Interview with Elena Kristofor

Who watches whom when the trees stare back? We sit down with visual artist Elena Kristofor to trace how a childhood between sea and steppe collides with the dense, watchful woods of Austria, and how that tension fuels a practice that blends analogue photography, sculpture, and site-responsive installation. Elena shares the visceral experience of moving through the forest at walking speed, camera at her belly, layering multiple exposures onto a single negative to compress an entire path into one image—then carrying that print back among the trees to let balance and breath draw a second line across the surface.

From there, the conversation opens onto the Mongolian Gobi, where the horizon runs unbroken and the body relaxes into radical openness. In that empty sweep, Elena works with mirrors, slicing space into reflective shards that challenge the camera’s central gaze. Think cubism for landscapes: thin spatial slices rearranged so you see more than one side at once. We talk about why disrupting single-point perspective matters, how Western habits of looking are not neutral, and what happens when sculpture and photograph meet in high wind and bright light.

Back in the studio and gallery, branches become actors, not props. Self-portraits face a precarious pile ready to fall. Tree portraits stare back like witnesses. Hybrid figures—half human, half tree—emerge from a chance moment in the steppe, evoking something mythic and tender. We follow Elena into fog-thick exhibitions that erase sightlines so visitors must feel their way, engaging balance and breath as part of seeing. Threaded through it all is a candid admission: the inner conflict between early inscriptions of endless steppe and later marks of forested Austria, a split that refuses to resolve and instead powers the work’s urgency.

If you’re curious about analogue processes, environmental art, landscape interventions, or how place writes itself into the body, this conversation offers clear methods and resonant ideas you can carry on your next walk. Listen, share with a friend who loves landscape, and leave a review to tell us which world shapes you more—steppe or forest.

Transcript

Welcome & Artist Overview

Liudmila Kirsanova 0:02

Hi, it's Vienna Time with Ludmila Kirzanova. For my podcast, I interview artists who live and work in Vienna, a place both grandly old and vivaciously young. Whether my guests were born here, chose, or happen to be here, I am keen on giving voices and sharing stories of very different artists belonging with different traditions and generations. I do gravitate towards profound interviews rather than sketches and brief questionnaires, and that's why you'll find here in-depth talks embracing both professional and personal insights. Considering my curatorial practice, I've been meeting extraordinary artists and witnessing wonderful art projects that no doubt will go down the history. And now I'm eager to share it with you to give an inside look at the local art scene which is as vibrant and diverse as personalities creating it. Let's explore and celebrate it together. And today my guest is Elena Christopher. Hi Elena. Hi. Elena is a visual artist who works with photography and installation, and her body of work is evolving around ideas of environment, nature, in particular forests, but also steppeth. So we are talking about landscape, we are talking about nature that Elena researches in her art and her visual language is, I would say, very much inspired with minimalistic practices of 60s and 70s, and at the same time, she is looking for the way how new media can come into the space together with organic natural materials, and how can they collaborate, co-create new not objects, but I would say new partnership that would develop our artistic language, our discourse of talking in art, in new media art, about environmental issues, about our connection with nature, about our experience of nature, of people living in a completely digitalized world? You say that your particular interest when we talk about nature is forest. And for example, in your projects like Indenblick Niemen or Valdein, you address forests as such. Why are you interested in forests?

SPEAKER_00 3:08

For me, the forest is a foreigner, it's a foreign entity. It's full of chaos and disharmony and even oppression. So it is also because I grew up in a very open landscape. On the one side there was the sea, the Black Sea, and then on the other side the steppe. So when I came to Austria, forest was something completely new to me. It was not a part of my memory, or it wasn't also not coded with familiarity, so it is something completely new. It was more of a mystical being that I knew from fairy tales. And in the step, you are in the step, you're inside of a space. And if you are in the forest, you are inside of an matter, you know? It is like you're surrounded, you're absorbed, you're dissolving, you your movement changes, you don't drift, you negotiate every step. You can't just walk a straight line, you have to weave, you have to you have you're in a constant conflict and argument with the environment. Yes, and this is very tempting to me.

