Episode 057 Martina Haidvogl

Show Notes

This week on the show we travel to Switzerland to visit with media conservator Martina Haidvogl. We’ve heard the conservation program at the Bern Academy of the Arts mentioned a few times on the show so far, as for a long time it was really the only formal conservation training program that had time-based media as a specialization. With time spent in Bern, and as an alum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Martina was one of the few first conservators to arrive in the US with formal time-based media conservation training, and now co-directs the Bern Contemporary Art and Media conservation program, so suffice it to say, she’s kind a big deal. In our chat we hear about Martina’s formative experiences in her early years training as a conservator, the accomplished eight-plus years she spent at SFMOMA’s first-ever time-based media art conservator, and the deeply important work she is doing now to train the next generation. We’ll also hear about how Martina is thinking through how the conservation profession and the arts ecosystem needs to adapt and evolve to a rapidly changing world around us. Tune in to hear Martina’s story!

Links from the conversation with Martina
> About Team Media at SFMOMA: https://www.sfmoma.org/read/team-media-action-contemplation/
> About caring for technology-based artworks and design objects: https://www.sfmoma.org/read/theres-no-app-adventures-conserving-old-tech/
> On SFMOMA's MediaWiki documentation platform: https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/reimagining-the-object-record-sfmomas-mediawiki/
> About the HKB's Contemporary Art and Media training program: https://incca.org/training-programme-bern-academy-arts-switzerland
https://www.hkb.bfh.ch/en/studies/master/conservation-restoration/
> Symposium Contemporary Art Conservation Revisited: 20 years later (program & videos): https://www.hkb.bfh.ch/conscare

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past, present and future of art and technology. This week on the show, we are traveling to Switzerland. 

[00:00:17] Martina: Hi, My name is Martina Haidvogl, I'm a media conservator and an educator at the Bern Academy of the Arts. 

[00:00:25] Ben: We've heard the Bern program come up a few times in the show so far as for a long time, it was really the only formal conservation training program that had time-based media as a specialization. Martina now co-directs that program so suffice it to say she's kind of a big deal. She's also a dear friend, Martina and I are sort of part of the same generation of time-based media conservators and back when I was a conservator at MoMA, Martina was a conservator at SFMOMA and we had the opportunity to collaborate on all kinds of cool stuff like matters and media art, and probably the most fun thing we worked on together was preserving over 100 floppy disks, belonging to legendary graphic designer, Susan Kare and setting up remote access to emulators for curators at MoMA and SF MoMA to browse through these. Now as we've also heard on the show in past episodes SFMOMA played a major role in the development of the field of time-based media, art conservation, but when Martina arrived at the museum in 2011, she was their first art conservator dedicated to media. It was just such a treat to sit down with Martina and hear all about her training as a conservator, the work that she did at SFMOMA and now the deeply important work that she is doing as an educator training, the next generation. I hope you enjoyed today's chat. Quick reminder before we get started, though, if you cannot get enough of the show, I recommend clicking the link in the show notes to our Patreon where our lovely community of supporters enjoy all kinds of extra and exclusive and behind the scenes content. I hope to see you over there soon. And now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Martina Haidvogl. 

