Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture: Hans Ulrich Obrist

Good evening. Good evening and welcome. I'm so happy that you're all here on a Friday night. There is going to be a really fantastic, exciting talk by Hans-Ulrich Obrist. I am very happy that Hans-Ulrich is here. This is the last lecture of the semester. So obviously, next week, lots of presentations and the week after as well. It's been a really exciting semester, and there've been a lot of Rouse visiting artists' talks. And Hans-Ulrich's talk tonight is the last from the Rouse Visiting Artists program that has been really such a great success during the rest of the semester. I think everyone knows Hans-Ulrich's work. And you know that he's the director of this Serpentine Gallery. Everyone knows Hans-Ulrich work so much with the interview format, interviewing artists and architects. But when you read the interviews, and you participate in his work, you realize that the interview is actually also constructing a very specific world. It's not the traditional relationship between the interviewer-interviewee. But that actually, Hans-Ulrich is the person who is really also constantly contributing to the conversation. And the interrelationship between the two is the thing that is made. Somehow recently, people have also started interviewing Hans-Ulrich. And in one of the recent interviews, somebody was asking him about, in a way, some of the motivation for his work. And he mentioned a friend of ours, actually, someone who passed away not so long ago-- Gustav Metzger-- who was a very important, very interesting artist, curator, who died in London maybe a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago. Hans-Ulrich was quoting Gustav's concept of extinction and disappearance. And in a way, when you now hear Hans-Ulrich, you realize that what is really amazing about him is this incredible sense of excitement, of energy, of enthusiasm, and the fact that our relationship to contemporary society requires a certain sense of urgency and a constant redefinition, a constant rethinking. And in that sense, I find his work incredibly exciting, because it's totally about inspiring us on a daily basis to not stop, and to keep going, and to be excited with new possibilities. And I think, in terms of tonight's talk, one of the things that's also very important in relation to a school like the GSD is really about the idea of rethinking or redefining institutions. And that's what he's been doing at the Serpentine Gallery for the past 10 years or so. So we're very delighted to be able to hear his thoughts and his ideas. I also very much hope that Hans-Ulrich will be able to come back soon, because we want to also do a marathon together in the near future. And this is something that we've been discussing and talking about for a long time. So hopefully, this is also the beginning of our plans for the marathon. The last thing I want to say is that, really, what I find also important is the manner in which so much of Hans-Ulrich's work has been at the intersection of art and architecture. And he's done, really, a great deal of work interviewing architects, but actually working and seeing that there is such an incredible fluidity between the world of art and the world of architecture. And for that, I'm really grateful to you, and we're all looking forward to hearing you tonight. Please, welcome Hans-Ulrich Obrist. [APPLAUSE] Thank you so much, Mohsen, for this very kind introduction. And thank you all for being here. I'm excited to be back here, because I haven't been to Harvard since I was here with Rem Koolhaas. I think, it was the moment when he did the shopping research. It was quite a long time ago. And as Mohsen said, we started conversations a couple of years ago about this idea of maybe doing a marathon. Since then, the marathon format has evolved and has morphed and changed. And I think it's now a moment, where it will be more exciting than ever to think about that. And the idea of mapping a city through the format of a marathon is something I'm going to talk about. I want particularly to talk about tonight about new experiments in art and technology, which is something we've been working a lot over the last couple of years at the Serpentine and which is increasingly important in our work. At the same time, also, I will address the theme of extinction and also, of course, the idea of archives, of memory in the digital age. Because as we live in an age of more and more information, in a way, maybe amnesia is somewhat very much at the core of this digital age. And Eric Hobsbaw always told me that we need to protest against forgetting. So that will be another chapter in the talk here tonight. But let's begin with the new experiments in art and technology. I was very inspired by certain experiments from the 1960s. One experiment is John Latham and Barbara Steveni's Artist Placement Group, also called APG, which is a phenomenal initiative the two artists in London developed from the 1860s onwards. And the idea was actually to position artists in society. So the idea would be that every administration, every corporation, every company, every brand, no matter where and when, would have an artist in residence. And they started to do this by placing artists in government, and it led to very extraordinary results. And we felt that it could be interesting to revisit this idea for the 21st century. So we basically started to collaborate with Ben Vickers, an amazing artist, writer, theoretician of technology and appointed him, first of all, curator of digital at the Serpentine. And then Yana Peel, our CEO, and I, two years ago, when our very old friends and new colleagues decided to emphasize more the aspect of technology within the institution, appointed Ben to be our Chief Technology Officer. Because we felt, why should a museum not have a