Teresa Hubbard &
Alexander Birchler

RRL

How long have you been practicing as a duo?

TH

We have been collaborating since 1990. We were individually working artists and we met at the Banff Centre in Canada, which is an artist residency program. Alexander’s background in Switzerland was a traditional art academy, with an emphasis on painting and sculpture. My background—grew up in Australia—was in creative writing and installation work.

RRL

How did this collaboration form?

TH

When we first began working together, we discovered that despite our differing backgrounds, we shared common interests. We realized that our collaboration led us to reach a third place. It wasn't just a mix of my voice with his, but a third voice that emerged from our collaborative practice—something neither of us could have formulated alone.

RRL

The third place is an interesting formulation for collaborative work.

TH

It takes time to get to that third place. When authorship is hybrid, work emerges from both studio work and discussion. Our collective interest is in forms that traverse and push the boundaries of documentary, fiction, reconstruction, and reenactment. Our work aims to broaden all these conceptual terrains yet remains specific to the project or context at hand.

RRL

What mediums do you often work with?

TH

We work foremost in sculpture, installation, photography, and moving image. I would say our practice is rooted in the moving image, but we use whatever means necessary for developing and fitting the content.

RRL

What was the first work that you made together under this hybrid authorship?

AB

The very first piece we created together was titled Small Town. We were at an artist residency in Banff, Canada at the time. The residency was secluded on a hill, but we wanted to do something in the town—so we obtained temporary access to use a vacant building. We began collecting doors, and then we built them into series of connecting hallways and stairways inside the building. It was a maze-like structure. We referred to the project as a “Museum of Doors.” It’s amusing to recall our early work, but from the outset, we were intrigued by archives and collections—not necessarily those found in art museums, but in history and science museums.

RRL

Were your individual practices as artists already interested in themes such as archives, collections, reenactment, and history? Or did these focuses gradually develop after the collaboration, a result of reaching this third place?

AB

These themes grew stronger together in our collaboration, but they can also be traced in our individual interests beforehand. Back then, I was very intrigued by facsimile and the reconstruction of found objects, both real and fabricated. Teresa was involved in water collection at that time.

TH

I collected rather sizable water samples from various locations, identifying and re-classifying them in a descriptive narrative form. For example, samples: “Water from a pig trough,” or “Water from a lake during bad weather.” This early project allowed me to navigate a path from the personal to the public sphere. I believe Alexander's work shared a similar trajectory. When we initially encountered each other's work, he had a project titled Landscape. The work was composed of a selection of everyday objects, for example a workman's glove, a crumpled sheet of paper and a scrap of wood which he found along the roadside. He would gather this debris and with great care, make an exact replica of each one. It was quite beautiful.

RRL

Specimens from fieldwork seem to be a trope reoccurring throughout your body of work. They are very present in your recent work as well.

AB

Despite the evolving nature of our work, it has been a constant thread throughout our more than 30 years of collaboration to focus on storytelling based on fieldwork and specimens. We are often as much interested in the factual, as in the narrative potential of objects and the manifold connections they afford.

RRL

Are there other themes that your collaborative practice often come back to?

AB

We often integrate everyday moments from our lives and surroundings into our work, to establish connections between them and our audience. As we have a collaborative practice, we understand what it means to be an audience, as we are always our own first audience. The concept of “the other” is always present within the work, which differs from the typically solitary and individualistic nature of an artist's practice. We always contemplate how our work can transform its surroundings into something inclusive and capacious.

TH

Accessibility is always on our mind, and we aim to create work in a generous language that makes people feel like they belong.

RRL

Have any works stood out to you as the most significant and productive in this respect?

AB

I think, most recently, Flora has been one of them. Flora revolves around the life of an American woman, Flora Mayo, who in the 1920s studied alongside Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. They had a romantic relationship. While Giacometti is among the most celebrated artists of the 20th century, the majority of Mayo’s oeuvre has been lost or destroyed, and her biography was previously relegated to a footnote in Giacometti’s scholarship. In Flora, we reframe this story from a feminist perspective. The work is held in several public museum collections in the United States, Europe and Japan. Flora has been constantly on display, reaching a broad audience since we first showed it at the Venice Biennale in 2017.

