00:03
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Niels Hansen Jacobsen, I chose his work, a sculpture, very traditional, called Skyggen, which means shadow. It's from 1897 to 98, an older artwork. I'm also in this process of making works about the shadows.

00:21
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
When you're attracted to a piece, it's because there's something in it for you. I could really see myself in this work. It's a very contemporary expression. It really looks like it is a 3D-printed sculpture in some angles, and not modeled in clay and then made to bronze.

00:42
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I could imagine that he was inspired by this story of Hans Christian Andersen. He made a story about the shadow, which is a very scary story about the shadow taking over his master's life and body.

00:58
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
The sculpture has so many different angles, it looks like it could have been made today. Very abstract, very concrete. I can rotate around the sculpture forever because it's just giving me different perspectives continuously. It's beautiful.

01:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the National Gallery of Denmark and the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, a Danish-Filipino artist and performance artist. Welcome, Lilibeth.

01:48
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Thank you for inviting me.

01:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We're very happy to have you. You are in your home in Copenhagen, or your studio, rather. Tell us about the space where you create your art and what makes it a good space for you in terms of nurturing your creativity.

02:06
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Actually, I work better when I'm not in a studio, honestly. I have to get out of all my duties. Because very often when you're in your home or in your studio, everyone wants something from you and it's so disturbing. My best working place is actually when I escape.

02:27
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
But I'm very fond of this studio here, it's in the middle of Nørrebro in Copenhagen, very close to where I live. There's a huge window to the outside world. I don't have a fear of missing out of anything because the world is passing by. Inside I'm just trying to make my work.

02:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you grew up in Manila, in the Philippines, the first eight years of your life. You're half Danish, half Filipino. How do you think this has affected your art?

03:00
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Unconsciously, in the beginning, I was already working with identity, looking at myself. I got more conscious about what I was doing when I went to art school, using it more consciously, actively, reflectively. I was doing self portraits, I was filming my friends, my family. Once I got some words on what it was, you can actually work on different levels.

03:30
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I'm from a working class, dual cultural identity. I don't have this artistic background at all. I was a very open, young person who was just taking everything in that was different from where I came from. And I think this is how I actually found art and stayed with it because I was open to everything, I was searching. A lot of my experience, personal or things that I can relate to, I use in my works.

04:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you moved from Manila to Stevns, of all places, in Denmark in 1978. Stevns is quite a different world from Manila. What was this transfer like for a little girl?

04:17
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
It was surreal. Manila is one of the largest cities in the world. Right now it's plus 25 million inhabitants. Denmark, maybe 6 million inhabitants. And Stevns, where I lived, was 150 people in this small village. It is where my father was raised, where he was born. So it was natural to move back there when we were leaving our home in the Philippines and going back to Denmark.

04:46
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
It was very different. I actually remember all these dreams as a child. I was dreaming a lot. I think it's to process this big change. But children are very adaptable to changes. The concept of moving was horrible. I actually didn't want to move. I asked one of my cousins if we could switch families so I didn't have to go to Denmark. I remember this. But after three months, I could speak Danish.

05:14
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I'm not raised in a bilingual culture, actually. When we moved to Denmark, my Tagalog, my Filipino language, just disappeared because there was no community there. My mom, she was so busy with moving and having a new baby. I don't know how we survived this period, but it was quite intense.

05:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Our series is called Danish Originals. How do you define yourself?

05:40
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
When I travel to a new place, the first thing I think is, could I live here? And then, I have an answer in my body and it's actually, I have many homes. Sometimes I go more to the Middle East or there was a period when I was a lot in the States, mostly in New York. So that was also my home. But right now, I'm going back to Asia a lot to do my work. And last summer I was also in Brazil. So I have many homes.

06:09
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
It's not like I'm particularly Danish or Filipino. Actually, most of the time here in Denmark, people speak English to me the most. When I walk around in Cairo, they speak Arabic to me. It's so weird to feel like a foreigner in your own home. I always feel something in between, rather than being Danish or Tagalog. And I actually work in Norway, where I'm a professor in the art school, so I commute there a lot, which means that I also feel part of Norway now. So there's just many homes.

