Some people can just force it. I sometimes wish I had that talent because it would allow me to make more commercial work. But for me, I never get to conclusions without going through certain life experiences.

TESS POLLOK: How did you first get involved with Yempejji’s Yeche Lange NFT project? Do you see it as a natural extension of your work with the online?

AMALIA ULMAN: I started making work online many years ago, not even relating to performance, just to net art and websites. I’ve always been an online person and I kind of resented the fact that it became so mainstream at some point because that’s always how I’ve communicated with most of my friends. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that I’m autistic and it allows me to communicate without getting drained too much, it’s less draining than real life interactions. For me, it’s served that purpose since I was a teenager. I’ve always had online friends even when normal people weren’t online because I had weird interests. I thought it was interesting the way they were promoting it, as well – art on the internet for the very first time. I’m very good friends with Milo, the curator of the show, and we’re very close – so whatever he makes, I kinda agree to make. He’s one of my best friends. One of the things is a metaverse exhibition and then we’re working in two actual NFTs and the format resembles more how the Tojibas were conceived. So, we’re working on that now.

POLLOK: So would you say you're pro-NFT in general or just pro-Milo?

ULMAN: I’m just pro-Milo. ‘Cause, um, I’ve been approached – as you can probably imagine – since the beginning when people started doing NFTs and doing these projects online, and people would always approach me in a sort of desperate way, like, “What should I do? What do you think we should do?” And I was always, like, “I don’t know, I’m working on a feature film right now! I have no interest!” I was busy and I don’t think things should be done out of desperation. Like, if you’re an online person you’re probably going to do interesting things online and it’s not something that’s just gonna happen. I’ve never been too interested in NFTs because they’re all so ugly and lame and the manufacturers are so unappealing. But at the time [NFTs started becoming more popular], I was just so deep in the movie my brain was formatted in a completely different way. It’s funny being a person who’s been online for so long, people keep being, like, “This is the future of art,” and I go, “Oh, cool, can I put up a short film?” And they go, “No, just JPEGs.” Oh, it’s just a JPEG? Interesting. Sounds like a shitty future. The only problem I have with NFTs is that someone told me they’re not good for the environment, but, you know, that’s not really my area of expertise. The general lameness of them...but I also think it’s all about having the right idea. Until now I just didn’t have the right idea for an NFT in my mind, I was always somewhere else and working on other stuff. But I’m never really opposed to anything. It’s just about having the right time and the right idea and it making sense within the format.

POLLOK: I do think the ugliness of most NFTs has to do with people who are just trying to cash in on the moment.

ULMAN: Right, these things take time. There’s a creative process behind everything and you might be really close to it and then suddenly, it just clicks. And that’s when you should do it. I realized that recently because I was talking to someone about my upcoming film and I realized that it’s actually been in the making for a long time. Not the movie as we’re making it now, but the ideas behind it only crystallized very recently, and I feel like a lot of things had to happen to me for that to happen, you know? Like it couldn’t have happened until it was there.

POLLOK: How long do you typically meditate on a project before executing it?

ULMAN: Something like El Planeta, I mean, the first time I thought anything about it was in May 2018 and we shot in October 2018, so that was pretty fast. But already, back then, by the middle of it, I started thinking of this new movie and the themes of this new movie, I just had no idea what it would become at the time. I was just, like, “Oh, I’m interested in this topic.”

POLLOK: What’s your upcoming film about, now that it’s crystallized for you?

ULMAN: The kernel of the story was for me to learn about health conditions in Argentina, and to learn that so many people were getting sick in Argentina and the Global South because of Monsanto plantations. Basically, Monsanto would spray RoundUp and pesticides all over villages, even inside schools, and a lot of people would go blind, or they’d get really sick, and a lot of babies were born with deformities. And it leads to all these problems with transgenic [antiobiotic-resistant] bacteria in the soil, and biophosphonates, which are extremely toxic. This happens a lot in Northern Argentina, it happens in Brazil, in India – it’s a common thing because the Third World is basically used as a dumpster. It wasn’t actually that far off from my own family, for me, because my family in Argentina, on the side of my grandmother, are part indigenous, from the north, and most of them moved to Buenos Aires in this massive exodus that happened in the 60s. But there’s still people there getting sick. Obviously when I learned about it, and my mom learned about it, we were, like, “What?” We were shocked that it was a thing and tried to research it more. So, that was a long time ago and the interest is still there, I knew that I felt like I had to do something about it but it wasn’t clear at the time what, and then, very slowly, it emerged from my work process. I guess my work process is that I don’t think much about it, it’s just there and then one day it clicks and I see the whole move from beginning to end. The movie’s not entirely about this, it’s just in the background. The movie’s sort of a very dark rom-com. It was a very organic process – some people can just force it, you know? I sometimes wish I had that talent because it would allow me to make more commercial work or be more of an admin and just push myself into finding a solution to a problem. But for me, now it’s a fully formed script with fully formed characters, and I never would have gotten to that conclusion without going through certain life experiences.

