Name: Daniel Beerstecher

Age: 39

City: Stuttgart

When was the first-time you travelled alone?

I think the first time that I travelled alone, I was around 15 years old. I was going to the Black Forest for four or five days. I walked with nothing else but my backpack. And I wanted to visit a girl that I liked at the time. She lived on the other side of the Black Forest.

For me, it was a really big challenge. I had camped out many times with the Boy Scouts before, but sleeping and walking alone in the forest for a 15-year-old boy was a new experience.

So, in the end did you meet her?

I met her, but it was a big disappointment. Because if you have five days to think about a person, then you have a lot of imagination about them that is not connected to reality. I arrived, but she wasn’t at home. It was a time without cellphones, without sending messages, and it took her five hours to come back home.

What was the takeaway for you from that first solo travelling experience? Did you find the walking alone part was more enjoyable than actually meeting the girl?

For me, it was connecting two things. On one hand, it was the challenge of going alone to the forest and sleeping outside. On the other hand, it was going to see this girl. It was a long time ago, but perhaps I also wanted to impress her. I don’t know.

But afterwards, did that trip make you want to do it again? To travel alone.

For me, there were many challenges during that trip. Like the first night, I was sleeping in the campground with a fireplace in the middle. And then in the middle of the night, some men came. And I was getting really scared, because they were five men with military clothes and really long knives arriving with flashlights. And I thought, oh my god, am I going to die now? But afterwards, I realized it was just some older men who go out there once in a year, make a fire, and drink some beer. A lot of them are actually very nice people. So, it was very funny with them spending the evening there. But in the first moments, it was a complete shock.

The second night, there was a full moon, I was in the middle of the forest sleeping, and the full moon was over me. And then there was one night that I was sleeping in an open hut. There wasn’t anyone else in this hut. There were always noises around, and I didn’t know what they were. That was also scary.

But you grow with these things, you know? It’s like, at the moment, it was very difficult, but afterwards you can laugh about it. Then you think, oh my god, I’ve done it. And you can tell the stories. It’s adventure. So perhaps I was getting addicted for more adventures. And it was proving myself. I think I like challenges, and with adventures, you have challenges.

It’s interesting, this story of your first trip as a 15-year-old boy who had this challenge and overcame it through a journey. I think that theme also comes out in all of your later works. It’s the same theme.

I think the main thing is I realized that with difficulties, I was growing, personally. Perhaps it was searching for difficulties to grow, in a nice way. And you can’t prepare for everything that will happen. Of course, you can prepare your luggage, you can prepare your shoes and everything, you can have good equipment. But then, there are still many things you can’t control. I’m German, and the Germans are very controlled. So, it’s really nice to find out things that you can’t control. And I think that’s one of the reasons why many German like to travel a lot and do backpacking adventure trips. If you go to nature, it also gives you a good feeling of how small you are.

When you went to art school and starting making artwork... First, when did you decide to become an artist? How old were you?

I worked for one year in an orphanage in Mexico. And I was travelling around for more than a year in Latin America. I decided I would go back to Germany when I knew what I wanted to do, but I had no idea what I wanted to study then. One day, I was sitting by the Caribbean Sea, I was diving there, and it was so beautiful to see the sea underwater. I took some shells, and I had some stones with me, and I started making some flowers with these shells. I’d say it was a little bit kitschy, but very beautiful. So I thought, oh my god, perhaps this is a way to express all the beauty and all the adventures I have done – perhaps art could be a way to express this.

But I had no idea about art at the time. I was around 21 years old then. At that time, Auguste Rodin and Picasso was the level of artists I knew. I knew nothing about contemporary art. Then, I went back to Germany, and I tried to apply to art schools. I could draw quite well, and I could also make some sculptures and stuff like that. So, I tried to apply, to make a portfolio. My future teacher saw this portfolio and he said, “I think what you are telling is very interesting, but with this portfolio, you shouldn’t apply.”

You shouldn’t apply? That’s a bit harsh!

No, because I didn’t know anything about contemporary art. So, he said I should first spend a little bit more time to learn about art, then to apply again. And I did it for one year. I worked for some artists as an assistant and did some internships. After one year, I applied again, and there was no doubt anymore about getting in.

Now looking back, it seems like you decided to make your work about travelling. But when was the first time that you started to realize that travel can be made into a form of artwork?

