Interviewer(INT): I’m so glad we get to talk today. Why did you agree to talk to me today, when you have refused so many times before?
Aloïs Simon (AS): I also wanted to talk to you before, but I had nothing to say. I wanted to meet and had nothing to meet you with. That is often the misunderstanding. It is not out of not wanting, it is out of not knowing how. And not knowing how to protect myself, I guess.
INT: protect yourself from?
AS: myself mostly, I guess. I wanted it too much, that can be dangerous. I knew you probably had many questions for me that I would love to answer. It shouldn’t be like that.
INT: So you shouldn’t love it?
AS: what I mean is, that it should come from some other place. Not out of loneliness or desperation or pure indulgence. And at those times it was what I felt more than anything. Because I was very lonely. And I felt very desperate for most of my life.
INT: what has changed, do you think?
AS: I dont’ know yet. I just feel a bit different now. Will you tell me your first question?
INT: ok I will. But it is also interesting to hear about the things we now started talking about.
AS: maybe we will return to that. I want to start somewhere else if that is ok.
INT: Yes, of course. My first question was quite simple, banal maybe. Naive. I wanted to ask you this: Do free artists exist? And do you feel free as artist?
AS: Yes and no. I like your question, even though it is quite impossible. Thank you. Let me think for a moment….. (silence for 10 minutes. Outside a bus is stopping, letting off some people and driving on. Aloïs is looking after it). I’m trying to think about where to start. The thing is that obviously no one is entirely free, there is no such thing, so let’s put that aside first, once and for all. No complete freedom. Then we can move on to where is the most possible freedom in my opinion, in my life. It is a great question, because the answer is never the same. If you ask me tomorrow, maybe even tonight it will be different. Maybe even the exact opposite of what I tell you now. That is what freedom is to me, is doesn’t exist, because it is just air, the void between the walls or the furniture of one’s room. It took me so many years to realize. When I was in the psychiatric ward for instance, I felt very free. I couldn’t just leave the room, I wasn’t locked there, but I had to ask for leave, and honestly freedom was definitely there too. I heard the same from people who have been in prison. So freedom definitely exists in a confined room too. But I also mean the room symbolically. As something that can constantly be changed and moved around but always is bounded. That leads me to an important distinction, at least in my head. Between physical freedom and psychological freedom. As an artist, as any human being, I will always believe that the psychological freedom is the most important. So that is the one I will focus on. Much can of course be also said about physiological freedom, and it they two forms obviously interlock in many places. But I have to focus on the other one first. The need for psychological and mental freedom. Freedom to think and do what you want. By “do” I mean express, because we are today talking about the life of an artist. It is probably the thing I have searched most for in my life, freedom of expression. And I have also obsessed over it to the point where my search for freedom paradoxically became a prison, mentally. I am, as I have said earlier, not a stranger to the psychiatric wards, and the reason, I think, for me having to go there was partly, I think, because of the extreme ways I investigated mental freedom. So I have been in places, mentally, where there were places inside freedom, where there was no longer freedom, and therefore I know, that is no such thing as a pure freedom. It has to be full of so many other things. In order to be what it is. But let me start at the practicalities of life. I wrote in obscurity for 10 or 15 years. Not in silence, because I had readings with friends and peers and occasionally the odd, uninterested publisher, but I was completely invisible. In the sense that I didn’t publish anything. I wanted to. But I couldn’t find anyone interested. But I refused to change the way I wrote. My time in the film world was a bit different, I will get to that, but it was battle for freedom of expression, because here I had people somewhat interested, but in film you have to explain what you want to make before you can get any money for it, and I could not explain anything. I could show some things, but they didn’t explain much. I sensed they wanted something I wasn’t prepared to deliver. So I went in a different direction. I believed that total freedom would help. I slowly left everything befind, said no to everyting. But that is a different story.I just wanted to explain that in both worlds, my writings and my film, I could somehow not make myself understood. And it didn’t only apply to the so-called art world, the establishment and so on. My peers, my friends also didn’t always get it. And that is ok, actually they should be critical. I dont believe in friends between artists. I believe that you can share a love for art so big, that you both gravitate towards it, and there you can find each other. But the love for the art always goes first. In my opinion. But honestly I had a very hard time finding colleagues who felt that way. They believed in the friendship first. I guess I thought so sometimes too. But I always ended up hurting them, letting them down. Im not proud of this. I had to learn to be ok with an extreme loneliness. I miss these friends and colleagues a lot.
So that is how I moved into obscurity. and it was true obscurity because I also had to earn some money, so I worked a gardener and office manager. My art was completely hidden in those years. And it a way it really was total freedom. No one forced me to change a paragraph, no one cared. No one needed anything from me. I had a deep depression when freedom left that place. One day I realized I had to look somewhere else. I had realised that freedom is not a beautiful thing in the sense that is painful. It was painful letting go of my ego. I really suffered in those years. Even though the freedom had been there. And then, when the pain got easier, then I was all of a sudden not free at all. And it dawned on me that the freedom wasn’t there, because the pain was no longer there either; that really surprised me.. Now freedom had to be found out in the open, in letting go. Letting people see me, I guess. that was a different freedom. So now we have talked about the freedom om oblivion and the freedom of being seen. The freedom of not talking, and the freedom of speaking.
to be continued..
