Nora Turato in Conversation with Raphael Gygax

Before lighting the lights on our 2024 season, our curator of digital art Raphael Gygax sat down with artist Nora Turato to understand her process, inspiration, and Chicago’s influence on her new site-specific work. By the end of the chat, we gained insight into the artist’s work with typefaces, discovered a mutual obsession with Charlie Chaplin, and revisited Chicago as seen from the perspective of Nora Turato.

Read on for the entire conversation, and meet us on the Riverwalk Friday, April 12 at 8pm for the world premiere of THIS IS A TEST OF SEVERANCE. can you let go?. The launch event is free and open to all, and the project airs every night at 8:30pm through June 5.

Header images (left to right): Nora Turato, Performance view, Basement Roma, Rome, 2021. Photography: Robert Apa. Credits: Basement Roma/CURA. Raphael Gygax headshot by Nicolas Duc. 

Image: Nora Turato, i'm going clear / total organization is necessary!, 2024. Vitreous enamel on steel (4 parts). © Nora Turato. Courtesy the artist, LambdaLambdaLambda, Galerie Gregor, Staiger and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Raphael Gygax
Perhaps as a starting point, we can look at the running thread throughout your artistic practice as a whole. Your work spans across multiple media. And you’re particularly known for your within performance though you also make wall paintings, enamel panels, video. Throughout that, language is always at the very core of your work. The point of departure for your works is always a collection of texts that you call pools. You also publish every pool in book form. Could you tell us more about what a pool is and what the process is to source this text?

Nora Turato
My work deals with language, and this unconscious system of how we communicate and how we are communicated to, through culture, advertising, and social media. I’m interested in how we talk to each other, the tone in our voices, the structure in the language we use — and how this all reveals something about our time, our culture, and our society at the moment.

I publish the pools almost yearly. Sometimes it’s a bit longer, but they are like annual reports on language. They are collections of texts that I source, and for the last pool there's also quite a lot of my own writing. They’re like a mirror of the culture at the time that I was exposed to. And often what I was exposed to, a lot of other people were exposed to as well, because of the algorithms and news and internet and just the general state of globalization. And so they are a weird reflection of time, like a capsule. It's interesting to look back at them and see how language dates fast, and becomes history really fast. Some structures and forms of sentences, meme structures, they appear, and trend, and then they die out, and become old news.

And what's really interesting about pools is that now I’ve done six of them, and it's a very peculiar time in the development of the internet. It's where AIs are getting born, and with the recent proliferation of Chat GPT and different language models, you could argue that I began the pools at the last moment that the internet was human, that actual humans were speaking to each other on the internet. And now it’s dead. And that was an accident — when I started making pools, I didn't think about this. It was not part of my intention.

I just read a prediction that by 2026, ninety-seven percent of the content on the internet will be AI-generated and bots will start talking to bots. So the language we exchanged in these last five years was the end of the internet, in a lot of ways.

Raphael
You speak of the pools functioning like an archive of language. Over the process of making the publications and time, could you identify any linguistic, content-related changes from pool to pool?

Nora
I noticed with the last pool, there was quite a big change. With the first five pools I felt that I was more exposed to general culture and general politics and I felt more open. But with pool 6, algorithms really narrowed down, and became a reflection of my deep unconscious. They were becoming more uncannily dark-side of me, in some sense. Now I'm at the point that I'm off social media, because I feel it's just gotten too precise. It’s too uncanny. So I'm also excited to see how I will approach my work now, after spending so much time working with language online.

Raphael
On a practical level, how do you approach the process of choosing which text makes into a more narrowed selection?

Nora
I have a file that I just drop text in as I find it, and then I have all this text and that gets materialized in the book. Especially with the last pool, pool 6, what started to be very interesting to me is how things were accidentally making sense against each other. I would drop one sentence into the file, and then two hours later, I would drop another sentence, but then I would start making these connections between the sentences. It became a mysterious way of writing poetry, creating connections where the connections were not meant to be, just by sheer chance. The thing was writing itself in some sense.

Raphael
When you select phrases or fragments from the larger text to incorporate into works, like the wall paintings or the enamels, do you have a certain set of criteria for how these choices are made?