CTO? And that led to many of the projects, of course, which go under the title of NEAT, New Experiments in Art and Technology. And that of course, is a reference to another 1960s idea, which I think, continues to be incredibly inspiring, which is Billy Kluver's EAT, Experiment in Art and Technology. I knew Billy Kluver very well and went to see him and was always very inspired by the way he introduced artists to science and technology and instigated his collaborations with Bell Laboratories. It's actually interesting, because yesterday, I was in New York City on the way here and paid a visit to the legendary Lilian Schwartz, who is now in her 90s. I think she's 91. And she has been incredibly involved in this Bell Laboratory experiment. She was one of the early pioneers of digital art in the late '60s, early '70s. And it was fascinating to hear from her how over years and years, these collaborations between art, science, and technology could really evolve in Bell Laboratories, how also, Bell Laboratories would send her all over the world, and how, in a way, she was really deeply embedded in that organization. It wasn't just a visiting artist. It wasn't just an artist in residence who comes and goes. But the whole idea of this APG and EAT is to embed out more into society. So in a way, these new experiments of art and technology began with these digital commissions which we did. And it's, of course, interestingly inspired also by Marshall McLuhan, who in understanding media, noted the ability of art to anticipate the future social and technological development. "Art," McLuhan wrote, "is an early alarm system, pointing us to new developments in times ahead and allowing us to prepare to cope with the. Art, as a radar environment, takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training." To apply that in an almost daily way within an art institution seemed interesting. So one of the earlier-- I'm just going to show you a few examples of these digital commissions-- is the collaboration of the Cloud Index with the artist James Bridle, who has just written a phenomenal book on technology. He gathered a vast amount of data. It's really an artwork about big data and correlates that data with polling events, for example, the Brexit vote. So it is an ongoing project. You can visit on the site of the Serpentine. Of course, one thing we also realize-- there is a rather simple point-- is that basically, exhibitions have a limited lifespan. They come and go. As Cedric Fries would have said, they have an expiry date. These digital commissions, once they start within the institution-- the same is true for Agnes, which is actually Cecil B. Evans commission-- they all continue to live, in a way, in the institution somehow forever and continue to evolve. I'm going to talk about that more. The new experiments in art and technology leads us out to do something we did here at the Cartier Foundation was with Simon Castets and Julie Boukobza. This is part of the 89plus Project, because we felt it would be interesting also to map what actually the first generation who grew up with digital media of artists would do. So we started a global research project and looked at more than 8,000 artists from all continents, born after 1989. Because of course, Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989. So the first generation actually grew up with these media, and this whole mapping has produced a whole series of exhibitions, including a big research on the filter bubble and how art actually tries to break out of the filter bubble. As Mohsen said, the interview plays a central role in my practice. And it has really been my way of being an eternal student, in a way, because I came into the art world when I was a teenager. I was, like, 16, 17. And I went to see many artists and visited hundreds of studios. That was my school. And then at a certain moment, I understood the art world, and I started to do exhibitions. I did, in '91, my first exhibition in my kitchen. And it happened with Fischli and Weiss and several artists, and it lasted three months, and it had 28 visitors. But it became, subsequently, a rumor. And these very intimate shows, I've continued to do them ever since. Like doing big shows, I always feel the necessity to go back to the kitchen. So every couple of years, I do a house museum exhibition. And I'm delighted that Tatiana Bilbao is here tonight. Because we, of course, collaborated some years ago on a magical experience in the Barragán House in Mexico City, where we invited Pedro Reyes and Fernando Romero and a whole group of people, several artists to visit the Barragán house. And so the Barragán house became, somehow, our kitchen. And so to come back to the interview, because we wonder, what does this all have to do with Vitalik Buterin, who is the inventor of a theorem and one of the key figures in cryptocurrency world? It has to do with the fact that I continue to apply this methodology of initial ignorance and then going into a field. So once I did it with art, I then, in the early '90s, went into architecture and applied again the same methodology. I would just make hundreds of studio visits and visit all the architects of still-alive-then of Team 10. And I would visit a whole series of interviews with Rem Koolhaas, because he told me that he did interviews as well when he began. And so we started to team up and went together to visit his mentors. Venturi, Scott Brown, and [INAUDIBLE].. The Metabolists, of course, which later became a book. And then at a certain moment, I felt it would be important to also-- I don't think we can understand the forces to effective in art and architecture if you don't understand what's happening in science. So I did the same. From the mid-90s onwards, I went to visit hundreds of scientists in their laboratories and would record interviews. And then all of