[00:02:11] Martina: My dad was a car mechanic and my mom was a kindergarten teacher, so, we did go to museums, but it was not on this like, upper level class, kind of situation. I was interested in art and art making. In high school I took these art classes, and I don't know how it came to be, but one afternoon our art teacher pulled out this old oil painting that I think they must have found in the attic or something. And it had a huge hole in the canvas. And so as kind of a group activity, he sort of guided us through, quote unquote conservation treatment of this painting where we, I mean, now in hindsight, it, you know, was not at all anything close to what I'd afterwards learn in school. I don't wanna say it was the artist version of a conservation, but it was a very, you know, it was patching it together. Literally, I think we added a patch, and then we were mixing colors on the front and you know, at that point I knew nothing of reversibility or of the materials and it was almost a very playful way of approaching this. And as I was mixing the colors, my teacher came over and he was like, oh wow, you seem really talented well, you should look into conservation and that's when I heard about it for the very first time in my life I was never exposed to that profession. And I did look into it at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and it's a five year program that ends with a equivalent of a masters and to sort of enter, it's a test. It's an entrance exam that involves submitting a portfolio of drawings pencil and watercolor paintings and I was drawing just, sort of as a hobby, and so I, I had these drawings and pastels of mine and I, went to the professor and he was you know, I feel like he was very kind and he looked at them and he said, Mm, mm-hmm and then he was like, well, they're maybe a little too expressionistic for us. And then he closed the map and he was like, This is not what we're looking for. And that was the beginning of the summer. And then he explained to me what it was that they were looking for for this portfolio. And then I found an artist who, I don't know why, took me under his wing and the entire summer. I was in his backyard drawing and he made me draw the weirdest objects. He made me draw them really fast. I wanted to spend hours like do, do, do really nitpicking, like drawing. It was this technique that actually, you know, it was kind of a trick, that teaches you to being able to look quickly and being able to translate what you see quickly into a brush stroke or a pencil stroke.  So I was drawing an entire summer. I remember it was one of the hottest summers in Vienna. Yeah and then I went to that admissions test and it was an entire week and we had to draw nude in both pencil and watercolor. And then at times they would pull us out for questions on art history and chemistry and some other tests of tactility and I got accepted to the program and that's how I got into conservation. In the very beginning of the program. I think they do it differently today, but back then, at first you would sort of be introduced to the different materials. We did some wood carving and we did an entire copy of an oil painting. Yeah, and at some point I felt like, hmm, I really like paper. And then I started out learning paper conservation. I think it was one and a half or two years in that there was a new program being established at the Academy of Fine Arts and in addition to the sort of quote unquote traditional conservation program, they established a program that they called Modern and Contemporary Art Conservation. And I got really interested in that. I think what interested me most was that there were challenges that were posed by the materials being used, the material combinations sort of new frontiers to break and that seemed really exciting to me. And so I kind of switched into this modern and contemporary art program. As part of that program, we had Johannes Gfeller who was then the professor at the Modern Materials and Media Program in Bern and he gave a guest lecture in Vienna for US students of the Modern and Contemporary Art Conservation program. He brought these, uh, large open reel video tape machines. And then he put them on the desk and made the tape squeak, and with a video camera, showed us how CRT monitors worked. And for the first time I was like, damn, now I understand how this video technology works. And I don't know why that was so fascinating but it was, and after hearing his lecture I was determined to learn with him and I said before I would graduate in Vienna, I wanted to go to Bern and be taught by him. And so because there was some, you know, logistics that had to be arranged beforehand, I could not go right away. And I had about half a year where I would have to wait. But in that time I then went to a video editing class and I went to a video art history class. And I took these additional classes kind of as an preparation before going to Bern and that turned out to be really beneficial because, knowing video editing programs, is, uh, kind of fundamental to then work with video.

[00:08:49] Ben: The way you were describing your attraction to contemporary materials this like seduction of , there being so many problems, it's not like, you know, oh, this is a very old painting and it's slowly falling apart. So that obviously makes a lot of sense that you would be drawn into time-based media, when you arrive in Bern to study with Johannes that must have been amazing. I mean, it sounds like it was kind of your dream at the time.

