A.V.
That would be very difficult because with me everything overlaps and dissolves into each other. Problems, rather than time, assume priority. In a way it is paradoxical. When I encounter some of my older things, I sometimes get the feeling it was someone else´s life. As if those things came from someone else. On the other hand, with new things I quite often discover - and usually after the fact - that their origins lie somewhere in my very distant past. Twenty, even thirty year-old notes and sketches exit that already potentially contain embryos of ideas, the same ideas which I think I am conceiving right now as new ones. But this is probably related to the multi-layered nature of what I do. There is difference between things that I physically completed and which palpably exist, and between the paralel records of utopian imaginings, which I dreamt of one day turning into reality. My utopian imaginings, that other, second, level of consciousness, accompany me from the very beginning as dreams and ephemeral visions. A very long time ago, when I hadn´t even thought of expressing myself in three - dimensional terms, I thought of certain giant paintings or frescoes. Later on, sometime in the mid-sixties, projections of spatial ideas in giant dimensions began to appear. In the second half of the sixties, things emerged that seem to overtake my physical possibilities. At that moment I neither implemented them nor did I actually complete them in my imagination, but they do appear as an embryo of something that I am once again thinking about today.

...Occasionally I would by mistake get ahead of myself and of my ability to develop and define what I was thinking about at the moment. Maybe it´s a shame that I didn´t set out in that direction sooner. But maybe it wasn´t the right time, the feverish thinking and the release of mental images evoked in me ecstatic states, as well as the attendant need of physical contact with something tangible. The road towards realization of an ideal vision is always long, if only because certain material means are required.

...For me the most interesting phase is the work itself. I mean the creation, the changing of utopia into actual reality. For that phase I always allowed myself as much room as possible, in order to be able to realize that particular ´´it´´ when I was fully concentrated. I had a feeling that if I thought up too much beforehand, my concentration would be diminished. Thus it was intentional. In that regard my working methods have recently changed quite considerably. This is because greater emphasis is placed on thinking and the rational construction of initially ecstatically generated imaginings. The actual process of physical work might no longer be as important, or it might be more combined, ambivalent, while the relationship between ecstasy, thought and physical labor becomes more permeated, suffused, and equalized. My presence or physical trace no longer has such a markedly dominant meaning. It is possible to leave the trace by what I am actually thinking.

...I am terribly interested in the relationship between ecstasy and what I do with resources, how I consciously use them. Most important is possibly the balance between them , in other words, the balancing of extremes.

...The thought is always primary. I never think a priory of a sculpture as sculpture, but nonetheless I know that everything that I am drawing is always primarily a sculpture. It became second nature for me to always think about something that has three dimensions, something that should be created, that should materially exist , that I would like to make. Thus, from that perspektive I think of a sculpture not as mass, but as an object that plays out in three dimensions. In any event, as far as I am concerned the plastic side is never predetermined, it could be said that the impulse is always metaphysical.

M.S.
It always appeared to me that you begin with some kind of a philosophical puzzle or statement.

A.V.
...Certainly. But it isn´t expressed verbally. It isn´t philosophical in the sense of being presented as an a priory problem, but rather it appears as a question. Althought in my mind it is formulated in that manner, it then looks for its expression by means of a specific language, not necessarily verbal. Words also appear there concomitantly, because in the initial notes things, which strongly activate my sensibility, are partially recorded in texts.

... I make sculptures, but not because I am endowed with the ability to control the resources used. It is more the case of person finding a way of expression , who is excited by space and by things that control it, things that are tangible and therefore exist. But that does not in fact constitute sculpting. That is about something else. Sculpting is more about mass than about space. It is also more about touching. I am more interested in the notion of walking through, in a person´s relationship to space, in the filling of space, in the filling of emptiness.

...I always thought that one of the measures of a work of art is its strength. If something is strong, its strength becomes one of its basic classifications. I always thought that strength means that the thing is strongly motivated and internally engaged. When the testimony is in itself powerful, it is probably about something that is substantial and important. I also thought that it might be wrong if someone doesn´t recognize it.

M.S.
Utopias?

A.V.
Utopias are very important components of art. Most of what one does is in fact utopian because the transformation from human memory into something that is either a pictorial surface or a spatial thing is so difficult. Of course it is important for me to talk about Utopias because my projects contain things that are difficult to achieve. Or one is trying to express things that are very difficult to transform into any kind of new reality - into the reality of that thing.
Very often it is utopian to realize things for the most mundane reasons. I mean that it is difficult to assemble the necessary resources. But utopia in its essence is something else, something much more substantial. Sometimes we encounter a problem that is terribly important, but very difficult to resolve. Yet we are urged to constantly try and do so. In my case it involes for instance the suppression of gravitation. I believe that with the use of the most advanced resources from the field of experimental physics the problem can be scientifically solved.