that, of course, has to do with production of reality. Because these conversations are not just conversations for conversation sake, but very often, they are the point of departure of doing something with each other, which is also why in this conversation, my only recurrent question is always about the unrealized project. I'm always asking the person I interview or I have a conversation with what are their unrealized project. And that might seem extremely unoriginal for everybody here who is in the architectural world. Because of course, in the architecture world, the idea of publishing unrealized projects is a very regular thing. But we need to take into account that that's an exception that in all the other worlds, like literature, music, art, we know absolutely nothing about practitioners' unrealised projects. And they never published them, and they never talk about it. So for example, Louise Bourgeois was my friend, and I talked a lot with her for many, many years. It's only towards the very end of her life-- she's almost 100 years old-- that she told me that her dream was to build this little amphitheater. If only we had known, we could have built it. It would have been very easy, right? So the idea to map these unrealized projects is a kind of part of that methodology. And so of course, when we started with these new experiments in art and technology, I again start from a position of wanting to learn and so started to make many visits. And this is what this Vitalik interview here stands for, which is also online, which my first conversation trying to understand Ethereum and trying to understand blockchain. At a certain moment, we felt it would be important to go beyond the idea of just having digital commissions at a certain time. And the question started, how do we actually bring this digital dimension into our shows? How can we make it present in the exhibition space, not just on the side? And one of the first times we did this was when we did the exhibition of Zaha Hadid, of her early paintings and drawings. And Zaha was a very, very good friend. And she was, of course, a trustee of the Serpentine Galleries. Started with Julia Peyton-Jones' pavilion scheme in 2000. It's the only architect to build actually two pavilions. She built our permanent building, which is her first and only commission in central London. We had very regular dialogues. So we are supposed to have lunch with her, and she canceled the lunch very unusually, and she said that she had to prepare for a lecture. And we all must come to this lecture, which was her last lecture, her IRBA lecture, where she really summarized her entire trajectory. So we've entered her lecture that evening, and she started to show all these amazing ink drawings in the lecture, which I had never seen before and, of course, her early paintings, and the whole trajectory from the unbuilt to the built and explained also how actually, many of these ink drawings had to do also with her childhood in Baghdad and her upbringing and studies in Beirut, where she was in close touch with calligraphy. And she made this direct connection because the fluidity of the calligraphy and the fluidity of her later digital architecture, in a way. I texted her the same night, and I said, this is completely extraordinary, and we need to do something with these drawings, with these unseen notebooks and these calligraphies, et cetera. So then we met for lunch the week after. And the extraordinary thing is that all of these drawings-- hundreds and hundreds of notebooks, probably thousands of drawings, I mean, really convoluted drawings-- they were never in the office. She always kept them, in a way, a secret block, as Joseph Beuys would say about his drawings, in her apartment. Some of them in a cupboard, some of them under the bed, so had never been seen. And so we looked at that material and obviously, very tragically, Zaha passed away a few weeks after. And we could never work together on this exhibition, but we felt, then, very important to actually realize this exhibition in her memory. And in that conversation I had with her, which was our last conversation about doing the show with her drawings and her paintings, she also talked about this idea that one could somehow-- because I told her that we wanted to do more digital experiments-- and she talked about this idea that maybe one could actually realize some digital extrapolation of these drawings to even more dimensions. So we then worked with the Google Cultural Institute and realized basically a VR piece based on these paintings and drawings. So visitors could experience both the drawings and the paintings in the show and, at the same time, the VR. The same thing happened again with Christo. So here, our adventure with Christo, which happened this summer in London, both as a physical, build structure and also as a VR experience, which we did with Acute this time, which is a Swedish London-based organization. The director of the Moderna Museet, Daniel Birnbaum, has just left the Moderna Musset to actually be the artistic director of Acute. So he went from a museum to a virtual museum. So the story with Christo was that we invited him to give a talk in London. Crossing the bridge between our two galleries, I asked him my usual question, what's your unrealized project? And it's actually interesting, because Christo was also here in that very space, Mohsen told me, a few years ago, giving a talk. And there is also at Harvard Business School a very interesting lecture one can download about the economic model of how Christo makes all these things happen. Because he obviously invented a model to produce all these projects, which is studied as a business model at Harvard Business School. Anyway, to cut the long story short, we crossed the bridge. And I asked him, what is your unrealized project? And he was talking about