Finding Structure Inside Chaos

Liudmila Kirsanova 4:34

You mean so on the other side it's very different what you experienced as a child, so this idea of suddenly being surrounded by a very different type of place, of space, of like you said, very dense, absorbing. And why is it tempting this richness of material? I I really loved how you said you have to negotiate every step. That's that's brilliant. It's a way you're very mindful, right, when you walk through a forest. It's because through a stepper you can just run through, right? You can just run and shout to the horizon. But in the forest, you move slowly. Why is it tempting though? You said it's tempting to be in this density of material.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

It's always a conflict if you if if I am in the forest. And this is very interesting. This is it is very interesting to experience who am I in the forest and what or who is the forest when I am in inside of it. Or maybe I just want to win this argument and to have the last word.

Liudmila Kirsanova 6:04

And to have the last word. And at the same time, it's extremely interesting now. You're talking about what a chaotic place it is. But when I look at your pictures, I see that you try to still see some order, to kind of I wouldn't say to bring it in order, but the way how you frame your picture, the way what exactly you take a picture of, it feels still like you pursue some structure within this chaos. Yes. So it's this urgency for structure, or where do you start from? So when it comes to forest, it's different, it's tempting, it's a conflict, and then you come there with your camera. What happens?

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Yes, I try to bring a structure in this chaos because it's uh the only way for me to to find uh my way through because there's just too much of it, of the forest, of everything there. I try to understand it. In the forest, I I lose my singularity. I just become part of a system without a consent. So I just go go inside and I'm not there anymore. So this is my way to find maybe myself again in this dense chaotic something. So I try to take one thing and then another and just to understand what is it.

Liudmila Kirsanova 7:42

And then you also bring some branches from the forest, which you arrange in the space, kind of having in mind this chaos, but still bring them in certain structure. So this idea of real sculptural attitude of this sculptural approach to how you create your pictures and how you create your spaces. When you then bring your forest into the space, what then happens?

SPEAKER_00 8:14

I don't try to recreate the forest because what I do in the um exhibition space is really not the forest, but more watch how I feel in the forest on how I imagine what forest could be or how the feeling the feeling which is like processed feeling. When you think about the works like Zwischenwint und Zeit, where I bring a branch and a wooden sled into the forest with a paint, this is my attempt to understand where I am and what is what it is. Maybe also to this is like maybe like a limp what I never had, you know, whichever whether that I leave there.

Liudmila Kirsanova 9:00

But it's still lack of communication. So with some projects, you take the branches, you bring them to the gallery for other projects, you take your objects to the forest, you intervene with your objects into this dense material, and then you photograph. So it's the process that works either way. True. Yes, yes. So it's like a communication.

Exhaustion And Long Pauses

SPEAKER_00 9:25

Yeah, like a dialogue. Yeah, this is an argument, you know. Um we have, and um we will see where it leads me and my work. But that also means you spent lots of time in in the woods. Yes, I did, but I always have this huge and long poses because it's just too exhausting for me to be there. When I go out, it's really like okay. I survived. Um, it's really uh really an intense time there for me. Also, after these years, it's not really easy for me to go there. So I need long pauses like several months before I go again and do my next work.

Liudmila Kirsanova 10:15

Let's talk your diploma project, where actually this process of walking through the forest has become the very core of your work. Can you please tell me what you did for your diploma project at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna?

SPEAKER_00 10:33

I went into the forest. So the process of this work is very analogue. Everything is analogue. First thing is I leave my safe space, my studio, and go and go to the forest. I went there with my middle format camera, uh carrying it in front of my stomach, so I didn't look through the camera, I just uh carried it in front of me. And during my walking, I took pictures of my path through the forest. And uh one thing what is like characteristic for the walking is repetition. So I did a lot of exposures in one frame. I took all the pictures on one negative, so multiple exposure, and inscribed the whole path into one picture. And then I went to the dark room and enlarged these uh negatives on matte buried paper. For me it was important that it is matte because matte uh paper is more immediate, so there's no no wall or no nothing bit in between, like no filter, nothing like that's really immediate. And also the buried paper is when it dries it becomes wear cultural form. So it is like really this tamed wild thing like forest, you know. It's not like a plastic paper which is always flat. So it has its own character. And then I take these pictures and go into the forest again. And uh I have on the on one hand the picture and the on the other hand the pen. And I just hold it, and I just try to go through the forest and keep my balance and find my way in between trees. I don't control what my hands do, I just hold this pen very loosely, and my act of walking draws my path through the forest. So there is like one more layer of inscription of my walking, my path through the forest on this picture. One is inside the photograph and one is on the photograph.