06:47
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
There's something in the art scene that we say it doesn't matter where we come from, but this is the only thing that matters. When you're part of a group exhibition, in the catalogs, it's like, where is the artist from? This is the first thing, this is the most important thing, which is quite contradictory.

07:05
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
So you can actually profit from your cultural identity sometimes. In my world, I think it can be trendy to be from some part of the world and less cool to be part of another part of the world somehow. This cultural identity has capital, it has a very strong value in the art world, I would say.

07:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Your name is quite particular. Can you explain the different names that you have?

07:34
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
In your career, when you start to get reviews, people start to call you something. The reviews were calling me Lilibeth Cuenca. Lilibeth is actually an Americanized Filipino name. It's a shortcut of Elizabeth. Cuenca is Spanish, and it comes from the colonial past of the Philippines. So a lot of the indigenous people were baptized to have a Spanish name. And Rasmussen is my dad's name.

08:06
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
But as I was saying before, people like to exoticize you in the art world. One of my first reviews, I was Lilibeth Cuenca and I liked this combination, but my mom got so angry at me. The Filipino side is my mom. She didn't like me to exoticize myself. She was like, "But your last name is Rasmussen. You have to use Rasmussen."

08:31
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I listened to my mom. So I'm now using all my three names and it's very long. But it actually says a lot about what I do. I'm in between cultures, in between countries, in between languages. My entire work is all about being in between. So I think it really fits my identity somehow.

08:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you discover art and what made you decide to make it your career path?

09:00
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I was an exchange student in the United States. I had this fantasy about Texas. It was the time when we were watching Dynasty and Dallas. And everyone wanted to go to LA or New York. No, I want to go to Texas. But I didn't end up in Texas. I ended up in Arkansas.

09:24
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I lived one year in Arkansas when I was 16, in Conway, and then I moved to Little Rock. Because I wasn't Danish and I wasn't Filipino, I was just half-half. I had this thing that I had to go to the United States because this would be a place where they could tolerate and accept people who are mixed like me.

09:47
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
So I was in high school in Arkansas for a year and I met this woman. She took me to an Auguste Rodin exhibition in Memphis and she couldn't get me out of there. Her own children were done after 15 minutes. I just fell in love and this was my first art exhibition. After this experience, I said, when I come back from the States, I'm just going to take my gymnasium, and then move to Paris. And that's what I did.

10:18
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Because of Rodin?

10:20
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Because of Rodin and because I wanted to teach myself about art. I have this big gap in my cultural background. I don't have this knowledge about art or literature or culture. So that's what I did. I lived in Paris for a year. One year in Paris, one year in Barcelona, to study literature. It took me a long time to find out I wanted to be an artist.

10:47
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I was 25 years old, and I left different studies behind. But when I was 25, and I started to study art in the art school in Copenhagen, I have never changed my mind since. But, it was a long travel. It started in the United States, in Arkansas.

11:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's very interesting. And then Rodin in Arkansas.

11:12
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Yeah.

11:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You explore identity and performativity in your art. You have done it from the beginning of your career. What have you discovered personally so far? What have you learned about yourself in the process, both as a woman and also as an artist?

11:30
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I don't know if I've learned about myself, because it's not me.

11:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What do you mean? Is it a character, or?

11:39
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Yeah, it's not about me. Working with personal material, personal input, it's very important for me that it becomes universal, that someone on the other side can relate to it and mirror her, his-self to it. So if it doesn't do that, it's not a very successful piece of art, I think.

12:03
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I'm using myself as, you could say, a media. It's really not about me, actually. But I have learned a lot from using myself as a mediator to my art. Every time I feel, okay, I have to go to another level, another step, it seems my themes are actually the same somehow.

12:28
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I'm exploring identity from gender or as a woman, but it's more about being a human being. Yeah, feminist issues, but it's more about — Some of my characters are also very queer, actually. Now there's a word for it. But there wasn't this word for me when I started to play different characters in my performances and art videos. I see myself as very queer somehow. Though it's more about gender than being a woman.