this mastaba, this extraordinary shape which he wanted to create, which is a Mesopotamian architectural structure from very, very long time ago, which he wanted to reactivate with barrels. And it's almost like a digital painting also, because, of course, these barrels are mirrored in the lake and changes according to the hours of the day. And he was saying that he wanted to build an enormous mastaba in the desert and then a very big mastaba on a lake, and that was for Lake Michigan. It was canceled there. It wasn't realized. And ever since, he always wanted to find a lake. And then we halted on the bridge, and of course, such a project involves many, many people. Our chairman, Mike Bloomberg, who worked with Christo before on The Gates in New York, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. The mayor of London had to be involved and help us a lot, the borough of Westminster and Yana Peel and I with our team, The Royal Parks, who were our landlord. So it was a big collaboration of all of these stakeholders. The project got realized and again, we wanted it to be also a VR production. And of course, this idea of building a reality is also what we do with our Serpentine pavilions. And we always felt that, in a way, it's difficult to exhibit architecture through models, which doesn't mean that it's difficult to do architectural exhibitions. Because I think there is a very interesting experimental history of architecture, which is actually not enough known, where architects experiment with the medium of the exhibition. So that's relevant, however, we feel the best way of showing architecture is actually to build it. And for this very reason, at the Serpentine, we build every summer on this little piece of lawn a pavilion. This is what Julia started with Zaha Hadid in 2000. And I joined the gallery in 2006, so the first pavilion I was involved with was the Rem Koolhaas, Cecil Balmond, and [INAUDIBLE] pavilion, which is interesting in relation to Mohsen's remarks about the marathon, which was actually, in a way, a conversation architecture. It was really built for Rem and me to have conversations. It was like a speech bubble. So on sunny days, it could go up. But then, like a balloon, you'd pull it back. And also, the excitement was that the architecture could be built, keeping mind that you're going to do these conversations all summer. And that was the first full-time marathon we did. I had invented the format in 2005 in Stuttgart. And that's another thing which I think is interesting which has to do with this idea of when we go into different fields. Because of course, I go into these different fields. From art, I venture into science, architecture, music, literature to learn, and then bring these fields into the world of exhibitions, into the world of art. And then after doing this for a couple of years, I'm then also very regularly invited back into these fields to do things, which keeps helping me to reinvent curating. Because ultimately, each time I'm invited into the literature world, or the theater world, it's a great trigger for me to come up with new formats. So here I am in a theater festival in Stuttgart, and I explained to them that I cannot really stage a theater play, because I'm not a theater director. And they say, but you do these conversations. Why don't we stage them like a play? And why don't we do it as a long duration thing? And then we talked about these plays by certain theater directors which could last for eight to 12 hours, and people come, and then they meet. The might go for dinner, and then they come back-- sort of long duration theater plays. And then we had suddenly the idea that we could actually map a city. And as we know from Oscar Kokoschka, who always said, it's kind of impossible to paint the city. Because how can we make a synthetic image of such a complex thing as a city? And that's something Stefano [INAUDIBLE] also wrote a lot about-- the architect and urbanist-- the possibility of the impossibility of making a synthetic image of a city, probably something like that. And that's almost kind of connected to the possibility of the impossibility of doing a painting in a way as Oscar Kokoschka said. And so in a way, we did this interview, and it was a bit lonely experience. You've got to imagine, I mean, Stuttgart, I'm on the stage for 24 hours. And every hour, another speaker comes on stage, and then they all go for dinner and have a great time. And I sit there and have to do the next one. So it was a bit difficult and also very difficult, at a certain moment, very exhausting. So after 18, 19 hours, there was kind of a crisis. I almost fell asleep. And so in a way, it was a rather torturous experience. We said, with Rem, it would be so much more fun to do this together, like a double act. Because then, we could always play questions. He would ask questions. I would ask questions. And also, we started to make it more dynamic to augment the number of speakers. So we ended up to have 72 speakers over 24 hours. So Rem and I were on stage for 24 hours non-stop. And it became, of course, not the complete portrait of London-- how could it be-- but some form of portrait of London in a structure Rem had designed for that very purpose. We had a delay in the pavilion, so there was basically two pavilions. Zaha Hadid created a small structure to kind of kick the season off, until the pavilion then started with Olafur Eliasson, Cecil Balmond, and Kjetil Thorsen. So here are also this possibility of having artists and architects collaborate, which we think is interesting, because Olafur had been friends with Kjetil from [INAUDIBLE] for a long time. And they designed this structure, which is like a spiral. And of course, it's free admission. So people can use it from super early in the morning until the park closes late at night. And so every year, people find out