Hande Eagle: I’ve been reading a lot about you, and I don’t know how much of it is true.

Leandro Erlich: None of it is true.

H.E: To me, the questions are very important. I think they are very important to you too, because you keep asking them in your work. You come from a family of architects. How did you decide to study Philosophy? Many online sources state that you have a degree in the subject.

L.E. Yeah, I went to university to study Philosophy, but I didn’t finish. I don’t have a degree in Philosophy.

H.E. Ah, okay.

L.E. I went to the US to do a post-graduate program in Art. I don’t have a degree in Philosophy or in Art, but I have a post-graduate. Nothing has been that organised in terms of the structure of my formal education.

H.E. I’m Turkish-British and where I was born, Istanbul, the general view on the study of Philosophy at degree level was seen as a waste of time, because such a degree would not get you a good job. Is that the same in Argentina?

L.E: Yeah, I guess everywhere. It’s the same for art. I participated in the Istanbul Biennial 22 years ago [7th International Istanbul Bieannial, 2001, curated by Yuko Hasegawa]. So, they are different but there are many things you can relate between Istanbul and Buenos Aires. I would say that we belong to countries where the illusion of a system that is there to organise your life and open opportunities based on your past efforts does not exist. In some countries, and for some people, this may apply. In Argentina, university education is still free and high quality, so you can become a doctor and pay nothing and that gives opportunity to anyone to access education. However, if you look at education in the US, you see that education belongs to the economic system, once you pay for your education, once you have the degree is when you start to get back what you paid for. This may not apply to some humanistic careers like in philosophy and art, but it does apply to most of the technically applied jobs. Even if you may not be a very successful doctor, you’ll still get a job because you have a credential. The reason I studied philosophy is because after high school, I went to the art school in Buenos Aires for one year and I realised that was a waste of time, the school was not good, and I was interested in learning things. Once you finish high school and you have to decide what you are going to do; it is the moment in which most people take a couple of years to start architecture or law, in a way you are extending the incertitude that you will be facing five years later, once you get a degree. So, in a way, I found myself eager to take that risk from that moment. I was interested in doing art, without a guarantee that I would be able to make a living out of this. It was either that or to do something else for another five years at which point you are facing the cliff-edge.

H.E: I would like to go back to 1973, the year in which you were born. It was an eventful year in Argentine history with a lot of events happening. General elections, when Juan Peron with his wife Isabel Peron as his running mate, won with a record landslide on the same FREJULI umbrella ticket on which Cámpona had been elected just six months earlier. Going back to the similarities I’ve drawn many parallels between the histories of Turkey and South America, especially after uniting my life with a Brazilian-Argentinian man. Argentina and Turkey in particular share a history of military coups, dictatorships, political upheaval, violence, protests… I know how my interpretation of evening news on TV, influenced the way in which I came to look at the world at a young age. Nobel laureate [2020] Louise Glück, who passed away in October 2023, wrote in her poem "Nostos":  “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory”. Could you please comment on this in relation to your work and your background?

L.E: Clearly, we are all victims of our circumstances and we are all influenced by our history. My artwork has always been influenced by personal experiences. If there’s something that happened back then, in my childhood... I was ten years old when democracy came back to Argentina. By the age of seven, eight, nine, you’re fully conscious of what’s going on. I was going to a public school and you could not repeat what your parents spoke about at home. You can’t go to school and say “the president is a son of a bitch” because then the teacher will potentially denounce you and people were kidnapped and they disappeared. Though, during that period, I was fortunate enough not to experience any immediate kidnapping. Noone in my family was harmed, some friends of my parents were exiled.

H.E: Political exile?

L.E: Yes, political exile. At that age you are not conscious of it. If your question is about how that time in my life correlates with what I do, I would say that it’s a kind of an analytical way of searching something in the work. I am not sure if that matters to me. Neither to justify the work as a way to explain or to conceptualise it. I believe that art has this universal way of communicating and linking people. Going into the specifics, which could probably relate, is like doing psychoanalysis.

In other words, the magic of art is that someone is creating something, and someone is interpreting something that has been made, and the action of the interpretation is equally creative as the action of making. Otherwise, you are providing formulae to be studied or proved, that’s why I never liked the work being analysed. But clearly there are issues related to my childhood as well as family context and personal interest. Things have been building up and there was always this search for things...

H.E: Perhaps growing with life, or growing through life?

L.E: Growing through life, I have less anxiety to explain or to justify things because you realise that something is in the work of art and that you are communicating through this medium. We need to let that to speak. It’s like having a book of Shakespeare and expecting that William Shakespeare will be next to you and you go and say, when you wrote this were you thinking of this? I would love to ask him a thousand questions but at the same time, the questions are for yourself, and noone is more entitled to answer the questions than yourself. However, you will probably listen to what William Shakespeare has to say, because at the end of the day, he was the one who wrote it.

[Shared laughter]

L.E: Exactly, this idea that we feel we need to corroborate... Whether our thinking or our interpretation is right... And the truth is that the most important thing has already happened when you asked those questions and you found for yourself your own answers.

H.E. Which leads me to another question. How much of the contemporary art is a product of sincerity?

