Interview by Matteo PiniPortrait by Jörg von Bruchhausen

MP Your exhibition A Whole New World at Mudam Luxembourg is organised like a theme park, with distinct worlds, a map and a mascot.

SF It’s something I’ve always thought about. I conceptualise my whole practice as rides in a theme park, and that’s given me a helpful throughline, given how disparate the individual works can be. It just so happened that I saw the plan of Mudam, and it looked just like a theme park. The architecture is so powerful here with all this natural light – it’s very distinct from a white cube space, so you have to do something quite extreme to meet it. The meeting was in the geometry, because the whole show was mirroring the walls and fractured angles of the museum.

MP Theme parks are associated with fun, joy, games, childhood but often fear as well.

SF That’s another parallel with museums. You can’t be too afraid in a theme park because you are assured that nothing is going to happen to you. You drop from 100 metres on a rollercoaster, but you will come out completely intact: accidents are rare enough that millions of people trust theme parks every day. A museum is also a controlled space, and you’re exposed to ideas that you’re not exposed to in the real world. They are philosophically dangerous: they challenge your beliefs, which in someways is more dangerous than being dropped from a great height.

MP The exhibition has a cartoon mascot of sorts named Who the Bær. You’ve described Who the Bær as a blank canvas, having no nationality, no gender, no race. It struck me that society once desired a vision of the future without the need for these identifiers, embodying this neoliberal “We Are the World” sensibility. But you envision Who the Bær as having a chaotic, often detrimental effect on its environment.

SF That’s an interesting take, because I think Who the Bær does harken back to a 1980s nostalgia. The “We Are the World” moment was a fantasy that we’re all the same underneath; we’re just people who love and want love. Covid-19, Black Lives Matter and the trans rights movement have shown a reckoning with the fact that we all have different fights. It’s something that happened with both the Black and gay liberation movements, where you had to fight for your individuality and assert yourself in identity-based terms to be granted humanity. If all groups are now asked to name and assert their identity, then people who previously didn’t think of themselves in identity terms – like white people – now have to proclaim an identity. Now that everyone has to be identified, nobody wants to be identified. Who the Bær was an answer to this moment where things got really convoluted, and you couldn’t show or speak about anything that wasn’t directly related to your lived experience. It made me question, what is my life and reality? Who am I? Do I stand for this? I thought, what’s better than a cartoon to talk about that idea? Identities are imaginary boxes: they’re cartoons.

MP In the exhibition, you interrogatepower as a kind of invisible architecture. One example is the pavilion dedicated to your experience of syphilis. How did this lived experience compare to its historical imaginings?

SF Because of the nature of modern medicine, I had no experience with it. There was a doctor’s visit, there were two jabs, there was a short period of fevers, but nothing worse than a cold and a bit of mania that comes with feverishness. Most of it was in my imagination. I’m not glamorising illness – I would never want to die of syphilis – but it was a completely streamlined, frictionless experience. I could have gone through it without ever interrogating it. It made me think, if you can feel unreal about a disease like syphilis, what else do we feel is unreal? What is the real threat to our lives today?

MP One room in the exhibition is dedicated to the cultural mythologisation of Anne Frank, her house and how she has become symbolically decoupled from her lived experience. How do you feel about the process through which a symbol like Anne Frank becomes a model of worship?

SF It’s magnificent and devastating. It’s acrobatic, and you see the breadth of the human as an instrument. The Anne Frank work is the closest I can get to encasing or grasping or holding that wonder for a second. It’s about the madness of being alive.

MP The room looks at the impossibility of doing the “right” thing, that even a well-intentioned decision has global knock-on effects. One of the works included is a recreation of a Topshop outfit Beyoncé was photographed wearing while visiting the house, which sold out within an hour of her posting it on Instagram. Do you ever worry about these questions in your own practice?

SF Everyone wants to live a relatively ethical life. You don’t want to cause pain, you don’t want to leave the world worse than it was before. There can be an overinvestment in trying to be ethically pure or correct, but whenever you gather ideas into a coherent position, you inevitably have to edit reality, to decide what stays in and what gets left out. That process is always somewhat violent: once you start editing, you start removing things you don’t like. I want my work to be a place with competing voices. It’s a jury, not a dictatorship.

MP Given how closely you engage with the contemporary, how do you avoid a sense of nihilism in your work?

SF Does the exhibition feel nihilistic? I make reams of art to distract myself from the possibility of nihilism. We can also think about it as an absence or a vacuum. The vacuum at the core of reality is a concept that exists in spiritual thinking as well. The answer I’m often compelled by is that meaning comes from experience and the body. The blue carpet we’re currently sitting on is affecting us in ways we don’t know. The experience of colour, of form, of the erotics of these incongruous ideas coming together in an architecture – this makes life worth living. All of these massive works come out of very small moments of realisation. My dream is that people coming out of the show feel validated in their doubts and that they can be taken seriously. We’re very smart animals, we just don’t trust ourselves enough to follow the leads sometimes. .