POLLOK: Your work seems really interested in keeping up appearances –

ULMAN: Oh, that’s a very easy thing to explain. That’s a very Argentinian thing. It’s part of the culture and a lot of the literature and films are about that. So, culturally I’m inclined to like those things, I grew up kind of seeing the world through that lens. I think it happens a lot in any colonial place that is highly mixed race, in Argentina especially, appearances are a huge, huge part of what your life is gonna be like. Some people pass and some people don’t and it changes the trajectory of their lives in a crazy way. So a lot of Argentina is these self-mythologizing stories about your supposed European heritage and a lot of people exaggerate certain things and hide certain things. Until very recently, it was very common to hide how indigenous one was, because it was seen as being feeble-minded. ‘Cause European culture is considered higher so people who could pass as white would never say they had indigenous blood. There’s a lot of stories about passing and a lot of them have to do with how people present themselves with certain clothing. It’s very common in Argentina for Argentinians to go visit the “motherland” – Spain, Italy, you name it – and bring back clothes. There used to be a lot of knock-offs, back when my parents were growing up, and people could tell if your stuff was really from Europe or if it was the knock-off. And you develop a really acute eye for those things, for example, in Spain they couldn’t see it because they didn’t have to deal with it for their survival or anything. Especially after 40 years of dictatorship, everyone in Spain is just Spanish, it’s a very different thing. Argentina is very similar to the US in many ways, people would arrive from a certain life, and especially if their background was very poor, they would be, like, “Let’s see if this time I manage to pretend I’m actually rich.” So that’s a very important topic in Argentinian literature and movies.

POLLOK: And to tie that into your next work, which I didn’t even know about until we started talking just now, I’ve noticed there’s a collapsing world theme to a lot of your work. And I was wondering if you felt that we lived in a uniquely ruined part of history?

ULMAN: I mean, there’s a lot right now that is objectively ruined – like the environment. But these are the same fears as we had during the Cold War, you know, people thought they were going to die in a nuclear war and that the world was ending. Technically, things have even gotten better, in terms of health. It’s interesting to watch Satyajit Ray’s films – he made these neo-realist, kind of European films, but in India – and the Apu trilogy, which I really like – and it’s interesting because people just died. Like, all the time, so easily, just because they caught a cold. And you’re, like, “The fuck?” People died from walking in the rain, and this was in the 50s, 60s. So it’s a hard thing to say that right now is the worst time. I do think there’s a hyper-accelerationism to the news with the way that you’re able to know, now, how things are going in the whole world. So it feels mulitiplied, in a way, because you get to see shit from every angle.

There’s a lot right now that is objectively ruined about the world – like the environment. But these are the same fears as we had during the Cold War, you know, people thought they were going to die in a nuclear war and that the world was ending. Technically, things have even gotten better, in terms of health.

POLLOK: Were you living in Buenos Aires when the economy collapsed?

ULMAN: Well, it affected me because I lived in England at the time, as a very, very poor Spaniard, and it was difficult for me to find jobs. For me it was kind of tragic because I was so in-and-out. I was a student at the time and I would only spend six months there at a time and watching the change was catastrophic. And I remember the one time during the crisis I went back for the holidays and it was crazy, there were just people walking around shopping and celebrating Christmas even though the whole year had been dead, stores had closed down, everything felt so...bad. It was shocking. It felt like people were too broke to go out to sit at cafés, or even just be about. The way I would describe it is it felt like how things felt during the pandemic, like people were in hiding. But it was because they just couldn’t afford to go out.

POLLOK: Does catastrophe loom over your work, including your upcoming film?

ULMAN: It’s more about health and bodies. There will always be bodies that look different and I’m not interested in using that in, like, a shock factor, but more in how the gaze is adaptable to whoever you’re in love with and how you come to accept someone for their flaws. The movie is a highly erotic interconnected story in, like, a dumpster, that’s kind of the feeling of it. This beautiful love story is happening in the worst possible conditions. A lot of it comes from the fact that I’ve been disabled and hospitalized, and that was one of the most erotic times of my life. While I was hospitalized I was in the middle of this budding love story with somebody that I met the night before the accident, so the selective body horror that I experienced was compensated for by this new love –

POLLOK: Whoa, you had a new love and a new body at the same time.