TH

At its core, Flora is about a mother and her son and the sacrifices she made to raise her son. It has touched a broad range of audiences because everyone has had a mother, even if you've never known them and no matter how dysfunctional or loving the relationship is.

AB

Yes, it’s about a mother and her son, but there are other entryways into the work as Flora unfurls as a multifaceted dialogue across place and time–between Mayo and Giacometti, Europe and the United States, past and present, and evidence and imagination. These dichotomies on different levels have made Flora accessible to many different people.

RRL

How was your most recent work Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come conceived?

AB

Parts of downtown Austin used to constantly flood, so it was decided in early 2000 that a tunnel would be built as an attempt of flood prevention. In mid-pandemic, we visited the site for the first time when the park was still under construction. Given the significant disturbance to the ground, it was obvious that if we were to make a public artwork at this park, we needed it, in some way, to reflect its ground, its history. We began researching, visiting the site, scouring historical photographs and documents, and gathering as much information as possible.

As we delved into our research, we stumbled upon reports related to the construction of the flood prevention tunnel. The Texas Historical Commission hired archaeologists to conduct excavations at the site—15 trenches in total. Their task was to assess if there were any artifacts or cultural resources of significance that could potentially be disturbed by construction of the flood prevention tunnel. We were thrilled to uncover this information and sought out the original reports by these archaeologists.

TH

When we eventually found the reports, some of the language immediately caught our attention. They described the sites and objects as “entirely disturbed deposits,” “out of context,” with “limited integrity,” and providing “redundant information.” Despite these descriptions, which were already intriguing to us, we discovered that a selection of these supposedly redundant, out-of-context, and disturbed deposits were archived and put into storage. This was incredibly exciting. When we visited the Texas Archaeological Research Lab (TARL), where these deposits were stored in four cardboard boxes, we found ourselves in a massive repository, the largest in the state of Texas, housing 5 million objects. It took several trips to locate these seemingly insignificant boxes.

RRL

These descriptions are loaded!

TH

I recall when the Head of Collections was bringing out the first box, she seemed almost apologetic, knowing we had searched extensively and made a special trip to the repository. She even questioned whether we still wanted to see the contents, as she believed there was nothing particularly interesting there. People have been living and visiting the banks of the Waller Creek for thousands of years, however, due to the constant flooding, only artifacts from the past 150 years were located. She suggested, jokingly, that if we were seeking anything significant, we would have to go to the bottom of Lady Bird Lake, because everything has been washed away.

AB

As Teresa mentioned, the language used to describe these deposits heightened our curiosity. “Out of context,” “redundant”—that's exactly what we're interested in. The artifacts that become the outsiders, external to the main canon. The leftovers.

RRL

How did you come up with the title for the project?

TH

During my time in graduate school, I had the opportunity to work for the poet Susan Howe, who is a wonderful person and writer. She wrote a book titled Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, which has had a significant impact on my understanding of language and objecthood.

Interestingly, the word “deposit” also surfaced in the reports we encountered, particularly in the context of archaeological findings described as “severely disturbed deposits.” This notion of a deposit, something left behind or preserved for a possible future, resonated with us as we were wrestling with objecthood, memory, and time.

RRL

What did you learn from these artifacts that are deemed archaeologically insignificant and redundant?

TH

These artifacts belong to a period from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. It’s a time when the area was inhabited by diverse working-class families and small businesses.

AB

These people were laborers who essentially served the people living in the city center. Their neighborhood was at the edge of the city at the time, or rather, the city's periphery. Archaeologists could still paint a fairly accurate picture of the neighborhood. They could discern that it was a working-class area with a few family-owned shops and restaurants like laundries, pharmacies, barbershops, and carpentry. They also uncovered evidence of children's pastimes, such as marble and penny collections. The city of Austin did not provide this part of town with garbage collection until the 1940’s, so these objects, for the most part, were discarded items that people buried in backyard pits or threw along the banks of the creek. Some were even found in outdoor toilets, thrown into privies that are no longer in operation.