Liudmila Kirsanova 12:52

I'm still surprised that you spend so much time with forests, and until now, like you say, to walk into the forest, it demands a certain strength, a certain balance, a certain idea within you. And at the same time, this tracing of your walking through the forest, first with camera, then just with drawing a line. It really gives us spectators this, I would say mindful idea of walking through this idea of not passing, not just going from A to B. Now talking to you, I realize it's more even like swimming through something, really going and negotiating every step.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

I really love this expression. And and this is the interesting part because our surroundings it inscribes itself in us. So it is like a filter through that we look or experience the world around us, and this is also what landscape is to me, all also like a factor that's really important for us, how we see the world.

Inscription On And Inside The Photograph

Liudmila Kirsanova 14:10

The landscape we grew up within, and that we that we carry it within this feeling of the space. Yes. You also did a project about Steppe, which is called Steppescape, and you did it in uh very recently in 2025, where you were in Mongolia. Tell me about this experience because the forest was a big contrast to your experience of the landscape. But when you were in Mongolia, that was again a steppe, but of course a different one. You were in Gobi. How did you feel there?

SPEAKER_00 14:46

I felt there very liberated, free, not constricted by anything. It's really interesting there because it's so vast, so radically open. It's there there is nothing. Nothing interrupts the horizon, you know. There's no vertical elements, there are no elements at all, because there's nothing, no signs of um human civilization. There are no roads, no power poles, no nothing. There's no GPS, no you're like really.

Liudmila Kirsanova 15:25

And do you feel safe there? I mean, like you say that you feel very unsafe in the forest, uh, but in the place where you have nothing, where you're radically alone in the empty space, that makes you feel safe, right?

Landscape As Filter Of Perception

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Interestingly enough, yes. I didn't think about it that it could be like really uh dangerous because if something happens, what happens in the step stays in the step, yeah? Um because really there is nothing. There's no water, no nothing. And if you like have an accident there, what do you do then? You can't call someone to help you. You you just can wait until somebody maybe passes through the same piece of land. I know. Yeah, but it I I felt really liberated, and it's really different how you move there and how the orientation works, because there's for me it is really possible to know where I am there. And in the forest, as you said, you can you don't have the same way if you if you walk through the forest, you can't repeat this movement, and in the step you can.

Liudmila Kirsanova 16:43

In this vastness, in this emptiness of steppe, you brought your mirror structures and you photographed them. Uh shall we talk about this? You work a lot with mirror structures in the landscape, and then you position them in the landscape and you photograph. Uh, what do you do? So it's like you revert the image to us. So it's an image in the image, and when you wanted to bring your mirror structures into the Mongolian steppe, how did you work with it?

Mongolia Steppe: Radical Openness

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Very fast. Because it's really not so easy to work there with mirrors which are very fragile and it's very windy in the step. So I needed some people behind the mirrors who were holding them against the wind, but it's not what you wanted to know. So what it what the mirror is about, I think it's more cubistic way of seeing because I try with a mirror to show more than one side of a landscape, like you do it in cubism when you try to show more than on one side of an object, and this is I try it with um with a space. And I also want to break this uh central perspective which is inherent to photography, and I try to disrupt it. Like I would make very thin slices of the space and rearrange them and try to question how our way of seeing in our culture in our western western culture of seeing things of seeing a space or a landscape.

Liudmila Kirsanova 18:45

So you mean this idea of a central gaze? This is what you mean by Western way of seeing. Yes, yes. Like you are standing in the middle and you're looking in front of yourself, and that's what you see. And you want to remove this figure standing whose central eye view we witness, we observe. So you would like to have it more as a I wouldn't even call it a panorama because you really then break this piece. So it's again you're building, like with your forests, you're building a new structure, like you not break the landscape, but you reorganize the structure of the landscape.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Yes.

