days or so, I really thought it had a kind of Sarajevo aesthetic, which is kind of one way a building dies, is in war. I also noticed that the building had actually lived quicker than its image in the piece. That we removed some partitions that were put there in 1965, and we removed them and opened some of the floor plans to their original shape, and the partitions that had disappeared from the building were in the piece, and I thought I could have a personal relationship through this. CD: Bruce Jenkins was saying last night, when we were thinking of the Gordon Matta-Clark film, and how a process of destruction and unmaking is so interesting to architects, because they don’t think of buildings, necessarily in that way. It is plan, design and build – that way – as opposed to destroy. To see Conical Intersect yesterday and slowly, piece by piece, coming to bits, and also this piece in particular, that must have been quite startling from an architect’s perspective. Tuomas Toivonen: Actually I had a question. When I heard about the piece the first time, I really had this idea that it would kind of involve time in a much broader sense than just the deterioration of the building. And I thought it is casting a very long arc or timeframe, that there would be possible things to discuss. There’s the absence of man and the absence of nature, and there’s the absence of the elements, the absence of weather or there is constant lighting and so on… It would be interesting to hear about the specific choices, that there are no birds, there is no bird shit… the marks of something on the building are in a way often the thing that makes it charming when it starts to age. The piece shows just the structural deterioration of the elements very pragmatically. Not the build-up of patina. RN: Actually, five days, four hours and two minutes and one second, there is a bird flying across the street. So you didn’t see that? Tuomas Toivonen: No, I missed it. RN: No, we took away the birds. And before we made this film, we made a couple of other films, one of them being a film called Flooded McDonald’s and that film is also very simple in the sense that it’s just a McDonald’s being flooded with water. There’s nothing else, there’s no humans or birds or animals there either, but we wanted in this film to have time play that sort of role as if time was an element like water or fire. So it’s not a tsunami coming like that, it’s just time, and to cut away everything else which, of course, makes it a fiction. It’s a complete fiction. We also tried not to make the building look like a war zone, but that’s difficult, because usually it’s wars that destroy buildings. But we wanted to make it really clean in that sense that there’s no political – it’s not the Russians coming and bombing, it’s not the Chinese colonizing Finland or – there’s no external things, apart from just time. We tried somehow to enable an almost ephemeral experience of time possible. Basically we cleaned away everything, and that naturally makes it a total construct. But that was really a deliberate choice. BC: There were a lot of discussion about that… Because you can have an ice age again, you can have like hurricanes for a hundred years. Every day in the
66