13:02
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
There's always new topics to explore. I get new ideas that I can take with me when I'm doing a new piece. To be in the process, it's so important actually, because this is how you develop yourself. Not being in the process of work, it doesn't develop you at all. Some works are better than other works, but sometimes I think you have to do the maybe not so successful work to reach the better ones.

13:34
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
It's important to keep yourself working all the time. You learn a lot from just working. It's so important to be excited about new work. If you're not, try different routes sometimes. I like to do things I'm afraid of to challenge myself.

13:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes, and you have created or evolved what one could call a cross aesthetic expression. You use text, music, costumes, and scenography, among other things, to tell your stories. How did you discover the mediums for your artistic expression?

14:12
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
These collaborations are part of getting wiser and also getting out of your comfort zone when you collaborate. First time I was recording a song I had written, I went to Anders Christophersen. He made this track for my work, Absolutely Exotic. It was my first performance work.

14:36
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
And I was terrified to sing. I'm not a musician. I knew I wanted to make a song because I wanted to reach out, not just the art world. It's very important for me to reach out to all kinds of people. I'm also interested in the art world, but this crossover is actually to reach out to as many people as possible. I learned so much from working with musicians or dancers or designers or whoever I'm collaborating with. It's a very interesting journey.

15:12
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I always start with a concept. How we do in art school, you're really trained to work in concepts and then you can start to maybe work more aesthetically. This is how I approach art making. I think when I reach out to, for example, a musician, a composer, they can help me let go of this control of the concept.

15:35
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I think it's very useful for me to have this collaboration. When you work with a designer, everything has to be precise, the measure of things, of course. It has to fit. So then you have to be more meticulous about things. So I just learn from collaborations.

15:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It seems like you have a lot of fun with your art too. Is that the case and do you like it to be fun?

16:03
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Oh that's good you feel that. It makes me happy to hear that.

16:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It seems there's a lot of joy around it. Is that true?

16:13
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Yeah, there's so much miserable things happening. I want to be the one who — Maybe it's more challenging to spread out joy than the opposite, for me.

16:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have dealt with issues like identity, feminism, ethnicity, social relations and the environment in your art. What are the themes that are closest to your heart and how do you evolve? How do you seek inspiration to express what you would like to express in new ways?

16:47
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I think the themes don't change so much. It's really where I am in my life, where I am in my art. Like, finally, I've been working more three dimensional. Sculptures have a performativity in themselves, so this is my new challenge. This is a new path that I'm really exploring, materializing performativity somehow. It's more static than, of course, making performances, and I also like this path.

17:19
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I also had an Asia tour where I was singing again, doing my song performances. So I have my curriculum getting bigger and bigger and I feel like I have this library where I can take different books out.

17:32
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I also enjoy going back to really old works and revisiting them. Last year I went on a tour in the Philippines. The curator who invited me was very interested in my very early works about my family, works that I haven't dealt with for so long. It was really nice to restage them again. Yeah. At the moment it's really about sculpture, but there's not something I prefer more than the other. Yeah.

18:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Speaking about feminism, it's not easy to be a woman in the world of arts. What is your experience like, and what do you do to make a change?

18:17
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I don't know if I can make a change, but if I get the opportunity and get the microphone and talk about these issues, I always take the microphone and I think it's so important. How can we change things if we don't dare to tell our viewpoints and to speak up? The way to change things is to talk about it and go public about it.

18:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
When you say you feel queer, maybe you could explain what you mean by that. Because today, many people express themselves gender-wise very differently. So maybe you could explain to us how you identify what queer means to you.

18:58
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
It's something I started to talk about now, not when I made these works I call queer. I just see that my characters are not just feminine, or woman, or gaia, they're also very masculine somehow. They have the power of being feminine and masculine at the same time. It's a hybrid of both.

19:23
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I'm always trying, even when I talk about being a victim, I always try to be a powerful victim instead of being a victim that you feel sorry for me. I don't like that. The energies, there's both masculine and feminine, hybridized somehow.

19:43
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
This is what queer is for me. It doesn't really matter if I'm a man or a woman. For me, it's not about sexual orientation. It's really about being able to make a fusion of feminine and masculine energy. We have both potentials, I think, as individuals.