During the first year at art school, I was doing some abstract things, and I was not really satisfied with doing that. I didn’t like to talk about stuff, and I almost gave up on studying art. I talked to my teacher, and he said, “Daniel, why don’t you do something you like to do? You like travelling around the world?” So, he said to me, “Make some projects about your traveling.” It’s at that time that I understood the possibility of contemporary art. You have media, you have sound, photography and all these other things. So I realized, well, I can bring these things together – art and travelling, but with new media.

I got the idea that I was going to hitchhike for ten days through Germany without any aim and record the conversations I had with people along the way, and do it secretly without them knowing. Afterwards, I did a video with these 15-20 minute recordings, where you can listen to some short stories that people told me, and you can see how different these people are. There was a very famous architect, then a woman who was pregnant at a very young age, then the next one was a businessman, and the next was a policeman, and everybody had a different story. For me, that’s why travelling is so interesting and hitchhiking especially, because you meet very different people. You hitchhike, you sit together with them, and they tell you things from their life, and you never would hear so many different stories. It was the average of the society, somehow.

Do you still hitchhike now?

Now I’ve become a little lazy, and I think the last time I hitchhiked was perhaps 5 years ago.

I was on your website and there’s an interesting description of one of your works called “Travelling Journeyman”. One sentence in the description underneath the title says, “Travelling Journeymen or why I choose to leave my ordinary life to backpack around the world and to reach for the MoMA.” Is MoMA still the goal?

It was a little bit more of a provocation. The idea of this project was to reduce completely, to have no money for one year and work for some artist as an assistant. And through my work, they could recommend me to other people. As I had hoped, I made some really nice contacts. I worked for Pipilotti Rist, Christian Jankowski and many other famous artists.

Actually, what I wanted to convey is that you sometimes win more when you reduce. Reducing is not losing, sometimes you can win more out of it. Is that going to lead to MoMA one day? I don’t know, and it doesn’t just depend on me. But going to MoMA was not the ultimate goal. It would be nice, of course. But it’s more about the doing, about the leaving, and about trying. Where it leads to is not so important. Even if I don’t get there, that’s fine. Because many things can happen.

There is something that I learned in Brazil during my past five years living there: that if you just have one aim, you lose many things along the way, and if you don’t reach it, you will be very disappointed. But if you are open, then many other things can happen, and they can also be very nice. And sometimes, those other things can be even better than what you had planned before.

So, do you still have a destination for your current art practice? Do you have a next place or next level you want to reach?

I think there are two levels I’d like to reach. At the moment, I’ve reached the point in my projects where some of them are very expensive. And I’ve reached the point that they are financed somehow; I don’t pay it by myself anymore. The next step would be that I can earn some money for my own living out of it. So, that would be one. And the second part would be to start teaching and giving some of the experience I’ve had to students. These are the next two goals.

So now let’s talk about your most well-known project: Land-Sailor. How did the idea of sailing a boat on the roads of Patagonia first occur to you?

When I got the idea, I was in São Paulo. And São Paulo is the complete opposite of Patagonia. It’s a very big city. And I was getting a strong longing for nature, to get out of this monster city and loneliness. And something in the city always gave me the feeling that my mind is blocked by the buildings, by the society and everything. I had this very romantic imagination that in the wildness with the far sky and the far landscape that I could just let my mind run. So, I got the desire to go to Patagonia to be away from São Paulo.

Although, it’s very interesting that when I’m in a very exciting place, I always get a new wish to go to another place. And in this part of my artist career, I already realize it’s sometimes easier to connect to a project. So, I was thinking about what I could do. And, I don’t remember how exactly I got the idea of the sailboat moving on the desert. It just came to me somehow. Perhaps it was because I also did some projects before where I was walking with a surfboard in the desert, or when I was walking in nature in a Hugo Boss suit in Scandinavia. Perhaps it’s just these connections or collages, to put two things together that are usually not connected.

So somehow, I came up with the idea. And this picture stayed in my head for a long time. Usually, if I have an idea, I will let it sit in my head for a while, and if after two weeks this idea is still in my head, then I think it’s really interesting. And this image of a sailboat in Patagonia was in my head for a really long time. And then I started asking around to people who know something about sailing to see if they thought it was possible. Most people said no. But I found some people who said it might be possible. Then at that point, when I heard that, I really thought ok, I want to do this.

By sailing do you mean… in the end it was a boat with car wheels on it? And it was moved only by the wind, right?

