Nina Abba: At the beginning of your practice, the materials you were using also implied a certain physicality, a strong work with your body. Heavy metal was a fundamental component, that created a very strong aesthetics. This work with the body and external elements seems to me to have evolved over the years towards the performative. And then the community building came in, with the creation of workshops - also a beautiful and important form of art piece. It feels to me as if the switch happened between your body and the materials and then your body with other bodies and other people.

Julia Flux: TERRA//Talking with Stones is an expression of all the work of the last years. It is my vision of a future for community and art. I am trying to reply to the needs of society, since people do not want to go to galleries anymore. People are tired of passively looking: they want to make art, to feel, to play. They want nature and they want community. I always looked for that in my sculptural practice: I wanted for people to engage with the sculptures, to touch them, and to see them as part of the environment. I wanted them to be immersive. Talking with Stones connects these thoughts to landscape art, to bring the bodies in a direct connection with the environment through dance and movement. When you think of an habitat and then think of how art interacts with it, it can often feel too invasive. You would hear someone talk about community building but failing to accept or respect the environment that hosts the community. From my part, Talking with Stones is adaptable: it can involve one stone or a full field of stones, it can be big and it can be small, it can be done by one or many. This adaptability serves as an invitation to the people, a response to their call to physically engage with art and our surroundings, in a more hands-on and open way - and I believe people need playfulness and joy. One of the main aims of TERRA// is to make play and enjoyment accessible. And the people’s responses has been really supportive this far: participants totally get the process straight away and the practice comes together by itself. Playfulness and joy allow us to connect to something that is already in us, and therefore any pretense of construction falls off and is gone. The community can thus rely on what is already in us, which is not constructed. It is when we are put in the right surroundings and we are allowed to access it, that we know what to do with it: when we are allowed to play, touch, and dance.

NA: And interestingly, it is not Talking to Stones, but with Stones. This gives the work a sense of reciprocity in the process, the aspect of a conversation. One that is perhaps unaccessible at a superficial level but happens in a different language that we are not used to.

JF: Absolutely, it is a conversation. One that can also take place in a geopolitical way, as we can start talking of of mining, minerals extractions, and industrialization - and at its core this piece is a harsh critique to what we are doing to the environment. But the spiritual aspects comes in even stronger for me, because we are made of the very same matter. The iron in the minerals and the iron in my blood are the same. There is some sort of sentimental aspect to it but it should not just fall into a romanticization of this relationship. It is a fact, and it has a physical impact on us. Of course it was a process, and when I began to recognize this desire to belong with nature it felt weird to even question what Nature meant to me. Through my research it surfaced that many communities and societies that are more grounded in untamed environments do not always present such a neat distinction between an Us and a Nature. In fact, such a distinction does not exist, at times not even in the language. I understood the role of such a dichotomy for myself, and art became the vessel to break it. At the beginning it did feel weird, to really talk at and with the stone - which is one integral part of the piece. But with time it became clearer how to have the stones close to or on me really becomes a dialogue. There is something to feel there, and those who participate did and will feel it. It is not a language in the sense we understand it now, in the sense we use language even in this very same moment. But something changes, like with movement. We then are helped recognize how much stones move and change all the time.

NA: It is interesting that you brought up time, because it seems to permeate so many aspects of your work. On one hand, metal and glass, materials present in your practice, can change drastically in artisanal interactions, or over very long spans of time, even if we perceive them as very fixed. As well, you are not afraid to engage with organic materials, on which you initiate and stimulate change through different methods. You are not afraid to burn, to dye, to incorporate moveable elements. Then performance is deeply intertwined with the matters of time, which envelops your movement work in a whole new layer of meaning. Thus correct me if I am wrong, but it feels like change and time are fundamental aspects of your practice.

JF: My practice is extremely informed by movement and time. We think of time in a linear way, and we are taught to connect this to progression. But in my current research I feel more and more that everything is cyclic. There are moments for things that pick up in cyclic episodes. Then repetition plays an important role, for example in TERRA//. Each time we repeat it, it changes. Not only because of the people, but also because of the time of the people themselves. That is why I want the body to be more of the sculpture right now - it aligns more with my values.