20:05
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Most of my life I was brought up in Scandinavia and it has totally changed me. For sure, your environments change you and I think I would have been a different feminist if I was brought up in the Philippines, honestly. Yeah.

20:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How so?

20:25
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
In the Philippines, women are so powerful, but it's a patriarchy. There's this duality, and it would have influenced the way I would be a feminist artist, for sure. I don't know how, because I was raised here in Scandinavia. Yeah, it's hard to say. Maybe it would have been even more up front, or maybe the opposite. Because there's things you can't say when you are suppressed. It's not the same freedom of speech.

20:59
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
For example, nudity is really not allowed there. You don't show your body. That is so different from the culture in Scandinavia. I released my big monograph last year. There are nude images. I'm also performing nude sometimes. It's very hard to show these images in Asia.

21:25
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
In certain countries, it's forbidden, and you can't do it in official institutions. There's just no way you can do that. Just this little thing, which we in Scandinavia find so obvious, and it's so natural to be in the nude. It's not allowed in Asia. Yeah.

21:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Have you felt a change in the opportunities offered to women and minority group artists since you started out?

21:57
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
It has changed a lot. But I have to say, I'm not sure if the change will stay. I think we have to work on that, because it's still the males. And the white male is still very powerful and more sellable than a brown female mid-career artist.

22:20
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
People know who I am. But people have this idea, when you're known, then you sell a lot. I sell more than ten years ago. But it's not what I'm making a living of. But the visibility has really changed. I remember when I went to art school, there was me and this artist Michelle Eisrup. We were the only brown women. Yeah, it's good, but we need to change the structures to really change things and the structures haven't changed yet. Yeah.

22:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It actually leads me to my next question, what you said, because a lot of artists struggle financially. How does one manage to make a living as an artist? You mentioned you teach, you're a professor.

23:07
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I am not complaining. I feel very privileged and I'm living off my art. Of course, I'm teaching and I'm a professor, so this is giving me this steady income for some years, but it's not a job I have forever. In four years, it's over. I'm not complaining. I'm doing well. I have a lot of work, but it's not easy.

23:30
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
For example, when you do big exhibitions, solo exhibitions, big sculptures, there's not money in making huge solo exhibitions. If you think about who's gonna produce this work, how much time you use, this is not how you earn your money as an artist. Maybe people think that, but it's actually by selling the work.

23:54
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
As a performance artist, it was actually easier for people to understand that I needed to get paid because I was traveling to make a performance. When I was a video artist, people didn't understand an artist fee. It was very hard to get an artist fee to show my video works. They would say, but you already made it. Why do you need money? Because when I made it, I didn't get any salary. This was not obvious.

24:30
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
People understand, okay, she needs to get paid because she's making a performance. Like a musician doing a gig or something, you can ask for more money if you have the experience. Yeah. That's like in the music world.

24:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah. You mentioned that you're teaching. You graduated in 2002 from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. How significant was it to actually get a degree? What did your education bring to the table in terms of the way that you perceive art and create it?

25:06
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
That's a very good question, because in the '00s, late '90s, the art schools were very different from what they are today. It was like being in the Royal Danish Art Academy. In Danish, you would say blåstempling, you were one of the right people. Just being there gives you recognition somehow and that gives you some kind of comfort. And yeah, I guess it gave me some comfort and security to believe in myself.

25:41
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Yeah. And this is very important especially when my background is working class and I don't know, no one would have guessed I would have become an artist. And I don't know, but I found it. So it was very important for me to be in the right Danish art school walls. I think I wouldn't have enough belief in myself, doing everything myself.

26:08
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Yeah. It was important to be there and to meet the right people who saw you. You could work, it was about meeting your colleagues. It was more important than the lectures you got, to have this playground for six years and be recognized. Yeah. I needed it to believe in myself to be there for sure. Yeah.

26:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How would you describe contemporary Danish art to somebody who has no clue what's going on in Denmark artistically? What would you tell them?

26:44
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
What's going on right now, it's so hard to say because we're in the middle of it. There's so many, there's so many threads. But if I should say something, a lot of it is very conceptual based.

