Baruch Blich interviews Relli De Vries. Davar, 21 May 1993

B: Is this the reason why you use in your sculpting elementary materials, and avoid using plastic materials and wood for example?

D: Yes, this is one of the reasons. Everywhere in Tel Aviv we see a fascinating and exciting Tel-Avivian geology. In the streets we witness strange encounters between the edge of the pavement and the road, or building waste by an elegant building. I am interested in highlighting these contrasts by using materials that are used for building foundations; I examine them through a magnifying glass so as to figure them out, and through them to excite the audience.

B: Does it not seem to you in the final analysis that you too deal with monuments, and that instead of commemorating a historical event you commemorate building or pavement wastes? Are you not commemorating what you earlier called geology?

D: The term commemoration did not cross my mind. I would like in particular to show the materials, the things below, and to highlight twilight zones, no-man’s- lands, beautiful as well as ugly. A no-man’s-land is not owned by anyone, it is at the margins, and it interests me from a political-artistic viewpoint. This is because it relates to the dichotomy of ‘center-margins’ that keeps on troubling me. Precisely from a social point of view, and for one who lives in a complex and pressing reality, I ask myself what do I do and where do I place myself: at the center (wherever it is), at the margins (wherever they are)? This unrelenting movement to the center and look from there at the margins interests me.

B: Is your work ‘center’ of ‘margins’?

D: My art is created in a no-man’s-land. I am convinced that every work of art is born in a no-man’s-land, which is by nature undefined, it is neither margins nor center, belonging to nobody. The work of art is always in intermediary areas, and the wonderful coincidence that we naturally seek in art is possible only in these areas. Only here does everything coalesce and integrate, and only there I can see how things are made without me intervening or being active. I am not doing the sculpture of an engineer. I am not doing calculations of strength or measure proportions. I prepare these materials for the engineer in that no-man’s-land and at a certain moment the things will integrate. In my case I believe they would be integrated by the observer.