[00:09:12] Martina: It was yeah, like I said, he's such a charismatic person and I really wanted to learn and I think he was, maybe also happy that there was a person coming who just soaked up everything that he was saying. And I was really lucky because at the time that I was there, he organized slash curated a video art exhibition in a museum in Lucerne. And he kind of enlisted all the students of that program to help with the preparation for this exhibition and the preparation for that exhibition. That was so incredibly cool to experience that because one student basically did the whole registrar work by compiling all the components necessary for each of these works. The way he had envisioned that show was to show the works with their quote unquote original technological materials. The artworks were mostly from the seventies and eighties. And if it was shown originally on Umatic tape recorders in the galleries, could not imagine that today, then he would try to get six Umatic tape recorders and we would create exhibition copies on Umatic tape. And that's how it was shown there. Whether it's really necessary to show works in this way or not, or whether the art could also sort of overcome that original technological dependency from then. That's a discussion that's really interesting. And today I have a different opinion than I had back then. But in any event it was a really interesting exercise and an incredible learning experience. A lot of them, as far as I remember, hadn't been shown in a long time. So there was also this like archeological approach of like, okay, how is this shown? What is needed for that? What are the components? How is it being installed? They had already worked on this in the previous semester and then I came in and we were digitizing all these videotapes. And since, you know, in preparation for this exhibition this is all that we were doing. And, we did that at times until 10:00 PM at night. It was me and Johannes with these old video machines and I learned about video signals and time-based correctors. And then, we digitized it and were digitally restoring the footage in Final Cut and then exporting it and back then we were still working with DVDs and I did experiments. I'm like, Okay how do you go from this uncompressed video source to a DVD and how does that look? And so I had this amazing playground of. Working with these video artworks coming from tape that we would then show in the exhibition. And then at the last part of that semester was actually installing these works in the galleries. And then there was an opening. And so I was really lucky to be there while this was happening. And I learned tremendously and I mean, it was an incredible luxury spending this much time with him and sort of soaking up all this technical information that he has. And so with all this now in my back pocket, I went back to Vienna to graduate and for graduation usually students pick a more comprehensive project. And in most cases, I would say it is connected to an artwork that has certain issue. And then as part of your thesis, you sort of, document the artwork, what is it what's the artist 's intent and then you propose a solution. I mean, that's maybe in a nutshell, and so for my diploma thesis, I was working on a Dieter Roth audio installation, and it was one that he did with his son, Bjorn Roth and it was called Keller-Duo and it was this like grown wall sculpture that had wood and paint and all sorts of little gimmicks and instruments. It had a keyboard and two violins. Equipment it had several tape recorders, it had cassettes, it had microphones. Everything was painted over and glued over. And the cassette recorders were glued into the sculpture. And, you know, it was grown over time. It was sort of installed in one of their houses, and I think his son told me in the interview, that every time they would walk by, they would like glue something on there. So it was this almost like living sculpture and then at some point it was acquired, you know, and then, with this acquisition it sort of changed that dynamic. So what my challenge was or what I was looking at for the diploma thesis was that none of the audio equipment, none of the cassette recorders were working anymore. And if you have a cassette recorder sometimes, and if it's like really considered playback equipment, if it, has mostly a functional status within an artwork today we consider exchanging them or, you know, even migrating to a digital technology. But with this artwork, because everything was so glued in and painted over, you could not do that. It was not possible. So, This was sort of, the challenge ahead and, there were sort of exhibition copy cassettes that visitors were invited to select and put into one of these cassette players, and then they could play along on those musical instruments. So it had this interactive, let's play music together. You could record on these exhibition copies. He manipulated one of the cassette players. He disabled that function that you would erase over the tape as you rerecord. And so he created these like musical layers or that was sort of the concept behind it that, different people at different times could then in a way jam together as they recorded layers upon layers onto existing footage without the below audio being erased. So that was the challenge and. I had incredible help and that was all already in a way foreboding of as a media conservator, we work in collaboration with technicians and scientists and in an institution with curators and registrars. So even in this little master thesis that was in a way, in its little vacuum at the academy, I was already working with people who knew their ways around the technology of these works. I had help with the digitization. I had help with the cassette players themselves. And so I was working with this scientist and I don't even know whether he was a physicist or an engineer or maybe both. And I went to him and I said, I wanna sort of preserve this interactive part. The selecting a cassette and putting it in and I should say it was a private collection. So it's not that you had like a thousand people come by, which is also why we were sort of able to even consider this approach as much as a proof of concept that it was, to have sort of fake exhibition copies and use RFID chips within these cassettes that would sort of identify a given exhibition copy and as you put the cassette into the player, there was an antenna sort of hidden in the player that would then detect that RFID chip and another switch underneath the play button of the cassette recorder would then activate that particular audio track that was connected to that particular RFID chip. And then play back that audio track from a computer which, you know, you could connect to the speakers within the installation. I mean, we did not implement it it was sort of a concept that we experimented with and we tried and only to see whether would work and it was successful in our experiments and our tests. But you know, that was this one solution and then we also considered just adding a playback machine sort of on the side that was visibly, added at a later date where this interactive portion of the installation could take place and happen. I think I visited one last time after I graduated at this collection, and back then they had just plugged an MP3 player into one of the cassette recorders and maybe that shows that, yes, at the end of the day, whatever solution you propose also needs to be practical and, easily maintained by staff in the collection. So this is how they decided to then present the work.

[00:18:49] Ben: Wow. I mean, but what an incredible student project. So after that big diploma project and your paper, what happened after graduation?