27:00
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
It's time for performance, and I've been waiting for this moment, because when I was starting out, got out of my performance closet, there was only me. So that's why I wanted to go to New York for a while, because I needed some competition. But now the scene in Copenhagen and Denmark, there's a lot of performances, a lot of crossover. What I have been doing for so many years is really happening now, I think.

27:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned you were in New York. You've been to the US, you've been to France, Spain, for shorter periods of time, and you have had exhibitions in Finland, Greece, Singapore, and the US, among other places. How is it to travel with your art? How important is cultural exchange?

27:55
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I feel the way to develop yourself, to understand yourself, is to get out of your comfort zone and get out of your national comfort zone. Especially with performance art, when I get the feedback up front. You get that up front compared to if you were showing a sculpture. It's such an amazing journey to travel with your art and your performance.

28:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was New York like, in particular?

28:28
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Very brutal.

28:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I can imagine that. New York is a tough city.

28:34
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I always say this is how I really learned to do performance. And that was in New York. I had this period where I was doing a series of reenactments, reenacting different historical pieces from art history, of performance art, performative art.

28:52
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
And it was a piece I did in my gallery at this time, Kirkhoff Gallery in Copenhagen. I traveled so many places with this piece. After Copenhagen, I went to Wales. In Wales, they were so shy. It's very confronting body art. And when I went to New York, they were performing more than I was, the audience.

29:17
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
It was so crazy. One of the pieces was Cut Piece by Yoko Ono, and in Wales, no one would cut anything off me, just this child who was putting her scissors in my leg, she couldn't cut properly. But when I went to New York, all my clothes were off. Two minutes, I was naked, because they just were so brutal. Yeah.

29:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
New Yorkers.

29:42
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Yeah, they were performing more than me. It learned me so much. Oh my God, I have to be prepared. Everything can happen. I also did reenact this piece, by Orlan, this French artist, The Artist's Kiss and in New York you could buy a kiss from the artist. And I got so many kisses, also by women, that I was not prepared for all this.

30:08
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
But, yeah. There's a huge difference in different cultures. That's why it's so interesting to travel, to have this opportunity to travel with your art. This is really how you develop yourself as an artist, I think.

30:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You are midlife. You are middle-aged, in your fifties, like me. So I don't feel bad saying that to you. What do you feel are the highlights in your career looking back from a personal perspective?

30:39
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Yeah, it's an interesting time to be in your mid age, mid career. I have this big catalog, and I have been reenacting some of my first pieces, and I really like my first pieces. They were so simple and if the idea is good, then you can come a long way, I think.

31:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
One of the highlights looking at your career, from my perspective, would maybe be being part of the Venice Biennale in 2011. That's a big event for an artist. How was your experience of that?

31:18
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Oh, yeah, that was pretty great, especially as I told you, when you do performance, you get everything back immediately. And it was very intense to stand there and perform these three days for the art scene, the global art scene, on top of the Danish Pavilion. Yeah, it was fantastic.

31:45
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
But it was also fantastic to be, as I told you, in New York. I learned to perform and to be in a city where there's so many talented people at the same time. It was very good for this Danish artist that's doing performance. New York taught me a lot about the art world.

32:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Great art scene there.

32:07
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Yeah. But very competitive and it's very hard to be there. I wanted to go there because I always felt so privileged to grow up here in Scandinavia and develop your art. There's so much help to make art, the Danish Arts Foundations, and funds you can apply to make your project.

32:29
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
A lot of artists, they're not dependent on the private market. But in New York, this is the only market. It's the private market. You have to sell your stuff. I needed to get this input, I think, to develop my art, to get more precise somehow. That's what I felt, and yeah, I really learned a lot from that. So highlights for me is when I learn a lot. Yeah.

32:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Denmark is small. You talked about New York, that's a very commercial, as you say, art scene there. And Denmark is located in Northern Europe, not exactly the center of the world, nor the art world. How good is Denmark in terms of promoting its artists and the art world, the Danish art world?

