Nora Aurrekoetxea – interview: Rijksakademie Open Studios

Nora Aurrekoetxea focuses on her home in Amsterdam, disorienting domestic architecture to ask us to contemplate the way it shapes us and ingrains itself in our bodies and psychology

Aurrekoetxea’s work encourages contemplation of the way we are physically and mentally conditioned by the forms we inhabit. The floor of her studio at Rijksakademie is flecked with metal moulds she has made of (and left inside) the holes one would normally expect to be covered. Dominating the room are two wooden bifurcated staircases – replicating the one in the house she has been living in during her residency – both rotated by 90 degrees, one placed on the floor, the other hung on the wall. By disrupting the body’s naturalised inclination to adapt to stairs, Aurrekoetxea’s uncanny distortion is suggestive of “falling”, with all its psychological and metaphorical connotations.

Nora Aurrekoetxea, installation view, Rijksakademie Open Studios, Amsterdam. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

Nora Aurrekoetxea, installation view, Rijksakademie Open Studios, Amsterdam. Photo: Nora Aurrekoetxea.

Interviews by TOM DENMAN
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY