Jacob Kotzee undertook a Quick Response residency in Studio 4 from 6 July – 2 August 2026.

Quick Response Artist-in-Residence Jacob Kotzee spent four weeks at PICA in August 2026, developing new work through research into materiality, history and place. During his residency, Kotzee explored how inherited histories and the traces of the past can shape our understanding of place and contemporary life.

In this interview, artist and researcher Boz Deseo Garden, Founder and Co-Director of the Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery in Los Angeles, speaks with Kotzee about his residency and broader approaches to research and making. Together, they consider how artistic practice can engage with history and memory and how research can open up new ways of thinking about place and the histories held within it.

Boz Deseo Garden (b. 1997) is an artist and academic working between Los Angeles and Paris. They received their BFA from California Institute of the Arts, their MFA from University of California, Los Angeles, and they are currently a Doctoral Student at the University of California, Irvine in the Culture & Theory Program. They are the Founder and Co-Director at the Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery in Los Angeles. 

[BG] Hi Jacob, thanks for speaking with me. I’m very excited to think through this body of work you’ve developed during your PICA residency. It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you over the past year and getting to see some of your research questions become “actualised” is a real treat.   

To begin, I am inclined to think of the effects of your work in terms of “consequences”. This is certainly a neutral descriptor in many spaces, but for those unfamiliar with your work, I think it would be helpful to situate the relationship between your work and its outcomes as consequential. Different from the connotations of beneficial or curative, thinking of the work as consequential primes us for, implicitly, a critique or even an indictment. The latter of which is an unorthodox thing for art to do. The negative, the lost and the doomed are all at play in your work—none of which are vague; your subject matter is unmistakable and your subject of address is perhaps no longer exclusively inhabiting the receding fortress of history. Your choice to contend with this dis/ambiguation through painting is deliberate. So I read your tarrying with these discourses (at the level of content and form) as urgent, an insistence on remembering without a neurosis that issues from the impossibility of knowing why we have forgotten in the first place.

I’m being vague in my gloss here, as I wanted to start on an autobiographical note by hearing you contextualize these fundamental components and their significance to you. At the risk of sounding, well, kitschy, where did you get your voice from? By which I really mean: were you always a thinker/a painter of, to abbreviate, the negative, the consequential, or the lost (and the ever re-animated), or was there a point in your career where your capacity for these questions expanded? And at what point did the discourse of German fascism’s figurative imagination (via the work of Leni Riefenstahl) become (one of) the object(s) around which that capacity was organised? 

[JK] Hi Boz, thank you for the wonderful introduction and for agreeing to this interview. I’m excited and intrigued by your framing of my practice in terms of consequence and indictment, which I’m sure we will discuss further shortly. To begin, though and answer your first question; yes, I think I have always been interested in the negative, the consequential, the lost, without always knowing it. In this sense, my understanding of the negative as structuring to my practice has certainly grown in recent years. 

I moved to Australia with my family when I was quite young, simultaneously learning English and forgetting the Afrikaans and German we spoke before immigrating. That loss, coupled with a generally confusing relationship to my cultural heritage, likely structures much of how I think. It has always felt sticky to try to relate to two cultures that, I would say, are primarily defined by shame. Engaging with any of that history, specifically the sources of that national and cultural shame (Apartheid and the Holocaust) feels like, to borrow your words, the ever-reanimated. 

I arrived at German fascism over the past 3 years. My initial interest lay in literature surrounding the forest as a space and symbol of the German unconscious, which soon expanded into the specific ways in which German cultural history was appropriated by the National Socialists. Following a few years of independent studio research, including a residency in Berlin last year, my interest in this subject matter consolidated around Leni Reifenstahl’s 1932 film Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light). Riefenstahl directed and starred in the film, a tragic folk romance set in the Italian Dolomites and it led to her subsequent engagement as a director for two of the National Socialist’s most prominent propaganda films, Olympia and Triumph of the Will. For me, Das blaue Licht became a text around which to organise themes of the German cultural unconscious; it presents a sublimation of the Nazi death drive into motifs and narrative structures drawn from German Romanticism and folklore. In this way, the film is almost a more ‘pure’ revelation of the German cultural unconscious, in that it reveals itself by accident, as opposed to the total transparency of Nazism.