33:18
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
As I said, there's the Danish Arts Foundation, there's a lot of institutions that can help with funding. Still, I think for artists to be able to go international, we need to work with people who also work internationally. And these are the high profile galleries who go abroad to show the artists. This is a way to get out of Denmark. It's actually their responsibility to take the artists out somehow. I don't know. Yeah.

33:59
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
We were talking about this concept of home before. I work a lot in Asia. It's just different periods somehow. Focus on Asia, focus on the United States or Middle East. It's just changing a lot. And it seems to be periods in my life. When you start to get known in a certain part of the world, you get more shows, you get more familiarized with the art community there. 

34:30
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
If you want to become a well-known artist, you have to get out of your country. Even the art scene in New York is also very small after being there. Just after two weeks, you find people don't get out of their comfort zones very much. So New York and big cities can be very small also, I think.

34:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have exhibited at the National Gallery of Denmark. What is your relationship to this museum and what makes a good museum in your mind for the artist as well as for the audience?

35:09
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I have a very strong relation to the National Gallery in Denmark, SMK we call it. One of my first big solo shows was created there in 2006. I call it the EgoShow. And it was such a big surprise for me that they called me and gave me this opportunity. And this is the beginning where I was starting to do performance, but more like a video artist.

35:39
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I remember after four months I exhibited there, the press person gave me this big map full of reviews. I got a lot of reviews and they bought two of my works that are still in the museum. This museum actually gave me a lot of opportunities. They saw me. They saw me very early in my career.

36:03
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I have a special relation to this place. But it's a national gallery and they have a lot of things they have to do because they are responsible for many things, and contemporary art is not always the first focus for them.

36:21
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Actually, I didn't know what contemporary art was when I started to get interested in art. I was more into the old, that's why I was in Paris. Because I was just looking at old art, modernism. The National Gallery has the different "isms" and also contemporary art. It's a huge place, and they have a big responsibility.

36:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And what makes a good museum from an artist point of view, maybe?

36:52
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
From my point of view, it's actually to dare, to dare to do stuff, to take things that are maybe not ripe yet, as they did when they gave me this solo show in 2006. For me, that was like, wow, that's daring. I like to get challenged when I see exhibitions. A good museum is where they take the responsibility, but they also dare to surprise and maybe take a chance to show art that is not so popular.

37:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is your favorite Danish word and why? And please spell it to our listeners who might not speak Danish.

37:35
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
That's a tough one. I don't know what my favorite is, but my first word was farmor, which is f-a-r-m-o-r, and it means, "Dad-Mom," which means, it's my grandma from my dad's side. In Danish, you can know the difference, if it is your grandparents from your dad's side, then it's "Dad-Mom" or "Dad-Dad." But if it's your mom's side, it's "Mom-Mom" or "Mom-Dad."

38:05
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
It's quite genius actually, the Danish language in this case, I think. Yeah, I thought it was the name of my grandma, farmor, and I was just so puzzled when I was a child that her husband was called farfar, which is so similar to farmor. So it's like, oh, they're a couple and they almost have the same names. Until I found out it just means grandparents from your dad's side.

38:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Super! My final question for you is, what are your goals for the future? Do you have a bucket list for what you want to achieve with your art?

38:43
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
I would like to be, maybe in more collections, also outside of the North. It would be nice to be in collections abroad. What I mean is to be in museums that are not only Scandinavian museums. Because when you are in collections, this is where your art stays. When you make exhibitions, you can see them on my website or in a book. But where do you actually see the works? Where is the work?

39:10
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
So that would be nice and I would also like to continue to be experimenting as I feel I've always been doing. But at the same time — I want everything at the same time. I also want to start to make more static works, I guess, that could stay, be permanent, I think.

39:29
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
That would mean a lot to me to have more permanent works installed. I hope this will come true. Maybe when I'm 80. For a woman, this is where they peak with their careers, when they're 80 years old. So I still have 30 years.

39:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I hope for you too. I will cross my fingers that that will come true for you. Thank you so much for your time here. We really appreciate it, Lilibeth.

39:58
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
You're welcome.

40:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen chose Niels Hansen Jacobsen's Skyggen or The Shadow from 1897–1898 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.