TH

These artifacts have all been touched by someone's hands—glass marbles held by a child, or the buttons sewn on by a seamstress. For us, these artifacts give flesh to memory in an unnoticed yet compelling way.

RRL

That your work takes in only the archaeological surplus which failed to cohere to a meaningful narrative within the cultural heritage framework is fascinating. Past Deposits seems to suggest an artistic approach of history that attends to the overlooked, the trivial, and the forgotten that lay beyond the dominant event.

TH

I remember when we first saw the buttons—there are a lot of them—I recalled Gertrude Stein's book, Tender Buttons, which explores the texture and significance of everyday domestic objects. I found myself pondering that phrase, “tender buttons,” while examining these archaeological artifacts, realizing that each one of them is like a tiny evocative event. They’re not just objects; they represent events in themselves.

RRL

Were there any criteria for the inclusion of artifacts into this work? There seems to be a structure in how these objects appear in the video—I am curious about how you process this “redundant” archive.

AB

Our approach of organizing the artifacts was subjective and non-hierarchical, based on considerations of material, shape, play, hygiene, value, religion, and color, to name a few. It’s important to note that each of these artifacts bears a mark left by the hand of the archaeologist categorizing the artifact. They would put a tiny brushstroke of lacquer on the surface of the artifact and then carefully write an identification number on top. When filming the individual artifacts, we kept this trace of previous identification visible–hundreds of tiny marks attempting a classification of the material world.

RRL

Your work added another layer of writing to them…

AB

Right.

RRL

How does the work blend into the existing architecture of the park?

TH

We spent a lot of late nights in the park conducting projection tests of the images. One night, there were a couple of teenagers sitting on a low wall in front of the amphitheater. They were embracing. Then the young woman said, “Can you stop kissing me? I want to watch this.” It was a funny moment—I could see how the work was resonating with the park's existing public life and ambiance.

RRL

That’s a great anecdote.

TH

On another occasion, we spotted a man with a magnetometer searching for artifacts in the grass near the amphitheater stage. He mentioned that the park was a great place to find items dropped by visitors and concertgoers. Observations and conversations like these added to our understanding of the park's environment.

RRL

Were there any challenges or opportunities that emerged during the installation process?

AB

In his design of the amphitheater, the architect, Thomas Phifer, has referred to being inspired by the work of the painter, Agnes Martin.

TH

I had the great fortune to spend time with Agnes Martin many years ago—when I was a young art student—so this was a poignant connection to Thomas’ architectural work.

AB

As a result, Thomas created a grid-like roof structure suspended by multiple columns on the stage. This grid like architecture was a direct impetus for us to think about order, systems, patterns and arrangement. At the same time, the numerous columns scattered across the stage presented a significant challenge to the projection display we were designing, and therefore we had to create many computer-generated 3D renderings to help visualize the choreography of artifacts.

RRL

The architecture of the site surely imposes certain constraints within which you must operate. Let's shift gears to discuss the structural aspect of the site's architecture. Flooding, as you mentioned, backdropped new construction projects within the larger downtown redevelopment scheme of Austin. It seems important to recognize that flooding is not simply a natural disaster; it has always been politically intertwined with the infrastructure it begets. Take, for instance, the Waller Creek, where many artifacts in Past Deposits were excavated. This creek was part of a 19th-century hydraulic infrastructure designed to mitigate floods, an architecture that engendered certain forms of environmental governance at the time. And today, the site is reconfigured into an art-accommodating park, which belongs to a widespread formula in “revitalizing” America’s postindustrial downtowns since the triumphant story of High Line in the late 2000s. Contemporary culture, like flood, is woven into forms of power structuring the site. How do you navigate and engage with this site-specific complexity?

