Roosmarijn Hompe: Apart from working here in the KABK Metal and Wood Workshop, do you have your own artistic practice?

Sabin Gârea: It’s a struggle to keep it afloat, but yeah, it’s still there. Since I work here four days a week, I try to look at my position as an instructor in the workshop as an integral part of my art practice; otherwise, I would feel discouraged by the amount of time I can allocate to it, and I would stop doing it. It is not easy because instructing in a workshop is sometimes not that glorious. You must deal with the basic needs of the student and that does not leave a lot of room for actual stimulation of their creativity. But there are also some that come up with amazing ideas. These give you that drive to try to push them to innovate, to try to teach them more. At this point, there are still plenty of students coming to me with challenging questions, enough to make the job creative and demanding.

RH: What are your research interests?

SG: I have always been very much focused on craft and understanding how craft can exist and evolve in a society that doesn’t have time for craft.

RH: Was this already a topic for you when you were a student in MA Artistic Research?

SB: My topic in MA Artistic Research was more about understanding the, let us say, existential crisis of the craftsman who is ready to trade their secrets, their biggest assets, in exchange for the survival of their trade. If they would still be practising their trades and applying the teaching models of the nineteenth or even early twentieth century, plenty of crafts would be lost. One had to help a craftsperson and work with them for four or five years to learn some of the trade secrets. I think very few people would have the stamina, the resources and time to invest in such an educational model.

My father is an artist, a sculptor, and is the owner of a small company centred on making ornamental furniture out of oak for churches. His business is in Romania, a more religious society than the Netherlands, where a lot of churches are still being built in the old Orthodox tradition. Specific hand-carved furniture is required and there is still quite a market for his craft. The biggest impediment is the huge shortage of craftspeople. He used to take pride in the hand-carved quality of his products, made without using computer-controlled machinery like CNC. In the end, being left without workers, he was forced to embrace the newer digital production methods.

RH: You also experienced this firsthand? Did you collaborate with your father?

SG: I worked alongside him and yes, I saw how society was changing. As we moved from a communist to a capitalist regime, there was a lot of social ambiguity and craftsmen slowly started to quit their trade, emigrating to the western European countries, ready to work at whatever was available there. So much knowledge disappeared. Carving wood is a time-consuming, attention-consuming activity; you must dedicate yourself to it. Having all this firsthand experience, I wanted to research: What is craft now compared to what it was a hundred years ago? What are the traces a craftsman leaves behind nowadays? Is it the outcome? Is it the process?

RH: How do you experience the integration of workshops in education at the KABK? I mean, as the coordinator of a BA department, I have a sense that there could be more mutual reinforcement…

SG: Yeah, in my opinion this aspect has a lot of room for improvement because we are still functioning under the assumption that these are two quite different domains, and that students learn the thinking within the classroom with their teachers and then they go and execute it through some unknown miracle in the workshops. And there is a nameless guy, known generically as “the guy from the workshop”, who will take care of it. I am trying to really push the departments to rethink how they interact with the workshops from the first moment they direct first-year students to us.

The way departments address the workshops often defines how students later understand and interact with the workshops. If one comes and says, “I need a small plank with a hole in it”, I will just give them a plank with a hole. I do not know what it is for, and I do not care. The best way is if the student starts by sharing the whole project with me, sharing their concept. Then I can tell if they need a plank with a hole, or a totally different thing, and then we can decide together. Now, that’s education. It is an approach that can spark a conversation, followed by a teaching moment like the one a teacher in a classroom is doing.

RH: When you were a part of the Design Lectorate Teaching Tools Research Group, what were you working on in particular?

SG: I embarked on a project of documenting the work of certain students who were using aspects of slow craft in their work. I meant to try and understand how the craft itself finds its place in the mechanism of creation. The students I interviewed were interested in instrument-making techniques applied to sculptural objects and were creating sculptures that also could be played. They were exploring this through an Individual Study Track course run jointly by the KABK and the Conservatoire [“Soundscape”]. Unfortunately, as soon as the Research Group started, COVID-19 struck, and we had to do all our meetings online and I could not continue working in the workshops with students.

RH: But, as a Research Group, you still did a symposium, right?

SG: The year I was in the Research Group, COVID-19 meant we had to do the “Fault Lines Research Forum” online, so we made it so that each researcher gave a tour of their studio space, their site of research. I was in the Wood Workshop, of course, and after I gave the tour and talked about my research, one of the students I had interviewed, who had made a xylophone in such a way that eventually it would break while being played, gave a live performance ending with the moment when the instrument broke into pieces. I would love to have continued working on the research after the Research Group was over, and to assemble a sort of catalogue of the documentation, but I didn’t find the time or the resources.

RH: I think this would be incredibly useful for the workshops but also for the KABK more generally. We could then evaluate the methods we use to teach students specific skills through certain exercises. And then we can see what they lead to.

SG: But workshop staff are not seen as teaching personnel, and you can look at the salary scale and see clearly who and what is. In our universe, administrative skills are better rewarded than teaching and researching. So then, yes, it is difficult to conduct research in that context.

RH: So, there is an organisation and hierarchical disconnect between where and how research and teaching happens and where making happens?

SG: Exactly! Earlier this year we went to an ELIA conference held at the Royal College of Art in London, through the KABK’s International Office. We took part in the European Workshop Instructors (ETHO) meeting that was part of the conference. What came across in most of the presentations was that, in general, workshop instructors are thinking the same thing – that the workshop should not be seen as a separate entity which students enter only to get things produced, but rather, as a huge part of the education process with instructors being seen and rewarded as educators, not as technical consultants.

RH: Would you define your practice as artistic research?

SG: That is a question I am trying to answer myself. Artistic research is more of a mindset or a way of looking at things, and I think as a follow-up to that moment of education in my life (MA Artistic Research), I continue to do that, to look at things in that framework. In a sense I try to investigate my practice and I start by not taking my creative actions for granted. What is the act of making? What makes you a maker and how? These questions pop constantly in my mind, together with many others, and they sometimes give me the power to create critical distance from my work. I need to see things from a broader perspective to find new ways of diving into a subject I am busy with.