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MS: I’ve been reading about the history of hyperbolic geometry. It is so bizarre that after almost two thousand years of attempts to prove the fifth postulate of Euclid from the first four, three different mathematicians in different countries discovered it was impossible, and constructed hyperbolic geometry. One of them, János Bolyai, wrote to his father: ‘When you, my dear Father, see them, you will understand; at present I can say nothing except this: that out of nothing I have created a strange new universe. All that I have sent you previously is like a house of cards in comparison with a tower.’

This could be a letter in which you describe your work to your father. I imagine it could apply to many artists, but in your case, with your previous installations, performances, languages and science fiction novels in mind, I feel the connection with hyperbolic geometry is particularly fitting. I have the impression that, similarly to the relation of hyperbolic geometry to Euclidean geometry, you attempt to create a universe with its own rules that are as consistent as our universe, but stranger. In any case, can you tell me how your interest in hyperbolic geometry started, and how it has developed? When and how did you decide to give it a central place in these recent works?

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MS: Your tent-like installations invite us to enter into, hide, and rest within them like a caterpillar within a kale leaf. Scientists seem to debate why leaves are hyperbolic: some consider it a geometric consequence of the growth process (which is both necessary and accidental), others argue there are energetic reasons to develop hyperbolic leaves, essentially a strategy to maximise sunlight exposure. Why are your fabric works hyperbolic, do you lean towards a geometric or energetic explanation?

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MS: Many of your works are subject to temporality, each in constant metamorphosis and changing radically with every new installation. As a son of a scientist and a science fiction writer yourself, you must have fantasised as a child with inventing a time-machine, did you? Can you imagine a machine to fully understand temporality rather than travelling into the past or into the future?

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MS: I see that you are trying to transform this tree into a more complicated structure by referring to perpetual cycles, unstable times and spirals in a separate branch, but I want to keep the hyperbolic geometry of this tree, so I will pretend that those connections are not there.

0.2.1
MS: I have always been impressed by the way your works feel somehow like large, children’s time-machines and at the same time they achieve a characteristic formal maturity. Do you have any insight on how you manage to achieve both of these at once?

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MS: For your project hyperbolisch ratlos ortlos inhaltslos (2015–2021) presented on the occasion of the 2021 Liverpool Biennial, textile works are suspended with ribbons and ropes, allowing them to oscillate with the circulation of air and the passage of visitors. For your exhibition, edrerde (2021) at Hollybush Gardens, you covered the exhibition floor with a thick layer of woodchips that makes the ground unstable, implying visitors’ constant reorientation while viewing your paintings. It seems that you don’t want things to be too stable, or that you are looking for a fragile balance; simultaneously, your work feels to me rather strong like a good camping knot. Are these conscious objectives in your work, to find a balance that feels at times fragile and at others robust?

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MS: The work that you are describing (Instabile Konstruktion) is almost eponymous of Instabile Konstruktion (Erbsenzaun), produced between 2020 and 2021 for the Liverpool Biennial. If I understand correctly, the new word that you add in parenthesis to the title is a ‘pea fence’, a trellis on which climbing plants like peas can grow. It is interesting that these Instabile Konstruktionen appear in your work in such historically charged years. Did you intend to draw a connection between these two installations?

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MS: You often work with mnemonics, fictional stories that secretly structure your ever-changing installations and performances. For your recent series of paintings presented at Hollybush Gardens, you used oil, a very classic and reliable medium. However, the final result has a similar fluidity to your previous work. Did you use some version of your mnemonic method to produce these paintings?

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MS: Did the mnemonics become mantras during the painting process?

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MS: Plants are often the protagonists of your sci-fi novels. In your work they mark the alignment with stars, in others their fibres are woven to create fabrics, or cooked to become pigments for your textile installations. Ipomoea, nettles, chilis, ferns, thymes, tea, madders … plants are chosen for their symbology, properties and characteristics, and they keep growing, adapting and transforming in your works. Could you describe the plants and gardens populating this last series of paintings and tell me a little about them, or why you think they became part of these works?

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MS: In Pentatonic Mallow, a flower is associated with stars: the structure you have drawn starts from a petal and repeats itself infinitely. This painting reminds me of two installations in which you invite us to look at plants from a cosmological perspective. In Antares-Mulde LS (Star-Rise Alignment) (2017), a group of wild plants and stones marks the alignment with the rising star Antares from the Vassivière Island. In the work Ipomoea baignoirensis (2019), hops grow in a spiral that turns following the movement of the sun while the ipomoea grow in a spiral that turns against the sun. Should we regard the connection between the small and the large, the local and the distant, the living and the non-living, an invitation to put everything, including the artist and the viewer, on the same ontological level? Do you see plants as collaborators in these works?

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MS: In a previous interview, you defined yourself as the gardener of an imaginary garden. You have recently moved your home and studio to a rural region of Germany. How does Reto the imaginary gardener compare to Reto the gardener?

2.0.1
MS: How do you compare plants to humans as collaborators? They are closer to the stars yet they have lighter egos, however one could also characterise them as more stubborn … 

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MS: Can you tell me a bit about Gina, the nettle-creature protagonist of your last book?

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MS: If you ask me, gardeners were always artists, all artworks are temporary, like a practice. Metaphors however, cannot be invented, they just wait to be rediscovered.