[BG] I think this leads well into my question about Saul Friedländer’s Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, about which we’ve spoken briefly and is a touchstone for your research. I appreciated the way he establishes the relative identity of myth, eternity, death as one dependent upon (an aesthetics of) reflection and repetition à la  “the long march without end”, a rhythm whose endlessness recedes into a nothingness with every step. Fascist eternity, on his account, is really an eternal sleep insofar as death is an alias for the atemporal geography across which eternity’s figure marches. I’ve heard you describe these new paintings (and the particular hand or mode you choose for them) in relation to dreams. The figures appear hazy, dissipating, and lost to the transformative reconstructions of narration (as in the clinic) or painting. In a psychoanalytic sense, dreams can be the rehearsals (maybe something like Friedländer’s “echoes”) of some symbolic rupture or some unassimilable content that is too grotesque to name but whose name(lessness) might march toward us in dreams. Waking up, then, is a return to the phantasmatic inverse of this: a march of the name(less) away from us—a march we institute by means of repression, displacement, sublimation or disavowal. Waking up indexes our inability to countenance the name(lessness) of death. If I’m following correctly, kitsch is a reduction of myth much like how repression is a reduced appearance of that which would unmake us in its nakedness—but whose mythical and repressed substance, respectively, is nevertheless evoked in every reduction. My question then is: in your practice and in these works (in their dream-work), on what “side” are the paintings on? As translations of film stills, I’m inclined to read them as returning the images to their pre-filmic coordinates—(re)finding them in the dream(s) from which the film precipitated (is this fair?). Are they “speaking” from the dream qua that atemporal geography of the eternal march? Which, secondarily, leads one to ask what the wakefulness is (what does it look like) that one must retreat into to hide from the true direction of those marching figures? (Is the viewer in this position? The encounter with art as such?) Or conversely—do these works reside on the side of the wakeful, acting as a further layer of fortification against a horror that remains even more difficult to assimilate than the painting’s contents? 

[JK] I like your formulation of the paintings returning the images to their pre-filmic coordinates. I think I’m trying to use painting to access or tune into the symbolic register of the cultural unconscious, or as you describe it, the atemporal geography of the eternal march. I try as much as possible however, to stop shy of completely collapsing the paintings into this psychological landscape. Or within a series, I might just allow one painting to disintegrate fully, while the others cling on to different levels of recognisability or mimesis. I’m trying to oscillate the works from the knowable to the unknowable, without giving over to one side of the scale or the other. So for me, the work is really about the gradual slip away from what you’ve described as ‘wakefulness’. Paintings that are more mimetic, such as the Arminius Mask painting or the series of Leni Riefenstahl film stills, are wakeful in the sense you’ve described – they provide some kind of psychological reassurance in their recognisability. But I like to think of that as a false reassurance. Their ‘aliveness’ is more necromancy, the reanimated dead. 

The paintings that are more formally ambiguous, which move towards a collapsing of pictorial space into something akin to this atemporal geography you describe, ideally feel more like they are borrowing this language of the dream—where referents disintegrate into one another—where a crowd becomes a landscape which becomes a flag. For me, the body of work is successful if there can be a feeling of vertigo that comes from relying on the recognisable, the ‘wakeful’, the moribund anchor to fortify the psyche against the ambiguous currents of the eternal march, an anchor which disintegrates. So in this way, I am interested in the anxious rehearsal that takes place at the perimeter of the subject, the repeated shoring up of the psyche. The horror always remains just out of reach. Klaus Theweleit has been another touchstone for my research, and is worth quoting at length in his description of fascism as a bodily condition:

“There are human bodies which live in constant fear without being exposed to concrete threats from the external world, it is the fear of losing the ground under one’s feet. When verbalised, it is described in terms of being devoured or swallowed by sinking ground, of being immersed in floodwaters and carried away by mighty waves or of sinking into an abyss of excrement. The “fragmented body” has no secure feelings about where an individual’s own body ends and the outer world begins; it lives in a permanent state of hallucinatory perceptions. People with such a bodily structure can only achieve the sense of being “whole” or “complete” through acts of violence”.

