[Germaine Koh is a conceptual artist from Canada. Her work was recently
included in La Biennale de Montreal 2000 and will be featured in
upcoming shows at both the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and
Plug-in Inc. in Winnipeg. This interview deals with a recent site-
specific radio project installed at the Arte in Situ / La Torre de los
Vientos in Mexico City, entitled "by the way."]

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Mathew Kabatoff: Can you talk about the use of mediated devices in your
work? How did you decide to use only popular mass media formats?

Germaine Koh: I have great faith in the power of commonplace things to
tell us about ourselves, how we live and how we relate to each other. I
think that the minor things that mediate our everyday lives inevitably
bear a residual meaningfulness, and much of my work has been an effort
to allow these things to speak quietly back to us. I would characterize
my work as a whole as an attempt to be attentive to the poetics of daily
life by focusing on those phenomena that shape everyday experience,
often slightly below the threshold of notice (and, yes, value). I would
like to create moments in which the commonplace, the mundane and the
ubiquitous are rendered remarkable again. To this end, ambiguity is
indeed a strategy I employ consciously. I am interested in points of
ambiguity as junctures at which viewers/receivers/interlocutors are
required to weigh for themselves not only various potential meanings but
also their own predilections. Thus they are points at which the processes
of communicating, of making sense and of reckoning with things, are
drawn out.

Since my earliest projects I have been committed to working with already-
existing phenomena. Part of this was a simple utopian principle of not
adding new objects to an already-saturated world, but it also arose from
a more general interest on my part in observing the world as it already
exists around us. The self-effacing nature of my work and the fact that
it is often phrased in the form of experiments, are related to an
attempt to step back in order to observe the world unfolding, if that
doesn't sound too corny.

MK: Your most recent project entitled "by the way," part of Arte in
Sita/La Torre de los Vientos, was installed inside the Le Torre de Los
Vientos–tower of the winds. How has the space been appropriated by
artists, and what is its significance in Mexico City?

GK: La Torre de los Vientos, by the Uruguayan sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca,
is one of a series of monumental concrete sculptures erected alongside
the peripheral highway in Mexico City at the time of the 1968 Olympiad.
Specifically, it is a 15-metre-high, more-or-less conical structure
which, unlike the other sculptures that make up this "Ruta de la
Amistad" (Route of Friendship), is also an inhabitable building. About
five years ago a young curator-artist, Pedro Reyes, began to invite
local and international artists to use this very idiosyncratic building
for site-specific interventions, and the resulting series of projects
have included some thoroughly remarkable pieces (see documentation on
their website at http://www.arteinsitu.org.mx). The structure and site
present a number of challenges. Bounded by the Periferico and on- and
off-ramps, its site is marked by the rumble of passing traffic. Within
the structure, which is enclosed but for small apertures in its walls
and an overhead oculus, there is a certain sensory disorientation due to
its blindness to the outside and its prominent echo. Inside there are
also five fixed concrete elements that suggest some kind of a
spectatorial situation.

Following on my first working trip to Mexico, for which I had produced
the site-specific piece "En busca del nivel del lago" at Ex Teresa Arte
Actual, Pedro and Antonio Out