[00:18:58] Martina: After I graduated, I was sort of doing some project here and there, and maybe it's just me, but, uh, it's a very existentially loaded moment after graduation and , I didn't have like a solid gig at that moment, which made me a little worried and during that time I went on a snowboarding trip with friends. And as it often so happens when you are sort of in a weird mindset I broke my leg on the snowboarding trip. And so bathed in uh self pity with my casted leg upwards.  I came around the SFMOMA Fellowship ad and I looked at this ad and I read through it. And I mean, even before, I saw that ad, I was like thinking about where would I wanna be? What is the kind of job that I would want? And I knew that I wanted to work in an institution with a collection, who would really seek out having somebody with my skill set and my specialty on staff. And then, I don't know, a couple days or weeks later, I saw this ad from SFMOMA and it was called Advanced Fellowship in Contemporary Art Conservation and this fellowship is set up that anyone with a focus of contemporary art can apply conservators or conservation related field and whatever their specialty is that they bring with, that's what their fellowship will focus on. And so if, somebody has a paintings background, they will work with the paintings conservator while at the same time being immersed in the conservation studio and also collaborating with other conservation specialties as they're there. But one of the specialties that they listed was media conservation. And I read this ad, and gosh I was like, well, that is for some straight A student person, that's not gonna be me and I closed the ad and I closed the computer and I went back to my miserable broken leg self but it, sort of got stuck in my head. Like I kept thinking about this ad and this position and I applied for the job. And, you know, cuz my broken foot a friend had to mail in the application and I remember I was sitting with my mom, we were having dinner and I was telling her about how miserable I felt, and I didn't know what to do with my life and how I had no perspective. When all of a sudden my phone rang and I saw the number and I saw somebody from the US was calling and I was thinking, wow, these folks are so nice at SF MoMA they even call to tell you that you didn't get the job And with this energy, I picked up the phone and uh, answered the phone, and I talked to, and, you know, it was Michelle Barger who's now head of conservation at SF MoMA to tell me that I've got the job. And I was so speechless and this is when I knew that I was going to go to San Francisco and that was at the beginning of the summer and the internship wasn't gonna start until September, so in between, I was really lucky to spend three months with Agathe Jarczyk, who's a time-based media conservator, now she's at the Guggenheim but she has this video conservation studio in Bern so before I went to San Francisco, I had an incredible, fun summer working with Agathe digitizing videos during the day. And at the time I was staying in a house with a bunch of musicians. So digitizing videos during the day and then going to concerts at night. And it's a really, really fun time and a lot of good memories. But at that time, I already knew that I was gonna leave at the end of that and then hop over to California. When I came to SF MoMA, I did not really have much of an institutional insight to conservation work. And when I was working with Agathe we were digitizing these video tapes, with Johannes it was preparing these artworks, but it was very disconnected from sort of a collection collection and also former conservation projects were these like contract works. So I, I was never really immersed or I never knew what it meant to be part of an institution with team, with workflows. So that was a big world that opened up to me coming to SF MoMA and yes, I had this skill set I knew my way around the video technology but being part of an institution and the workflows around that, and this whole machinery really of acquiring, lending, exhibiting works, that was all completely new to me. Once you're in an institution, it's never, just you and the artwork, there's an entire team and there's opinions and there's discussions, and there's considerations and so, that was one big mind opening for me coming to SFMOMA and then, Jill took me under her wing I was incredibly lucky to have this . Incredible woman as a mentor. When I came to SFMOMA I felt like, in German, we say the nest has already been made. So you don't have to make the nest anymore it's already built and this is how I felt coming to SFMOMA as a media conservator. They didn't have a media conservator before I came on, but I think they had something that may even be much more important than having that one person who has that skill set. They had formed a culture around preserving these artworks and this culture and this approach was built. It was really hard work building that and it's thanks to people like Jill Sterrett and Layna White who were working there, and who I've had the honor to work with. So I came to SFMOMA and I felt like I didn't have to make a case anymore that, oh, you need to take care of these works it's really important that we discuss these things before we acquire these works. Can we even support these works? What is needed to show these works in the future? I didn't have to make a case for that anymore. That had already been made and it had been made for many years and I think adding a person with the skill set, then it just you're set. But the first part is hard. Today probably it is media conservators coming onto institutions doing this kind of work. I mean, not to minimize my own impact there, but I was standing on the shoulders of some very hardworking women and people who came before me.

