Interview with Andi and Lance Olsen

Résumé En

This interview with Andi and Lance Olsen was conducted during the AFEA annual conference in Bordeaux on June 1 2022. The talk referred to several times in the interview is the keynote lecture Lance Olsen gave on that same day entitled “Carnage Carnival: The Narratological Politics of What the Fuck?”1Lance Olsen published his first novel in the early 1990s, and his literary oeuvre is characterized by its sustained exploration of experimental writing practices. He is the author of more than thirty novels and short-story collections as well as of works of nonfiction, including the personal memoir [[there.]] which is discussed in the interview. Andi Olsen is a visual artist, using video, photography, texts and objects in her assemblages and installations. Over the years, Andi and Lance Olsen have become close collaborators in a number of joint creations, like the ongoing project There’s No Place Like Time associating Lance’s novel Theories of Forgetting (2014) and a multimodal installation.The interview focuses on writing and publishing innovative fiction, on Lance Olsen’s more recent fiction (Theories of Forgetting, My Red Heaven, Skin Elegies), and on the artistic collaboration between Lance and Andi Olsen, a deeply original aspect of Lance’s writing that is inseparable from Andi’s visual creations.We are very grateful to Andi and Lance Olsen for their time, for offering so many insights into the way they work together, and especially for gifting Transatlantica with two original works that we “commissioned” to illustrate the interview. The collaged photograph and the video montage are respectively Andi Olsen’s and Lance Olsen’s creative answers to the question we asked them: “what does seeing mean to you?”The interview ends with a video recording especially made for Transatlantica by Andi Olsen of Lance Olsen’s reading of a passage from Skin Elegies.