fictilis

FICTILIS is the collaborative practice of Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau. We make projects.

Our projects tend to arise out of our relationships — to each other, and to our communities and surroundings — and are intended to both reflect and affect these relationships. We sometimes bring other artists, non-artists, and community groups into our collaborations and create new relationships.

Our work is research-based, rigorously interdisciplinary, conceptually oriented, and seriously playful. In no particular order. Much of our work attempts to expose and/or bridge the gap between Social and Environmental activism.
Our projects often involve the creation of semi-fictional institutions, motivated by the understanding that all institutions are, at some point, semi-fictional.

There are a few named Project Areas that our work tends to fall within, including Interlife Crisis, or the (dis-)connections between networked

individuals and cultures, Critical Collecting, or the politics of acquisition, taxonomy, archiving, and display, (Re-)Materialisms, or the renewed valuation of objects and materiality, both human and non-, with a particular focus on Waste, guided by the belief that all material is, from its beginnings, potential waste.

Often our projects have multiple components that live in different places — some in the Art World, some in other places, some in many places at once, some one at a time. Accordingly, our work can be called many different things, regardless of the forms it takes: Installation, Performance, Curatorial, Exhibition, or Social Practice. All of these may or may not include the production of objects. We prefer the term “Projects”. When we need to define what exactly it is we do, we do; when we don’t, we don’t. We believe that an Artist Statement is a place where we need to do both. We hope we have done so.

Maybe it’s obvious that another of our interests is Language. It’s true. Language, yes, but not necessarily Statements. (Or not necessarily unnecessarily long ones.)