Niels Van Tomme: Earlier this week, I was reading Slavoj Žižek's Enjoy Your Symptom!, 1991. He considers fiction films the most significant, direct materialization of social fantasies and often refers to them as though they were reality. Conversely, when discussing your work, many people get stuck on the fiction-reality paradigm. While you borrow methods and stylistic elements that are clearly associated with documentary filmmaking, fictional elements also play a very important role in your work. It's sometimes deliberately unclear whether something is staged or not. How do you see the relationship between fiction and reality? Have we not moved beyond this simplistic opposition?

Julika Rudelius: While the discussion about fiction and reality in film- or video-based art is somewhat new, it has been going on for a really long time in cinema. I'm always astonished that we are still caught up in this specific debate. When you come from a documentary background, it's customary to restage half of your shots. Photographers and filmmakers always ask people to repeat something or to reposition themselves. That was also my initial starting point: I could stage everything because the documentary is already staged. This whole fiction vs. reality discussion in art is a little belated; it took place in filmmaking years ago.

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In 1997, "Carolina Sales Co." closed its doors for the last time. A mainstay of downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, the thrift store owned by Joe and Sylvia Gray had opened in 1939, and occupied the street level of two adjacent three-story buildings. When Sylvia died in 1997, all three floors were a jumble of items of every material, shape, and size.

Not knowing quite what to do with the store's contents, the family shut the doors. Occasionally, one of Sylvia's grandchildren, George Scheer, would stop by. In 2003, Scheer, Stephanie Sherman, Josh Boyette took up residence in the building and began to slowly carve out spaces amongst the stuff. Greensborian Allen Davis decided to join them in their quest and a community of sorts began to form under the name "Elsewhere." A corner in the front window was designated the Natural History Museum—a nod to the Museum of Jurassic Technology—and displayed anything that related to the history of the space. Since then, Elsewhere Collaborative has welcomed a range of projects and become a site for social interaction.

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