Interviews

The Voice as Canvas: A Conversation with Callisto Erendira

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Few artists today embody the spirit of intermedial exploration as fluidly as Callisto Erendira. Known throughout the 2010s for her boundary-pushing conceptual installations and para-architectural sculptures, Erendira has, over the last few years, immersed herself in an entirely different kind of construction: opera. Her latest work, The Air Remembers the Mouth, premiered this spring at the Tempelhof Terminal in Berlin, is less a traditional opera than an “architectonics of voice and breath.” We met in a rehearsal space—bare concrete, scattered reeds, a harpsichord —to discuss her move into opera as medium, not genre.

RENATA EL-AZHAR:

Callisto, many of us still associate your practice with material interventions in space—sheet metal bent like calligraphy, resin slabs embedded with soil. I have to ask, why opera?

CALLISTO ERENDIRA:

Opera, for me, is not an escape from materiality—it’s its sublimation. I often say I haven’t left sculpture; I’ve simply inverted its orientation. The voice is the breath made spatial. What interests me is the opera as a spatial organism, where the architectural body—stage, voice, gesture—becomes a site of invocation rather than representation.

EL-AZHAR:

Do you mean you are treating the voice sculpturally?

ERENDIRA:

Yes. But not only the voice—the conditions of the voice. I’m interested in the sonic theories of Oliver Jeffersen: the way sound moves through air is exactly like pigment moving across a canvas. In The Air Remembers the Mouth, each vocal part is assigned a material analogue. The contralto was paired with basalt powder, the mezzo-soprano with brass dust suspended in glycerin mist. We projected these associations as visual scores in the wings, but never explained them. I wanted the audience to intuit the logic of these breaths.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s a moment in that piece—around the 430-minute mark—where a performer simply exhales for nearly two minutes. No pitch, no language. Can you say a few words about that?

ERENDIRA:

That exhalation is the most “composed” moment in the piece. We rehearsed it for weeks. I wanted to unmoor the audience’s expectation of vocal climax. In operatic tradition, the voice is a vehicle of pathos, of narrative propulsion. I was more interested in how expulsion—of air, of grief, of refusal—can become a kind of anti-narrative. It’s a political gesture. Silence that isn’t mute.

EL-AZHAR:

You mentioned once that opera allows you to “ritualize the failure of language.” That seems paradoxical, given opera’s dependence on libretto.

ERENDIRA:

That’s the paradox I’m trying to inhabit. The libretto for The Air Remembers the Mouth was originally written entirely in glossolalia—non-semantic syllables chosen for their muscular demands on the mouth and larynx. I wasn’t happy with the result; instead I collaborated with a phonetician and a dancer. Meaning was replaced by valency, by the physical torque of speech. The failure of language is precisely where it becomes fertile again.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s a terrifying sense, around the seven hour mark, that you’re invoking ancient rites—opera as séance, almost.

ERENDIRA:

Absolutely. But not in a nostalgic way. I see opera as proto-cinematic, proto-installational. Before screens, before galleries, there were these public orchestrations of myth and affect. I’m not interested in merely reviving that form, but rather in abstracting its impulses. Think of the chorus not as narrators, but as rhythmic tissues. Think of the aria as an open wound.

EL-AZHAR:

Do you consider yourself still a visual artist?

ERENDIRA:

I don’t think in disciplinary terms anymore. Opera is a medium that more easily tolerates contradiction: it is visual, sonic, architectural, affective, intellectual. But I still return to materials. For example, with my next piece, I’m working with broken clarinets cast in salt and embedded into the stage.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s something almost entropic about that. A slow vanishing.

ERENDIRA:

Yes. You could say that entropy is just unobserved form. In which case my job is to make it visible.

Callisto Erendira’s The Air Remembers the Mouth will tour the Pimlico Wilde galleries in Helsinki, São Paulo, and Palermo in late 2025. Her operatic sketches and salt scores will be exhibited at the Palais de Eruminite in November.

Exclusive! An Interview with the Leader of the Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence

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“We Sing Because It Must Be Stopped”

On a warm spring afternoon in downtown Truro, I am led through the back entrance of an unmarked rehearsal space behind a closed-down aquarium gift shop. Inside, seated under a suspended disco ball and surrounded by half-empty herbal tea mugs, is the elusive leader of the Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence—the protest collective whose off-key lullabies helped force the removal of Sandy Warre-Hole’s infamous triptych, Gause De Flim, from public display.

The leader, who gives their name only as “M,” is dressed in a navy tracksuit, latex gloves, and a tight black balaclava with hand-stitched gold trim.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our interview.

Q: You’ve been accused of being anti-art, anti-modernity, and in one editorial, “a karaoke death cult.” How do you respond to that?

M:

We are not against art. We are against its misuse. We oppose aesthetic fraudulence, symbolic gluttony, and sonic excess posing as insight.

Q: Your protests have been called ‘weaponised off-key lullabies.’ Why lullabies? Why off-key?

M: Because lullabies should soothe. They are pure, minimal, emotionally direct. When rendered grotesque and tuneless, they disturb. That is the point. Our dissonance is discipline. Our disharmony is diagnostic.