ULMAN: Yeah. That’s a huge thing in the disabled community is desire and how certain bodies are not allowed to feel desire. All bodies feel desire. So I’m sort of excited to put it under a different light that is kind of more useful, like it’s not going to be sordid, it’s more, like, “What if this condition is just like blue eyes?” and what if these conditions are just a part of who some people are.

POLLOK: What was the eroticism of your hospital experience like? How long were you in the hospital for?

ULMAN: Just two months. I would say month one was just, like, really, really hospitalized, because I had surgeries in both legs at different times. The second month we did physical therapy and I was learning to walk again, but I was too exhausted to do much more than that. It’s interesting because I wasn’t healthy enough to go out so I didn’t crave going out, either, it was just too much. I remember this person took me out one day in the wheelchair for a walk outside and it was, like, one hour tops and I was just exhausted. And I wasn’t even walking, it was just being outside, and I was, like, “Please take me back. I’m not ready.” I wasn’t ready for the world yet, I hadn’t healed yet. It was pretty intense. Sexually, it was mostly, like, a texting thing. And the emotions got so excited because of the situation. I think that helped me heal a lot faster – I wanted to come out of it. It also motivated me to look at a lot of disability theory and things like that, things I obviously wouldn’t have looked at it [if I hadn’t had my accident.] Because it took me a long time to fully recover, changing wheelchairs and this and that, and noticing all the problems that would occur from me not being able to walk. It made me interested in writers with disabalities and made me more interested in the sex aspect of attraction, being differently “abled” and still being horny.

POLLOK: Yeah, I mean, disability – disability in the context of being in the hospital can be really intense. I was recently hospitalized and they were trying to give everyone a shot of naltrexone, which is an opiate antagonist that literally deprives you of joy, and they were giving it to people who couldn’t speak English, people who clearly didn’t understand that it was optional.

ULMAN: Well, yeah, that was a whole experience for me. I was completely alone. My family couldn’t afford to visit me – only my second month in the hospital was spent in New York, and there I had all my friends visiting me all the time, but the first month I was completely alone in Ohio. I was completely alone. It was tough. Because of that, because of the whole manipulation thing – because of them trying to get me to do things. They have all this power and it’s very scary. Most of the time I was in very high spirits. I was in pain but I wasn’t fully in tragic mode – because of the morphine, probably. I was, like, “Oh, I’m in pain, but I’m writing poetry and reading books.” So mentally I was kind of doing alright, I was there. Except for one day, and the hospital was empty because it was Sunday, and I suddenly ended up crying. I mean, I think it’s normal for somebody in that situation to finally break down and cry. And they put me on suicide watch. And I was, like, “Wait. Come on.”

POLLOK: They put you on suicide watch for crying?

ULMAN: I had a panic attack. But the funny thing is that that was 24 hours, right? I didn’t kill myself, obviously, and I wasn’t going to, I just needed to cry and vent or whatever, but this nurse had a back problem and she really wanted to keep doing suicide watch on me because it meant she could sit. And I was, like, “I’m sorry, I think that’s gonna fuck me up.” Because then on the records it’s gonna look like I’m a fucking nutcase. And that in the US is terrifying. (Laughs) I don’t wanna get my rights taken away from me just because it says on some paper, you know, “she’s been on suicide watch for a month,” or something terrible. ****There are a lot of things like that, lies, or doctors trying to convince me of things I said under the effects of morphine that I knew were not true at all. And the US is so liberal with drugs, they want to drug everyone as much as possible.

POLLOK: I’ve noticed in your films that the characters are very involved with their internal worlds. What is it like being a more inward-facing person?

ULMAN: I’ve never known another way. It was definitely rough when I was younger and I had less coping mechanisms. Now I’m surrounded by a lot of very amazing people that do the outward work for me in a way, or keep me updated on the stuff that I’m not that good at.

POLLOK: Do you like talking about being autistic in the context of your work?

ULMAN: I think it’s important. I was diagnosed later in life, and then everything made sense, and I was, like, “Oh, fuck, now everything is explained.” But I think a lot of my work, like any other artist, is determined by my brain. I’m very sensory in many ways. I’m okay with talking about it. I don’t think it diminishes the work. I think some people would say not to talk about it because then they feel like the work all comes down to that, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think it explains certain patterns in my movies and things that are in the work. And the work that I do isn’t really about the condition, it’s more to do with how I see the world and how I’m attracted to certain textures more than others.