homage to Johnny," an undocumented worker in a restaurant in New York who was exploited, earning $5 per hour and not receiving tips due to his status and not knowing English. Could you tell me a bit about these dialogues you create between images and installations?
VB: The relationship lies in them being chronicles, observations of my surroundings combined with memory, a kind of recycling of symbols contained within materiality that interact with each other and invite the viewer to be part of the conversation. I want those who interact with my work to become part of a subjective three-dimensional experience, sometimes invisible.
Dream America, 2015
Homage to Johnny, 2015 - 2017
IL: The way you've brought some ideas to life in your photographic work is by creating scenes like a woman holding a machine gun in one hand, a cotton candy in the other, with a background sign featuring the US flag and the words: "In guns we trust."
VB: For this photo, I lived very close to Coney Island and used to bike there often. I placed only the model and changed the logo of the hot dog franchise to the title of the artwork. Everything else was already there. The cotton candy, the fries, the flag, the hot dogs, the AK-47, and the hat are objects that are part of the everyday scene at Coney Island. However, this time, I arranged them to offer a political narrative about amusement, consumption, frenzy, violence, competition, pain, and how all of that fits into a single sentence.
In Guns We Trust, 2015
IL: Oh, I see. And have you used Artificial Intelligence?
VB: So far, I've never used AI for my work. I don't see myself using that tool, except for some research.
IL: Research about Artificial Intelligence itself?
VB: Perhaps I became interested in discussing the marginality of artificial intelligence, its errors, and shallowness. To see how users push the possibilities of this tool, seeking answers or letting someone or something else take over, as a constant self-underestimation.
Technology will always be in favor of our desire to achieve perfection or experiment with our own limits. It's in the immediacy and the desire to attain everything quickly that I feel we risk losing ourselves in the mediocrity of the medium. I still believe that above all, a critical stance is necessary, even in the face of something as simple as cotton candy.
IL: Above all. Thank you very much, Violette.