Mirrors To Break Central Perspective

Liudmila Kirsanova 19:34

And in the same series that you did in Mongolia, not only did you photograph your mirror sculptures in the steppe, you also did pictures with a figure and different again branches. So you love branches, right? But uh these branches are much thicker, much more monumental uh than the one we talked before, and which are now on my left hand side, like a big pile of um branches. Beautiful, it already brings some feeling of this uh natural chaos, much needed. And on the other side, now we are in the studio in Elena's studio, we have this amazing picture with a figure standing with this really monumental branch, and you photograph it in the way you merge the figure of a person with a branch.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

I was um in a residency there with uh seven other artists. Uh, four of us were from Europe and four from Mongolia, so local artists. And um we explored the area together and looked for materials which we want to use for our projects. And one of the artists, one Mongolian artist, he was planning to build a huge sculpture in a public space. So all of us we all helped him to gather branches in a remote place where some trees grow. It was really somehow mystical place because there's nothing and there's like one place where three rows of trees grow. And I saw another artist carrying this huge tree trunk on his shoulders, and it this this picture, this image of this fusion of him with this branch was so fascinating that I asked him to do this again for me in front of the camera, and another artist wanted to join in. This is how this series was born. It was like really spontaneous. This picture that I saw of this Mongolian man carrying this huge branch. um in a landscape where there there isn't there are no trees. It was mythic experience and I wanted to show on the on one side this dance or this um have an experience of caring this thing and also on the other side this hybrid being of wow half human and half landscape. Do you really achieve this?

Hybrid Figures: Human And Landscape

Liudmila Kirsanova 22:30

It has this very mystical feeling to it because it's very I would even say mythological because when you imagine this really amped landscape and kind of this mythological creature of half man, half wood it's something what exists somewhere beyond. It's like whether it's imaginative creature or like a creature who lives there where there is no place for us. So I think you really achieve this mystical feeling to what you do. And also it has a feeling of like a landscape inhabited by some other creatures. So this like you said that a certain landscape defines certain creatures certain personalities that inhabit and carry it within and this step you know it's so radically liberating and so radically open that it might you know produce this kind of very different type of creatures because you can even see these parts of this big tree trunk as some kind of wings you know I believe it's very easy to fly the step it would be very easy to you know jump and fly a couple of meters and then land it's very poetic how you work with nature I believe even though you come with this idea of structure and like even you said I didn't think about this cubistic optics of how to break the landscape and remove this central eye view. It's very poetic it's very mystical you even have this project with which I think very very mystical with the fog and lots lots of fog you worked with a performance artist for this project I work with um Laura Sperl.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

She's not a performance artist she is a visual artist who also does performance a little bit but she yes she performed in um this work in front of the camera and yes we use fog as a strategy to disorient us and the also the visitors of the exhibition because we also use the fog inside of the exhibition space. So if you go inside you don't sometimes you don't see your feet so you really don't see anything and experience the the space in really an a new way. Also the exhibition space it's not very common to not to see what you where you are or not to see the artworks in a exhibition but then you have to discover them and to find your way through this exhibition space. So it is really another I think um we try to evoke more conscious way of seeing or perception.

Fog, Disorientation, And Embodied Seeing

Liudmila Kirsanova 25:37

And moving yes or perception like maybe not seeing but perception with whole body with other senses not just eyes before we didn't talk about this mystical experience of forest but you know now talking to you I mean I'm sorry I will now bring an example from the pop culture but you know I realized that in the pop culture there is this very beautiful also example of forest or as a mystical creature. I'm thinking about Twin Peaks of David Lynch because if we think about how he pictured forest there it's uh it's not a protagonist but it's a personage it's like a it's it's a person next to other persons in the whole story. So but it's like a different entity but it has a personality and then what happens in the forest and how it's all on the edge of the forest and now when you talk about forg about more I somehow thought about Twin Peaks and how Lynch also incorporated forest as a as a partner as a not as a landscape or as an environment just the world where it happens but a place which is all involved into this mystery and conflict and this detective story.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

I think there's the the the mood and the atmosphere is really um connected or there's um there is a connection between my work and yeah if you say it's like this I I didn't think about it but now I I see it. Yeah there's the same feeling I guess.

Liudmila Kirsanova 27:30

And to to wrap up our big talk now around forests just to jump back to your project Valdein where you did your self-portrait that you covered again with branches you you'd collected in the forest and you'd brought into the gallery space. So it's maybe one of the I think uh it's the one project where you actually position your face your personality your figure in this direct dialogue for us in this direct visual dialogue with forest so what so you did create your self-portrait and then you covered yourself with the branches.