Nora
It’s almost easier making a series of works, because then I really have a process that is compared to something — like writing a poem. You're making sense of one work in relation to the other, and they're helping each other, and they're elevating each other into different meanings. I'm always very excited to work that way, because one work opens the other work. This pressure of ‘one work’ is always a bit hard for me, this idea that one work has to contain all of it. And of course, it cannot be. So I really like to think in terms of shows and exhibitions as a whole. It can be at times very mysterious how the works happen, and why something speaks to me.

Raphael
You come from a graphic design background originally — I would love to know a bit more about your relationship to typeface and its role within the work, and how we read certain fonts, and how we have specific preferences. I also understand that you design your own typefaces?

Nora
The typefaces — I designed four of them in collaboration with different designers — and they are almost synonymous with different periods in my practice and my life. What's interesting about typefaces and graphic design in general is that a person doesn't have to know much about typography, but still, on a gut level, they feel the differences between certain fonts. You can see a certain font and say, ‘oh, this is very serious looking. This looks very much like a bank. Whereas this really feels to me like fast food. This looks like it’s about wellness. This looks very spiritual.’ So there's this unconscious messaging contained in typography and graphic design already. Even if we're not educated in it, we're still unconsciously reacting to it.

Raphael
When you start designing a typeface, do you start with a certain feeling, or desire to achieve a particular tone?

Nora
For the Chicago work, I really wanted to use a slab serif. The previous typeface that I've done, was based on Helvetica, which is this very modern typeface.

If you look at the history of typography, for instance, it’s very connected to the history of printing. In the beginning you have typography that is very tied to books. The goal of typography is to be legible, so you have a lot of details. You have serifs. You have a lot of curvature, you have a lot of variation in the thickness of lines.

And as the industrial revolution begins, and people are moving to cities, this typography is getting applied to bigger and bigger surfaces, in the form of advertising. And then you have problems, because you need to apply the typography with a paintbrush, and it needs to be legible from a distance, which is a totally different thing than typography for a book.

So you see the serifs are starting to thicken, and simplify, and bolden up. And then eventually, you have total shedding of those serifs, as in Helvetica, which is total modernity. It’s reflecting this linear, individualistic, machine-inspired thinking of modern times.

The work focuses a lot on the reemergence of spirituality in the West, and using spirituality as a self-optimization tool, which is the opposite of what you might interpret the role of spirituality as in Eastern philosophy. So I thought it would be interesting to trace our journey toward modernity backwards, through typography. I wanted to situate the typeface in this time where serifs are shedding and becoming bigger, in this moment where we’re becoming modern.

Image: Test shot of Nora Turato’s commission, THIS IS A TEST OF SEVERANCE. can you let go?, 2024. The work premieres Friday, April 12 at 8 pm.

Raphael
How did the work for ART on THE MART come about, did it pull from anything specific?

Nora
While I still had Instagram, I kept bumping into this guy — in the research for my last performance as well — who was talking about how you could ‘do more,’ if you just think of time in terms of weeks and not days. And I was just fascinated by it, fascinated by these ‘motivational speaking’ Instagram Reels where people are just telling other people how to ‘do more.’ For some reason, I took a screen recording of that small clip, and I saved it into my favorites. I saved it locally on my phone, in the exact folder where my discount card for my supermarket was. So every time I went to the supermarket, and I opened my phone, I saw that video there and I was like, why did I save the video? At one point, I started to think, maybe I should do something with this video!

After further research I realized this ‘guy’ I came across goes from podcast to podcast, saying the same thing with slightly different language. And I thought it was almost like the opposite of productivity, because what he’s doing is a waste of time. So there was a paradox in his public persona. I started to research and record all the moments where he says the same thing, and I started to study all the words that he repeats — he has a fixed set of words that he repeats in a certain way. I found it poetic in a sense to try to reveal that, to work with that. I started to study how he talks and try to embody that voice, and somehow I got hung up on it.