[BG] I really like this formulation of what mimesis does for you, the work, and implicitly for others. It involves the question of method (at the level of how you paint the way you do), but also the psychoanalytics of signification in general. The demand for the appearance of the signifier also dooms the signifier (to fail). The contrast between the dissolving works and the wakeful ones both contribute to this infinite process of innovating on one’s own confusion; a search for better ways of keeping the bad encounter (which is to say one that has already happened or is happening all the time) at bay. How do you determine an approach for a specific work? What dissolves and what comes into partial focus? Are there moments during the process (of each work) where the method fluctuates? Or when do you know if a work (or its content) must dissolve or fortify itself?   

[JK] I like to think of how I distinguish between which paintings should dissolve and which should stay in focus in terms of weight. For example, the Arminius Mask painting references an image of a Roman face mask found in the Teutoburg forest, in the approximate area where the Germanic chieftain Arminius won a substantial battle against the Roman Empire in 9AD, effectively halting Roman colonisation east of the Rhine. The battle took on significance as a Germanic foundational myth over the 16th century through the work of German historians, and renewed interest in the 19th century by the German Romantic Nationalists, such as Caspar David Friendrich in his Tombs of Old Heroes painting, depicting the supposed tomb of Arminius. This is weighty stuff, and I try to imagine this object as inevitably bogged down by this historical and cultural baggage. Painting a photo of the mask, then, almost becomes a kind of autopsy of this baggage. The mask isn’t free to float as a signifier amongst a range of new meanings. Painting it can’t pretend that it has a future life. Like I mentioned before, it is recognisable and therefore reassuring, but this reassurance is predicated on the painting being dead on arrival. Its lifespan, or futurity, is foreclosed. Other images which are less restricted in terms of their specific location or associations I like to treat as more flexible. They can be disintegrated into aspatial fields and hold a more ambiguous stance.   

[BG] Yes! So wonderfully put. It’s this point on paintings being “dead on arrival” that I’d love to spend more time on. We’ve spoken so much about your relationship to the intense looking and re-looking painting requires, but this is also not necessarily for you (and as a natural consequence of your interest in the negative), a process that you are in love with. The sentimentalism or the poetics often evoked to narrate a painter’s relationship to painting are, I think, productively excised from your practice. One of our buzzwords is “devastation” and it may be (or has become) difficult to imagine a practice, one’s commitment to it, beyond the language of love and possibility. So I’m wondering if you might speak more to your relationship with painting and the discourse around painting, its failures, and the devastating limits of painting that I think your work treats. Another way of asking this is: what are, to your mind, the expectations people have of painting? How do you negotiate those desires (in studio visits, openings, etc.)?  

[JK] While it’s risky to discuss expectations of art in any kind of general capacity, I think for the purposes of answering your question it’s worth focusing again on this idea of psychic fortification. I do think there is an appetite for painting and representational mimetic painting specifically, to be recognisable – not just visually, but almost morally, or politically. This can likely be said for a lot of art, but I think paintings which are closer to images (i.e. painting of things) maybe allow for a kind of looking that privileges identification with a particular position, or stance. I think in that process of recognising and digesting the image, the psyche is fortified and the bad encounter is further repelled. 