It was in the beginning already clear that it had to be a boat. There are some beach sailors, people sail on the beach with some wheels. But those are not boats, it’s like a special vehicle for the beach. I could also make a special construction to sail on land, but my idea was to sail with a boat on land. The only way to do that is putting some wheels underneath.

Was the name of your final video work from Werner Herzog’s movie and his diary Conquest of The Useless?

It’s Fitzcarraldo. In this movie, the main character carried a boat in the jungle, up a hill. Werner Herzog said in his dairy that he could do this easily with a small motor or shoot it in the studio, but he had the idea to make it real. Making this movie was such a big challenge that somebody almost died, and he was running out of money – it was completely crazy. But it was this image in his head that he had, and he wanted to realize it in reality. That gave him all the power to realize it, even with all the difficulties. While doing my own project, there also appeared to be so many problems. I ran out of money, I had problems with customs, the boat was breaking and everything. So, it was really a conquest. The whole project was a conquest somehow. 

Was your project also inspired by reading his book?

No. When I came home after finishing the project, I tried to make a movie out of it, a documentary. And I realized that I had such beautiful images, but when cutting them down and putting them together, it was getting boring somehow. After looking at a boat sailing through the landscape for 10 to 15 minutes, it was just getting boring. And we didn’t have a microphone. We were at the end of the world, and the microphone was broken, so dialogue was not really possible. So, I realized that the idea of the documentary that I planned to do was not working. Then I was very disappointed, because I put all the thought into it, but the documentary was not working.

But then people told me about Werner Herzog and how he had done something like a diary called Conquest of The Useless, and that he said it was possible to do it just because he had this image in his head. I realized that I also had an image in my head, and this image gave me all the energy to realize a project for four years: getting all the money, and building two boats and everything. So, I reduced everything down, all the images we had filmed. I reduced it to just one image, in one position that only last for 5 minutes. Because it was this kind of image that gave me all the power.

And the title is also like… the Conquest of The Useless is not just Werner Herzog; many mountain climbers use this title for when they climb up Mont Everest. It’s all these adventure characters in between. And I think when we do something useless… like, say, a boat in Patagonia is somehow useless, it helps nobody. On the other hand, so many people helped me to realize this project. The engineers, the people who gave me money, the curators, etc.

Why do you think they were motivated?

Because somehow, people are very excited about things that are getting out of the ordinary. Many people would like to do something like this, something crazy. But they don’t have the energy, they don’t have the courage; but they help other people do it. They somehow live the adventure with me, and this energy is very strong. It was a conquest of the useless, but it has a lot of power. Transforming this energy into an artwork can make it even stronger.

I remember you were using Kickstarter to do fundraising. Was most of the money raised from there?

I was hoping there would be a lot of money coming in, but it didn’t. It’s also because I had no experience in these things. For example, I didn’t even have Facebook at the time. But what was nice was that all the people who supported me came from the art world, most of them. There were artists and curators. So I thought, ok, if these people support me, then this idea has to be good. Because if it was a bad idea, none of these people would support me. So, this gave me the power to work on it, and I got some funding for the movie-making. And at the time, my father was dying, so I also used some of the money he left for me. I was completely obsessive to realize this project.

So at the beginning, it was just this image that came to your mind, and afterwards it’s a 5-minute clip that you can show other people and a story that you can tell. But the whole process, what was it like while in the making? How long did it take you to finally realize? Was there some point in the middle where you thought it’s impossible and were about to give up?

From the point of the idea to when I went to Patagonia was two years, more or less. And then, it took me another year and a half to reduce all the images to just one. So, in total it was three and a half years. And in those two years of realizing, so much shit happened. For example, when beginning construction, I found a father of a friend of mine – he was an engineer and sailor, and he would help me to make this boat. So, I came back to Germany from Brazil to make the first boat. I had a mechanic and an engineer; we were working more than a month on the boat. And then we wanted to send it to Latin America in a container.