L.E: I was talking to Mario [Cristiani, co-founder of Galleria Continua and Associazione Arte Continua] about this yesterday and I don’t know. I think that first of all, I would never place it in terms of percentages, I would never answer like that. Yet, it’s a valid question. I don’t know. But I am quite romantic in terms of my idea of art. I grew up watching Italian neo-realism, black and white old films and yes, you realise that there were things that had been made with a lot of heart, you called it, sincerity...

H.E: And, now?

L.E: Even sincerity has become subject of speculation. Meaning, to play sincere about whatever subject, to be perceived in a particular way, that could be – already from the beginning – done in order to achieve attention. We are talking about sincerity in the contemporary arts right? I think it would be easier for us to understand and judge sincerity in a system that is not rewarding the artist so well. Sincerity would be to do something without expectation, without having eyes on you. That’s pure sincerity. This is what you do because this is what you want to express to others. But ultimately, there are still many sincere artists and actions. Although, I would say that it would not be as clear as placing the qualities of sincerity or authenticity where you would imagine to find them. At the same time, I’m answering your question about sincerity in contemporary art from the position of an artist. How much sincerity do you think there is in the art world?

H.E: As a journalist?

L.E: Not as a journalist... Consider sincerity in the art world as a market?

H.E: Well, markets are not sincere.

L.E: Exactly. Markets are not sincere but it’s clearly a culturally driven force.

H.E: For example, I’m trying to put out a level of sincerity with my writing. My blog is ad-free and free for all to read. A labour of love and dedication to presenting profound writing about art. I sold my writing for years, and then there came a point in my life, when I decided I no longer wanted to accept "house style" and compromise on the quality and genuineness of my published work. That’s why I can sit here and talk to you about sincerity. 

L.E: Some artists who are important and famous artists, can do very eclectic things. Sometimes they become a brand and this makes us doubt their sincerity.

H.E: Yes, exactly and there’s always a brand, be it paint or another material that a particular painter or sculptor with which they may choose to create their art, regardless of our awareness of it.

L.E: There’s a brand in our jackets, shoes, everything. In his lifetime, Raffaello [Raphael] was a brand. It’s hard to go into this kind of analysis, unless the art that is made is absolutely crap. That’s the ultimate problem.

H.E: In your works, especially ones involving mirrors [Bâtiment, 2004; La Torre, 2007], or fake mirrors [Cadres Dorés, 2007], or the semblance of a mirror [The Ballet Studio, 2002; Double Tea, 2010], you continually bring the audience face-to-face with their inner selves. This is very clever because most people don't enjoy the experience of looking at themselves, neither introspectively nor physically. I think with the rise of the internet and social media, and in spite of the popularity of “the selfie”, people look at themselves much less, and less often than they used to. Do you get a kick out of knowing that adults experiencing your works feel a tad bit uncomfortable in their skins?

"Everything I have been motivated to do with great effort is for the audience..." 

Leandro Erlich

H.E. Some of your other works that interest me deeply are ones that make connections to climate change. Maison Fond (2015), Order of Importance (2019), Sopratutto (2020), The Breach: Labyrinth of Monoculture (2022). What instigated these works? Did you wake up one morning in 2014, and think, “I have to think about climate change or ecological disasters?”

L.E: I am someone who is interested in many things. I have many interests; politics, people, culture... I am interested in art, but I would not place this at the top of the list. When I travel, seeing an art exhibition is not a priority. For many years, I have been very concerned and I am involved in actions on the environment and sustainability. Everything has been different, from Maison Fond that was created for The Paris Climate Summit in 2015, two years after which everything was trashed. I am now creating a work in Miami. It is submerged underwater for the regeneration of the coral reef. There are things that are more concrete and others that are more symbolic. But I think it’s a very serious matter. I think that in respect of political systems and so on, with all its problems and imperfections, modern democracy is probably the best model to be living in. This is in relation to the human world, the social world. When it’s social, somethings could be subjective in accordance with people’s perspectives. However, when it comes to the environment there is not one second of subjectivity there. Things are going wrong and will not get better by themselves. We are the source of the problem. I feel very motivated to get involved, because it’s a personal concern, and I hope that my work helps to create general awareness. I have three children. I think that in terms of the changes we want to make it’s important to motivate the change with some level of optimism rather than pure truth that can be very depressive and heavy to handle.

H.E: You travel a lot, depending on where you are in the world, what’s your morning routine like? What’s the first thing you do?

L.E: I drink coffee first of all... But, I have a very nomadic life. If there’s something that my life doesn’t have, it’s routine. I have three families, my parents are still alive, I have two children from my former wife, and a baby with my current partner. My life involves a lot of juggling.

H.E: You observe a lot of people and situations in the places you go. you encounter a greater segment of human society and have a deeper sense of it than most people who work in 9 to 5 jobs, and lead relatively repetitive lives. Knowing all that you know, what do you think the future holds for us on this planet?

L.E: I think that I remain optimistic, otherwise we’d have to kill ourselves. But clearly, we are living in complex times. Even though many things are going wrong, somethings are improving. What I see about the future is clearly is that humanity will conquer space before solving the problems here. If we think that things are not linear, it may happen that the path of the evolution goes wrong first, in order to be adjusted and corrected. If you look back in history we are participants of a cultural evolution of two thousand years, so the last five hundred years in comparison is nothing. Two hundred years ago there were slaves in the States.