I generally think of painting as devastatingly limited. Or, as Tuymans describes it, painting is incredibly violent. There is an immediate displacement that happens in the act of painting something, and I think attending to that displacement is becoming more and more important in my work. I think of that displacement as the unavoidable deferral of the bad encounter; that no matter how hard you try, painting – like language – can never represent the negative. It’s a challenging project, then, to centre my research around that which exists in the popular imagination in the West as the ultimate Evil – Nazism. By and large, Nazism has been articulated to the point where it feels knowable, and therefore perversely digestible. It’s almost like a roadblock within the cultural imagination, in that it demands complete repulsion to the point, I would argue, of disavowal. Paintings which then approach this subject matter anew then also run the risk of a demand for identification. They, in turn, need to be knowable, recognisable, digestible. So it’s dangerous, in a way, to try to hold on to some semblance of ambiguity. To be clear, Nazism is abhorrent and evil. I don’t want my position in painting to be confused with an ambiguous political position. What I am truly interested in is driving an encounter with the disturbingly eternal march. My position is that Nazism, in its perverse knowability, can be disavowed in such a way that you are tricked into thinking you had the bad encounter. But that can never be the case. Painting, in its incompleteness, in its ambiguity, in its failure, may allow for something different, something more psychologically dangerous, by walking you up to the edge of the subject, to the edge of yourself.   

[BG] Being tricked into thinking you have had the bad encounter is something I will be thinking about for a long time after this conversation. What I love, too, about the implications of this trick— if I’m reading you correctly—is that the danger painting allows for is either a staged one or the danger of what the staged one indexes: being excluded from the possibility of encountering this encounter. You are given the receipt for an acquisition that has never happened, the taste of an object that has never been digested. What we are left with is a bad economy, where nothing is circulated. Or rather that in every exchange, the object’s inscrutability compounds—and it is precisely this inscrutability that is passed off as the legible, original, unadulterated encounter. Devastating! With this Derridean-Lacanian “movement”, a movement that is also a stasis, where do you see your work or this body of work “going” next? Do you see it introjecting this phantasmatic deferral in some way, denying itself even more (returning to a bad encounter with Richter, so to speak)? Or do you imagine it tightening around this contradiction of seductive rendering as the denial of the actual, world-ending pleasure, (every)one is (not so) secretly after?   

[JK] I’d like to take the work in both directions and they may not be mutually exclusive. There’s a part of me that is skeptical I could ever ‘believe’ in painting enough for it to ever not be denial, deferral, or about the negative and the lost. So it’s probably inevitable for this circulation of nothing to always take place. I think trying to introject this phantasmatic deferral, be that through the seductive surface or otherwise. However, there is scope for my work to engage an alternative of this kind of compulsive recursion, which might look something like transcendent indifference. The deferral we’re talking about is a power dynamic—the vertigo of being close to the edge of yourself, or the taste of the non-digested. Where painting may accelerate through the stratosphere and leave orbit is, I think, through a kind of immediate, eternally present, and ultimately indifferent posture to this exhaustive circular rhythm of deferral. This is why the flowerfield works still feel important. I am interested in how colour may be singularly present and irreducible. The accumulated patches of colour in the flowerfields are kind of non-referential and aren’t caught in that exchange of nothing. Or maybe they get closer to that exchange of nothing, a more pure revelation of the drive, without all the tinsel of the surface and the deferral. Like a map of—as you say—the “bad economy, where nothing is circulated”.   

In practical terms, I want to continue mining the archive of German visual history. This includes the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, and even more so those of Albrecht Altdorfer. The rest of Riefenstahl’s oeuvre, as well as the decorative works of German Nazism (including mosaics, sculptures and civic architecture) and German expressionist cinema and theatre, will all continue as subject matter for this body of work. Ultimately, though, I think I’m trying to confront the kinds of roadblocks within the cultural imagination we’ve discussed so far. Bringing them to painting is, for me, a kind of always-incomplete exorcism. If, as I believe, Das blaue Licht is symptomatic of the psychological drives of German Fascism, so too can painting be symptomatic of the logic of the psychological drive itself.

PICA’s Studio Program is supported by PICA’s Art Ambassadors.