When I went back to Brazil, I met a curator who made the Biennial of the End of the World in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, and he said, “Daniel you have no chance of bringing the boat from Tierra del Fuego to Patagonia. Because there is a piece of Chile, the country, where you have to cross the border. And the Argentines and the Chileans, they hate each other. People can’t cross the border with their own car. It can be very difficult. So, if you arrive with your sailboat at the border, you’re never going to pass.” So, I called some people in Argentina, and they all confirmed this – that it’s not possible. So I thought ok, no problem, I’ll send the boat to Buenos Aires, then I’ll carry it as far as possible in the south, and then I’ll cross somewhere a little bit north, in the middle of nowhere. But then I realized Argentina did something similar to what Trump is doing now – they closed all the borders, so it was almost impossible to send my boat and guarantee that it would get past the border. So the cost of transporting the boat was getting like 12,000 Euros high, and without any guarantee that the boat would get in.

So, after a while, I was getting panicked, because if I couldn’t get the boat in, I would be completely bankrupt. Because I had spent all the money for construction and sending the boat, and there is also just a small period of the year that you can do this when the weather in the south is fine. So, time was running out, and I couldn’t find a way. Then after a while I thought, ok, I won’t send this boat. I’m going to buy another boat in Argentina. Then I’ll have to find a mechanic and a producer and everything in Argentina and rebuild everything again. And I did this. I only had two months’ time to organize all this before my camera team arrived in Patagonia. My cameraman arrived on February 1 in the south of Patagonia, and we arrived four hours after him. Day and night to build this boat, it was completely crazy.

Where is that boat now?

The German boat is still here in Germany. The other boat I left with the producer who helped me in Argentina, and he sold it without telling me. This is actually very sad, because I left it with him to take care of, and after one year he sold it.

He sold it just as the boat or as the artwork?

He never gave me an answer about this, though I asked. We had done really great work together, but in this case, it was very disappointing for me.

Well, at least you still have another boat.

I have another boat, and I have this experience that is the most important thing. I have the video, and I had some great exhibitions with it.

You know most other people, they just go to work, get paid, go eat at some restaurant, repeat, all this. Maybe the biggest challenge they are going to give themselves is to start a business or apply for a better job. But what you did with your life – no one asked you to do this, you really set all these unnecessary and difficult challenges for yourself. And basically, your way of living was just to realize this crazy impossible image that came to your mind and make an artwork out of it. I feel like one could get addicted to this. Once you’ve done something crazy like that, once you’ve made it happen, you probably would want to do it again, right?

Yes and no. I think it shouldn’t be the same. Each time I’m searching for a new challenge. Now I’m doing blue-screen video with drones, and I had no idea about blue screen before, so it was a technical challenge, and it’s very interesting. But what’s also nice about doing a project like this is… before the project I was full of prejudice. For example, I was thinking the police would stop my project, that I would have to pay a lot of bribes to keep the boat going. But the complete opposite happened. The police helped me, like we could stay one night at their department, they were cooking for us, they were really happy that something happened to them. And they helped us up a hill – they put a rope between a police car and the boat, because there wasn’t enough wind to push the boat uphill. So it was very nice that I didn’t know this kind of thing could happen, and it was a nice experience that things can happen differently than what I imagined.

So, it’s not like every time the goal is to make the project bigger and more ambitious, but to always find a different kind of challenge for yourself as an artist.

It’s a little bit like mountain climbing. There are people who start to climb the high mountains, and in the end they want to step on top of Mount Everest. And afterwards, it has to be higher and higher. I think with this project I have perhaps my… you never know what’s going to happen, but at the moment, I think I have my Mount Everest, I reached it with this project. But I think there are deserts that I can cross, there are other challenges. The next project doesn’t have to be more dangerous or more exciting, it just has to be different.

Let’s say it like this: it doesn’t have to be a more dangerous mountain to climb, it just has to be different. Because if it’s just getting crazy with big projects, then I need more and more money, and I do it just for the challenge, not for the new experience. So, the next project, I can’t tell now, but it will be big in another way, it’s completely… how do you call the opposite of everything getting faster and higher? It’s about complete slowness. Deceleration.

How many years is it going to take for this project to come to life?

One year.

Ok, I have one last question. So, your first trip was as a teenager, and you said that you think travelling can help you grow. How old are you now?

39.

So now looking back, 24 years have passed. In general, how do you think the travelling and these travel-related projects and trips have changed you? And in what way?

I think they changed me a lot, and they are going to continue changing me, because it makes me much more open-minded. I have to react to the things to come, and I have to always change my mind. Because I always learn something new. And I learn that I will never finish learning, there is no end. I have to see what life brings me, and I think this is an endless process. And it started with travelling, that I’m somehow getting more curious for things, and I hope this goes on.

Interviewed via Skype on July 20th, 2018