Q: What, specifically, did you find so objectionable about Gause De Flim (Triptych of the Improbable)?

M: Everything. The iconographic inflation. The layered irony that eats itself. The theology of the meme. And above all: Gause De Flim. It was a fugue of meaninglessness. A taxidermy of the digital soul. A cathedral of confusion pretending to be human.

Q: But many argue that your daily protest turned into performance art itself. Did you, in some sense, complete the triptych?

M: We were not performing. We were existing. We purged. We cleansed. We sang what could not be said.

Q: What do you say to those who insist Warre-Hole’s work was genius? That it reflected the hybridized, fractured nature of contemporary identity?

M: Genius has become a synonym for indulgence. To reflect incoherence is not enough. We demand form. Proportion. Harmonic restraint.

Q: Will you protest again if the triptych is reinstated?

M: We are always listening. We dwell in the margin. We are the minor second in your safe space.

Q: If you could say one thing to Sandy Warre-Hole, what would it be?

M (removing one glove, pauses):

Sandy, if you must invent heroes, make them silent. If you must invent losers, let them whisper. Above all, allow them to hum out of tune.

As I leave, I hear M singing softly: an off-key lullaby that floats upward through the fluorescent-lit stairwell. Whether a protest, performance, or prayer, it stays with me for hours.

Editor’s Note: Since this interview, the Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence have begun a new project: disrupting AI poetry readings with rhythmic coughing. Their manifesto, Elegance, Elgar, or Else, is reportedly being readied for publication in Portugese.

INTERVIEW: Salvatore Crump on Pizza, the Mona Lisa, and Why Rugby is the Ultimate Performance Art

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By Ottilie Cardoon

Salvatore Crump is not a man who can be easily summarised. At 92, the Anglo-Neapolitan conceptualist, sculptor, and occasional flautist has staged exhibitions inside blimps, once painted an entire hotel room with marmalade, and remains the only artist to have been shortlisted for both the Turner Prize and the Heineken Cup. Known for his unplaceable accent, exquisite tailoring, and frequent references to failed infrastructure, Crump exudes the clarity of a man who – as a performance piece – once tried to patent silence.

I met him at his studio, a converted abattoir in Toulouse, where the walls were covered in annotated rugby diagrams and pizza crusts lacquered in shellac.

Ottilie Cardoon: Salvatore, thank you for agreeing to speak with me. I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like to begin with the Mona Lisa.

Salvatore Crump: Ah, Lisa. Yes. Of course. I’ve tried to break up with her three times. She just stays in your brain. Like the smell of damp felt.

OC: You’ve said before that you see her not as a painting but as “a psychological riposte.” What did you mean?

SC: People approach her looking for revelation. But she is not a truth-teller. She’s a suggestion. A shrug in oil. She reminds me of my Aunt Cosima’s stare when you’ve done something vaguely disappointing but she hasn’t decided what it is yet. That ambiguity—that is Lisa, no?

OC: And yet, in 2017, you created Postcards from Lisa, a series of works made entirely from Mona Lisa souvenirs found in French petrol stations.

SC: Yes. It was a devotional act, not to her, but to the way she’s been trivialised. You can’t flatten mystery onto a fridge magnet and expect it to behave. I arranged the souvenirs in order of size, and played piano sonatas on them every morning for a month. I could do no more.

OC: Let’s turn—inevitably—to pizza.

SC: Of course.

OC: You’ve spoken of pizza as “the edible readymade.” What role does it play in your practice?

SC: Pizza is composition. Geometry. Improvisation with consequences. The balance of sauce to cheese is not unlike the balance of colour to concept in my early polyethene works. Also, and this is key: every pizza is a personal cosmology. A circular map of desire and limitation.

OC: You once held a three-day symposium titled Crust: Borders and Boundaries.

SC: We invited no one, but still, people came. Neapolitan pizza is a big draw.

OC: Your fascination with rugby seems… unconventional for the art world. Why the obsession?

SC: It’s pure. It’s choreographed violence. It’s mud and grace. I consider it the last great baroque ritual left in Western civilisation. There’s something fundamentally sculptural about the scrum—it’s a moving knot, a living knot. Bernini would have wept, had he been a scrum half.

OC: Do you still play?

SC: I do, but at 92 I fear every game is my last. I no longer play in the front row, that is my concession to age.

OC: What are you working on now?

SC: I’m building a gothic cathedral out of expired boarding passes. It’s called Saint Delay of the Terminal Gate. It’s about transience, repetition, and the essential failure of Western society.

OC: Naturally.

SC: Also, a one-man ballet where I interpret the Eurozone crisis as a series of rugby set-pieces. It is to premiere at the St Ives Opera House.

OC: And finally, Salvatore, what advice would you give to young artists?

SC: Eat everything. Question the sky. No, I mean question everything. And if your work begins to make too much sense, take a step back. Breathe. And maybe put some more anchovies on it!

Crump’s next exhibition, “The Leftover Century,” opens at the Bodega Municipal de São Vicente in September. It is rumoured to include a perfect 3D map of Rome made from lasagna, which will be eaten at the opening party.