AB

The history of parks is indeed important to always keep in mind. Often, parks were not built to bring people together; they were constructed to keep people separate or to condemn structures where people lived. Obviously, the hope is that Waterloo Park is a place that will bring people together, but we are completely aware of the conflicted and complicated histories of the site. Parks in downtown areas, for example, have very complex histories. To address this, from the onset, we have envisioned and created a series of public programming initiatives. There is a component of the work called “Dialogues,” where we invite respondents to delve into the complex histories of parks and urban spaces, and specifically the place of Waterloo Park. These dialogues are presented as short essays.

TH

The initial respondents include a diverse group comprising researchers, curators, poets, historians, and scholars from various academic institutions and backgrounds: Jana La Brasca, Lisa Le Feuvre, Dieter Roelstraete, Zachary Suri, Andrés Tijerina, and Javier Wallace.

RRL

How did you approach sound in Past Deposits?

TH

We considered several composers, but we were drawn to Alex Weston because of our previous experience working with him on Flora in 2017.

AB

We envisioned the need for a human voice devoid of words or song lyrics. We believed that Alex could compose something that would effectively accentuate and amplify this concept.

RRL

How did you arrive at the idea of using nonverbal human voice?

TH

At the beginning we envisioned something directly relatable, like a children’s song with a simple melody.

AB

As we both come from different cultural backgrounds and speak different languages, our decision to use the human voice without words appealed to us.

TH

Another musical aspect we grasped early on was our desire for cyclicality, an inclination towards plucking sounds reminiscent of a metronome—a timekeeping apparatus. These were ideas we discussed with Alex, allowing for a fluid exchange of thoughts. Repetition emerged as a prominent theme, emphasizing the importance of returning to our initial point, especially with regards to the sound of the voice.

RRL

What was the process working with the composer like?

AB

It was a back-and-forth, iterative process which was very different from with the typical approach in film scoring, where the music is often composed after the film is completed, without much room for edits or changes. In our project, however, we had the flexibility to revisit and adjust our work in response to the sound and score that Alex was creating. It was a collaborative effort through which we could continually refine each other’s drafts.

RRL

Zooming out from Past Deposits, how would you understand the role of sound within your larger body of work?

AB

The sonic register in our work is very important. We believe that sound can extend beyond the confines of the frame, evoking a sense of what lies beyond its boundaries. Each time we engage with sound, whether it's through scores or any other auditory elements we incorporate, it's about articulating the unseen. We often use sound to express what remains hidden from view.

TH

Sound allows us to both contract and expand the frame. It is also often deployed in our work to contradict what is being seen.

RRL

There’s a history of artists producing artwork in public spaces in American cities. The usual suspects are Serra, Kapoor, Calder, and others. It’s often told that their works reflect their unique understandings of what public means, but also suggest different visions of how art relates to public spaces and cities. Some view the public as a place lacking aesthetic appeal in need of beautification, while others construct artwork that intervenes in and disrupt the existing urban flows, provoking conventional ideas of what public spaces should be. How do you understand this lineage of, for lack of a more nuanced term, public art? What was your conception of the public and how does it manifest in your work?

TH

That is an interesting question. The work exists solely as a projection of light and a stream of sound—immaterial and fleeting. It merely lingers on the surface of the architecture before disappearing.

AB

Past Deposits is a fleeting gesture in public space. I believe we harbor dual aspirations. On the one hand, we aim to provoke contemplation about the ground we inhabit and the history we inherit. Yet, simultaneously, by creating an ephemeral artwork that fades away for much of the park’s daily usage, we take an unassuming approach to reflect how art can accompany and integrate into public life.

RRL

A provocative accompaniment. I really like that…

AB

Past Deposits does not impede the flow of public activities but serves as a “Stolperstein” (stumbling block), an interruption or an open suggestion, if you will, for the public to pause and contemplate. This is how we conceived of a public artwork for Waterloo Park.