Question
I was curious about the photograph of the work you change over time. You were describing the changes over time, but showing us a single image.

Tonico
Yes, that was a big dilemma for me for the banana drawings, because again, what is sold is a photograph of just one particular moment. And when you go to the gallery, you could be lucky to see the banana in its splendour or you could see it when it’s horrible and smelly and you can’t see much of the drawing.
In question of the photograph which was what was actually sold, I decided to take that stage when the drawing is most visible, when it’s darker, just before it starts becoming invisible again, so there was a decision made about which moment I would frame into a photograph to be sold.
I have to tell you something which I found out recently which scared me a bit about those works, the banana photographs. I went to the Mori Museum in Japan, and they love gadgets there. They made these shirts with the banana fruits, which sold really well, and then some people started doing their own drawings on the fruits, but then someone showed me this link. Someone in America created a website, they call it ‘Tattooing Bananas’, and there are hundreds of drawings on bananas from 2005/2006 after the ones in Japan and it’s just crazy how it went into people’s mind… it was kind of scary to see, the size of it… you totally lose control. The internet sometimes creates its own private religion of people who share the same awkward interests, and you don’t have control of it.

Comment
We could leave you in this room and come back next Wednesday and you could make a carpet sculpture…

Tonico
No, please... Yes actually, I thought about that, just doing something quickly.

Question
You previously said your work was about disappearance, but it struck me that it’s very much about appearance and about anthropomorphism. I wonder what you enjoy about seeing faces in things, seeing bodies?

Tonico
I like the idea of transformation, of when the work contains a certain type of dynamism. It is very subtle, but there is something in transformation, it’s not completed, your mind is trying to complete something from a certain state. There is a kind of action going on within that created microcosm or environment. Even the bananas are like an environment where something specific is happening when you do the drawings, it’s a very specific environment that I’m putting forward, the same thing with the carpet, and those things could not happen in a different environment.

Transcribed by Jackie Howson and edited by Marion Endt.