And then I thought, okay, but there must be something in me as well that attracts this. There's this part of me that wants to be productive, that wants to be good, that wants to succeed and doesn't want to fail. So I thought it would be interesting to make a work that somehow in some sense, almost exercises that part of me. I was thinking a lot about how at ART on THE MART, you can sit down, you can watch, there’s sound — so I started thinking also about the proliferation of guided meditations, and the gamification of meditation as well. So that’s how it came about. I was joking that it’s like an exercise video, but I did want to make this ‘guided experience’ for the viewer.

Raphael
What was the biggest challenge you faced whilst working on the piece for Chicago?

Nora
The challenge for me is that the work has to exist on multiple different levels because there’s different modes of attention for each viewer. There’s a viewer that sits down and watches the whole piece, but there’s also a viewer that passes by. I really wanted to work on these many levels, so that when you pass by you still get something out of it, you are still visually excited by it or somehow stimulated by it. But then there also needs to be something to grab onto for longer than that. There needs to be a possibility to actually sit down and experience the work. So it’s about finding this balance between doing both well, and not getting too caught up in one.

Raphael
Yes, because I wanted to ask you about site specificity. In one way, regarding Chicago because obviously it's a very site-specific piece, but also because I am wondering your thoughts on the term?

Nora
I wanted to definitely do something very ‘male,’ and goal-oriented. There's these guys in front of the building, and I feel like Chicago is so ‘big shoulders,’ very, you know, ‘go get it.’ So I think the work also deals a lot with that, for lack of a better term, very masculine energy -like, ‘goals’ and ‘succeed.’ When I was making this work for ART on THE MART, I was excited about the possibility of sound as well, because it's quite impressive. The art is so big on the building, but there's also this whole sound aspect, which I think is super exciting.

Image: Publicity photo of Charlie Chaplin for the film Modern Times (1936). Image by United Artists. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Raphael
I always have to ask this question: which artists are important references?

Nora
This may be a weird answer but, the last couple of months I've been obsessing over Charlie Chaplin.

Raphael
Woah! Me too!

Nora
Really?

Raphael
Yeah, it’s funny because I read this one chapter in Naomi Klein’s new book and she's talking about The Great Dictator, and ‘the human machine….’

Nora
Yes! I mean, what I really respect about Charlie Chaplin is how, through entertainment, he offered a subtle shift in perspective to people. Not too much, never too much, but like, you can never watch the other thing in the same way. And I think that's really beautiful when art does that, and I think Charlie Chaplin was a master of that, in a very humorous, very light, but very, you know, I don't know. He came to my head now because I've been obsessing about him.

Raphael
What have you been reading recently?

Nora
What have I been reading? I've just been reading a lot about Charlie Chaplin. Because, yeah, I found him very fascinating!

Raphael
Charlie Chaplin lived in Switzerland. In the vineyard region at Lake Geneva.

Nora
Really! Oh yeah, because he was exiled to Switzerland. I should go there.

Raphael
How would you describe the normal studio day for you?

Nora
I mean, my normal studio day is not normal.

Raphael
[Laughing] I almost expected that kind of answer….

Nora
[Also laughing] It’s not normal! No, I mean, because I've worked a lot with my voice and my body; training, different movement exercises, meditation, and voice work are a really a big part of what I do. I work with a lot of different coaches, there’s different lessons that I do. So that's huge, and then of course, I’m just walking around, looking at things, reading things. It's really hard for me to define what my studio day is. Sometimes I'm in the studio all day and nothing happens, but then I take a walk and I find, like, an ad, that ends up somehow making it into my work. So it's very hard to define that.

Raphael
Last question: Do you have a favorite expression right now? Or a word?

Nora
Oof.

Raphael
[Laughing] “Oof?”

Nora
I’m not quite sure! Maybe because of my piece for Chicago, where I worked with laughter, I’m thinking a lot about laughter, and how people laugh, and why they laugh, and when they laugh, too. So it’s this unconscious…. It’s maybe not fully language yet, it’s these body things. I’m growing more and more conscious and thinking about these things that we do to fill up the space, or to obstruct something, or to not say something. I’ve been interested a lot in that kind of ‘becoming’ of language. This gap. This body. This ‘ha ha.’

Raphael
‘A-HA.’

Nora
Exactly! It’s becoming interesting to me, this space between language and the body.