[00:26:50] Ben: But you must have been like their wildest dreams because here you were a trained conservator and with expertise in time-based media, which is the thing they didn't have. So that must have been just, for the whole team there, like finally

[00:27:05] Martina: Yes. But in a way it was, Oh, finally somebody can do this research. Yes, maybe finally somebody has some answers. But you know what, we discussed a lot of approaches and treatments as a team. One of the pillars I would say of that culture at SF MoMA was around team media, this working group that has been built over time. And when I say over time, I'm talking early nineties. Back then it was Jill Sterrett who was a paper conservator at the time a registrar and a media technician and the three of them got together and were sitting down and were like, Well, how should we deal with these works that are coming in and that are being now acquired? And how do we take care of them? This team grew over time and when I was there, it was a group of 15 to 20 people that were convening once a month and had this forum of , coming together and discussing questions regarding the media arts collection. And coming together and discussing questions that could be very minor questions or bigger questions of collection care taking. So, it wasn't just my voice saying, okay guys, follow me this way. It was like, you know, we were coming together and, I had things that I could contribute, but I became part of that team and I relied on that team and it helped me with my work, and I'm sure my contribution helped them in their work. I was growing into that. This was not from day one. but I think one of the, biggest compliments, this approach, I should say received from Rudolf Frieling who's the media arts curator at SF MoMA, he said because I have this team that I can rely on, I'm able to consider even very complex works of art for acquisition, which otherwise I may couldn't. And that, I mean, think about it, if having this team on board does now open up the world of arts for curators and for acquisition, so I thought that that was a, an incredible compliment to this approach.

[00:29:41] Ben: Yeah. So you were at SF MoMA for eight years and it's really where you established yourself. But eight years is a long time and I would imagine like things probably changed a lot over the years and I would guess you probably worked on some pretty cool projects. So I guess I'm curious how did your practice evolve and were there some cool things you got to work on?

[00:30:05] Martina: Yeah, I think, maybe when you're a student you're really interested into the material and into the technology. And maybe that is reflected in my diploma thesis and approach. And the more I spend time at SF MoMA and was immersed in that culture and I was working with artists and I was working with a lot of people around me, the more I got interested in that aspect of caring for works. How can we support people? How can we foster these really beneficial collaborative workflows within an institution? I know that was something that Jill was always really interested in and I was inspired by her in thinking in that direction and how do you work with artists? How do you work with a team? And how at the same time can you bring that knowledge and information that is being generated during these processes together? And I could see for example, how with our media arts department, with team media and everybody involved there, we had worked together for so long, I knew exactly what this person needed to know to do their work. I knew exactly what that other person needed to know. And this whole, we were so good at working together. And so I think this is what I was immersed in at SF MoMA and I think, or today I would credit that culture and this approach and practice in how this whole media wiki project came about. Sf MoMA has done a lot of research on how can we document these complex artworks? How can we use our systems the database systems, How can we break the silos in the museum? So there's been a lot of research done already at SF MoMA on that topic. And with media artworks because they're coming together as you install them and as you turn them on, and as you bring all these components into specific relationships, this is sort of when the art comes into existence and as you take them down, as you de-install and you put those components back on the shelf, in a way the art is not in existence during that time. You know, you cannot just pull it out of a painting rack and there it is, there's your painting. And as you see it there, you will see it in the galleries, but with Media Artworks, as you put them on the shelf, they sort of come out of existence. And because you have these many different components that you put into a relationship and, this relationship may even be with the room that you're in, with the site that this certain installation is being installed there may be a certain variability to these different iterations. So a work may have very different in instantiations over the course of its lifespan. So this was all a long sort of way to say that documentation plays such a crucial role within media conservation and, you know, you've been part of exhibition installations. There's a lot of decision making on the floor. You have preparators, you have media techs you have curators, you have the artists present. So there's a lot of decision making and you learn about the artworks as they're being installed. And now where does all this knowledge go? And so this is how this whole idea of a platform that many different people within the museum can access and can download, if you will, all that, that they've learned about the art. And thereby creating these like very comprehensive documentation records that are readily accessible within institutions on the browser that you can go to. You can stream the video, you can read about it, you can listen to an interview. As you research, you can really immerse yourself with everything that's connected to this artwork and that is being captured within this Wiki system. And Mark Hellar who's been a long time. collaborator and consultant for SF MoMA he and I worked on a lot software based artworks. He was instrumental in putting this platform together. And that was one really interesting project and what interests me so much about this project is that it is at the same time about people and how people use it and the workflows that it supports as it is about the technology and not losing sight of what it is that we do when we install art and when we work in a museum. What is at the forefront of that? So that it's not the technology, but the technology takes this supportive role and that's what made this project really interesting to me.

[00:35:39] Ben: So, in a kind of like really beautiful, I think full circle way you, after your eight years at SF, MoMA took all of that that you had learned and built and all of that real world expertise, and reality, and you've now brought that back to Bern and you are now a professor in the program there where you spent some of your early years. So I was curious if you could share with us maybe a bit about the program. Like what are the courses that you're teaching and yeah what's that like?