I do have a deep fascination with metal, but this is also shifting more and more to the rust, to the decomposing metal. For some reason you always find these huge mounts of rusty metal and glass in the desert - it is everywhere! And they are these highly industrialized human products, that one could even see as the peak of industrial production. In a way it serves as currency, and to find it everywhere, even in the desert, decomposing and decaying is incredibly fascinating. And I find it important to say that they decay, because it brings them closer to us, closer to the body.

NA: Fascination with decaying metal but also with the desert. I feel that you are inspired by realities that we are used to think of as dead, or at least hostile and mute to humans. As you say they decay, but we are so accustomed to see such matters and environment as infertile. In that sense I think your work Cosmic Gardening is very intriguing, because it implies the introduction of order and fertility. It forces to rethink our relationship to the non-human and nature from a different point of view, allowing for infertile realities to suddenly feel very organic.

JF: I see these elements as really broken structure, so it is very nice to hear you hint to their organicity. I think we are used to connect trees and green with nature and life, but if you look around, if you search for it in the city you are actually mostly looking at unhealthy and dying plants. They have been made to fit in the city. The idea of what is natural feels very off, and we need to find acceptance for death. The idyllic idea of the Garden of Eden, adopted and influenced by capitalist ideology, excludes the possibility of a way back, of a return. On the other hand, deserts carry not only a strong mythological significance, but also the reduction to a minimal aspect. In the desert everything is reduced to a minimum. Complexity, nourishment, variation - they are all reduced and magnified to the extreme. A drop of water makes a difference, a bit of wind makes a difference, a stone makes a difference. So the impact of yourself and of your feelings gain immensely in importance. And the way deserts are expanding and growing - both autonomically and under human’s influence - does present a possible outlook of our future. Still, I find it important to have hope that we are not lost, even if all signs seem to point towards a dystopia right now. Creation is creativity, and we can create a desirable future, not one in the Garden of Eden, but one in which we work with what we are given. It is a spiritual mindset but also a very critical and scientifically realistic future. I cannot think of bypassing what is there, and Cosmic Gardening allows to combine both elements without sacrificing any of it.

NA: As you said, spirituality but also science. I am mesmerized by the role that order and putting things into place play in Cosmic Gardening, and your work is never chaotic or messy. I think we can recognize how much our generation has lost a healthy order, a structure. The way you incorporate that in your work is very beautiful, because there is something powerful and beautiful in giving something a place, giving something a home.

JF: That is what I always loved about gardening. It is absolutely incredible to see something grow and then decay. It is a delicate balance because you do need to know when something needs to go. You really engage with the matter and there is something of a cosmic law to it. In our universe, in our reality we have rules, we have physics. If you know how to work with them, if you understand them, you know everything that you need to know to be in this world. I try to avoid consciouslt chasing a certain aesthetic. That just does not work for me - it is no fun. I need to be open for what is already present, for what is there and feels right. So that became a whole visual language of itself, that goes through a matter of intuition. It is what I understand as being an artist: to know - perhaps feel - where to continue, where to stop, which direction to go. Artists keep an order, and through that serve a fundamental function to our society.

NA: Embodied knowledge means that thoughts and ideas intuitively go through the body and physical sensations. And your artistic research is informed of many different parts: theoretical research, but also work on and the conversation with the materials. And I can only imagine other elements that come into play in the process that are perhaps harder to put into words.

JF: Well, yes. I have learned to allow the material to become what it needs to become, to give it space. Every being has an essence, and there are infinite possibilities for creation. The concept, the fact that everything has a living essence is gaining in importance for me.

For example, not that long ago I was doing a residency in the desert and I felt I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I thought it would work, I was sure it would. I wanted to research on eco-dyes and was very commited to the process, including the performances. Well, it did not work in any way I wanted it to, no matter how much I tried to adapt to it, no matter how open I was. It was not doing anything and it became boring. I was sitting there and nothing was happening - but that offered me a chance to let go and keep on going. I focused on being an open vessel through which creation come, and not something that push. And shortly after I found myself in a cave and I started working on its landscape and it was just happening. That was just working. That is where I put my trust in: I cannot work with a production-oriented mindset. The work will come. And it is more fun to be in this dialogue with the matter surrounding me. The matter does have its own language, and it can be taken one step at the time. Like right now I am working on on a big metal sculpture, but rather than putting all of myself on it, I am also focusing on dancing and play, and that multiplicity feels right.