Twin Peaks Atmosphere And Mood

Self‑Portraits, Instability, And Being Watched

SPEAKER_00 28:12

So it's like that was a part of this your feeling within the forest yes yes it was a part there's also another work uh or another picture another work and it's uh they stand in a dialogue this work is behind you this one where the figure the the person is like starting to go inside or into the forest that's also you it's also me yes so there's there are two sides of um myself you see like this huge portrait with uh also I have a branch in my hands so maybe like a weapon or maybe like uh something to cover myself so to to protect myself so and these uh branches in front of this big portrait is really really big it's like uh three meters uh to two meters like really a big one branches in front of this uh big portrait are not fixed so they could fall any moment and this instability which I also experience in the forest I wanted to show it and on the other side is this other portrait where I stand in front of the forest and now I have to decide do I go inside or not and also in this picture also the part of your Wildine project where we see you your figures standing in the forest it's also a question who is watching you who is observing you we have this again this twin peaks feeling that actually forests watching you not you watch the forest but forest is watching you which brings some mysterious feeling to you and of course the way how you pictured yourself it looks like you can be devoured any minute by this yes green masses of yes of matter yes and there is also because you talked about diploma project there's also a second part of this project which are portraits of trees which are looking at me when I go through the forest. In this work the trees become active role you know not just me going through the forest but also the trees which look at me and stare at me and like yeah like this pressure which I feel in the forest from the trees who are like staring at me and observe what I do there.

Liudmila Kirsanova 30:49

It's again now when I talk to you I realize that you bring together two perspectives one is this prehistorial perspective like you're talking now about you know to be there with a with a branch to protect yourself to be lost to be devoured to feel unsafe in the so it's very this in very interesting of course how can we feel this prehistorian feeling of the forest but when you talk I have an impression of this prehistorian face-to-face encounter with something wild and powerful where you have to you know go and protect while all the trees are observing watching and you make this decision do I make a step or I stand here with my branch and I so it's this really very ancient feeling it's one perspective and the other perspective it's like this very you know coming with this background of the modernity of the postmodernity with this knowledge of cubism minimalism environmental art history minimalistic mirror sculptures objects so this very refined sophisticated structural high organized approach and then you put them together how shall we find a way how should it's very yeah like a conflict you make us also observe in your in your artwork you're very welcome coincide if you um if you dare and maybe the last question in our talk I definitely share with you this idea that landscape the feeling of landscape influences our personalities our feeling in the space our our body feeling in the space and you always talk about steppe as being liberating vast and how great you feel that nothing disturbs your gaze to the horizon so do you also feel it about yourself that's when you talk about steppe you talk about yourself do you feel yourself really this large and uh you know with the thought running to the horizon so do you do you think that this steppe landscape really made you a person of big inner liberty and freedom I think I'm more in a conflict and so also conflict with steppe no there is no conflict with steppe but uh there's a conflict with because I came to Austria when I was 16 so it's really long time ago and Austria also left some impressions on marks.

Prehistoric Instincts Meet Modern Form

SPEAKER_00 33:46

Yes marks on my personality so there's I think there's this conflict inside myself of this very early inscriptions of the step and the later inscriptions of the forest in the mountains and this um borders around myself I don't know it's a good uh answer now that best answer is yes I am very open and um liberated person inside not on the outside but inside but do you feel it because you were in Mongolia and you told me that you worked with a local artist but did you feel it in them? What I can say that they're really different they're they move differently more relaxed and not um driven by doing you have to do and to this capitalistic way of living you know you have to perform you have to do and they're uh interesting to to think that it comes from force yeah maybe and also this sentence change of plans we heard it like ten times a day so this constantly changing and you have to adjust to the situation which is constantly in movement you know everything is in movement because the wind is always going you know already before this this project started when we're like just organizing everything it always changed everything changed permanently thank you very much for the talk was like a really deep dive into a forest prehistorically historically capitalistically in the end like you're leaving us with many thoughts to ponder about and we are left also now with this feeling of how do we move in the forest and what kind of landscape formed our personalities because we all come from different landscapes and now I will have to think about how the landscape because I grew up actually in the forest so I mean surrounded by forests so now you know it would be I think actually a big conflict for me to be in the steppe and now now you put the challenge for me to go to the steppe and yeah to experience it this radical vastness and openness let's see enjoy thank you very much for the talk too