[00:36:17] Martina: Yes my way was leading back to Bern where, you know, in a way was the last station before I came to SF MoMA. So the Bern program is one of the first programs to teach media conservation specifically. And this media conservation program is nested in a contemporary art and media program. It's called Modern Materials and Media. And, the two people I've mentioned earlier actually already, you know, being part of my life Johannes Gfeller he was instrumental in founding this program, this media program specifically at the University in Bern. And then his successor was Agathe Jarczyk who is now at the Guggenheim Museum and who has been, I would also say my mentor in the past. And so coming to Bern there's for me, there's these quite large shoes to fill and yeah, but it's really exciting. So our program is a bachelor master program there's three years bachelor and two years master and in the modern material and media specialization of that program we have about 25 to 30 students all together. I'm co-heading this program together with my colleague Martina Pfenninger Lepage, who used to be at the Academy of Arts in Vienna. And we've been looking at the curriculum and what we've been doing in terms of, making some adjustments was on the one hand in the media area, bringing in the more digital, software based art, some coding. So also have these like very new frontiers, that the media conservation field sort of dealing with, get these in, into the curriculum, but also maybe in a broader sense, look at the classes and move away from this divide of like media on one side and modern materials on the other side to a more holistic contemporary art approach. Having experienced two continents in a way, having experienced life as a conservator in the US and then coming back to Europe, I think something I'm paying attention to is how I can partake in fostering a discourse within Europe also to really make this argument why it is so important to have conservators on staff within institutions. And these media works especially software based artworks, they're so incredibly fragile they're the most fragile works a collection can have. And looking at institutions in Europe I, see a big need to fostering that discourse and helping bring awareness how much institutions can benefit from having a person on staff and saving these artworks and making sure that they will also be available to future generations. And you know, we were wondering what is it that we as this educating institution, how can we help? along that development. We organized a symposium, and it was actually the anniversary of this program of contemporary arts and media at the Academy of the Arts in Bern. For this anniversary, we brought together experts from the field and hosted this two day symposium on contemporary art. And it was a, moment also to reflect on where we've come from, but also how, our approaches have developed, how our practice has evolved and where we're going next and what the new frontiers are. And specifically if we look at what the world is currently grappling with and we're, you know, we hear news about war and we hear news about climate change and then to reflect on what can conservation's contribution be to these large questions that, our planet is currently grappling with or mankind is grappling with? So it's this two day symposium and yeah it was, uh, really cool to organize that. It was really great to work with these many different folks who are contributing to this conversation. We recorded all these talks and, uh, please check them out especially if you wanna learn more about contemporary art conservation and what yeah, what people are currently grappling with and thinking about and what they're challenged by.

[00:41:19] Ben: Wow. So, I can't think of anybody better equipped to give advice to emerging professionals. So Professor Haidvogl 

[00:41:32] Martina: My god 

[00:41:33] Ben: I'm curious if you have any advice for, you know, folks listening to this chat who might be interested in getting into this field.

[00:41:43] Martina: I don't know if that's a super specific conservation advice or a general life advice, but it's uh, in retrospect has served me quite well. It's like a platitude, but don't listen to the people that say no or that doubt you. If that's what you wanna do, do it. And there will be a way. I was told that, you know, I wouldn't be able to go to the US, they wouldn't want me there. A person actually said that to me and hearing these things can be really discouraging. And then the reality is just not, it's just not true and, I would say do it, try it. And maybe there's a couple detours and the detours are just as valuable as going straight 

[00:42:34] Ben: Well, Martina Haidvogl, my dear, dear friend, Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and chat. You know, I've known you for all these years, but I feel like I know your story really fully now. So, thank you for taking the time to share your story with everyone.

[00:42:50] Martina: Oh, you're most welcome, Ben, and thank you for doing that. I mean, the work that you are doing here is an incredible of testament and appreciation for the community.. 

[00:43:00] Ben: Aw, shucks. 

[00:43:02] Ben:  Thank you dear listener for joining us for this week's show as always, if you want to help support our work and our mission of equitably compensating artists that come on the show, you can join us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence, or if you are interested in making a one-time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts you can do so at artandobsolescence.com/donate. And there you can also find the full episode archive, including full transcripts and show notes. And last but not least you can always find us on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence until next time have a great week my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin and this has been Art and Obsolescence.