different ways of using it. It's difficult to predict. Here, the ramp was very popular with the joggers. And then the pavilion also inside, it created an amazing laboratory. Because it was very protected space inside for things to do. A much more open structure with Frank Gehry, which referred to speaker's corner, because of course, the whole idea of free speech is in Kensington Gardens. And then a much more immersive structure by SANNAA, which basically brought the park into the architecture. With Jean Nouvel, it became an homage to Jean Baudrillard, who was his friend. Paul Virilio wrote the essay. But you don't see here that there are all these niches to play chess, to play ping pong becomes a very complex playground. The next year, the opposite, because of course, like with an exhibition space, when you a wide cubed or any kind of other exhibition space, and you organize a series of shows, then the artists are always very aware what other artists have done with it before. And of course, here, it's the same. The architects look very carefully what has happened before, and then don't repeat, and often find another-- in an exhibition space, we would call it a gallery gesture. So here, maybe we can call it a pavilion gesture. And that's of course, Peter Zumthor, the exact opposite by creating a kind of a [INAUDIBLE] almost like a cloister, almost like a monastery, a [INAUDIBLE] kind of situation and a collaboration with a landscape architect Pete Rudolph. We brought them together, because we felt that they could-- you know, that's kind of also what, I think, is a very important aspect of curating. Because I'm often asked, what is curating? It's kind of a difficult notion now, because it's used in such an expanded way. Shop windows are curated, and restaurants are curated. And shopping lists online are curated. So maybe we need a new word at some point. And I kind of like this word of JG Ballard, he taught me, which is junction-making. I now believe that I see my work as a junction-making. And so that's making junctions between works of art in exhibitions, which I continue to do, objects, junctions within objects. But it's more complex than that, because since the 19th century to the 1960s, the history of art is the history of objects. And then we have also the dematerialization of art. So we have non-objects, loosely, parts idea. Then we have quasi-objects, [INAUDIBLE] objects which only gain significance when you interact with them. Timothy Martin talks about hyper-objects, like bigger system, like the weather or climate. Very important in our age are hyper-objects. And then [INAUDIBLE] talks about digital objects. So in a way, a curator could be a junction-maker between objects, non-objects, quasi-objects, hyper-objects, digital objects, and also just a junctiom-maker between people. So here, our job was somehow to bring Peter Zumthor and Pete Rudolph together. Then with Ai Weiwwi and Herzog and De Meuron, another artist-architect collaboration, they decided to dig the first pavilion, which decided to dig into the ground, almost like an archeology of previous pavilions and of previous histories. Because there's other histories which precede the arrival of the pavilion. And then something happened in 2013, where we felt it's important to going to a younger generation. Because the pavilion from the get-go was there. And that's the rule of the game that the architects have never built in the UK. And it's kind of extraordinary how many architects had not built. I mean, Niemeyer had not built until he did the Serpentine pavilion. And many architects had not built for whom it was too late for us to invite them. I would love to invite, for example, Mies, but it was too late. Because Mies, of course, had this amazing scheme for London which was never realized. And so many great architecture [INAUDIBLE] as much as London is such a very global city in a lot of fields, it was for a very long time a very insular context for architecture. Many international architects had never built. Most of these architects we've seen so far have built all over Europe, but not in the UK. It's so fascinating that even Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas, who spent actually 30 or more years in London, lived in London, until they did the Serpentine pavilion, had never built, which seems almost surreal, but also shows the necessity and urgency of the scheme. But then, by 2013, this situation became more international. Also, we had worked with so many pioneering architects who had never built, that we felt it's time to open it up for a younger generation. And Sou Fujimoto was the first younger architect to build a pavilion. One of the things which I haven't mentioned, which is somehow important, is that the pavilions always have a second life. So the idea is that, in terms of sustainability, but also in terms of long duration, the idea is that after London, they go to another place, they go to another city. For example, the Sou Fujimoto pavilion, which now belongs to the Luma Foundation, has been installed in Tirana in collaboration with Edi Rama, who is an artist who now is prime minister. It's a great example for the Artist Placement Group that a country is run by an artist. So the artist Edi Rama runs Albania, and he brought our Sou Fujimoto pavilion. He continues to do exhibitions. I keep seeing exhibitions by Edi Rama, so he's both a practicing artist and the prime minister, which is very much an achievement. So he brought the pavilion of Sou Fujimoto in collaboration with the Luma Foundation to Tirana for three years. So should you be in Tirana, still see it there. Smiljan Radic is a pavilion which is now in Somerset in the Hauser and Wirth project installed on a lawn. Chilean architect with whom we've also collaborated on an exhibition because he is not only an amazing architect, he's also a great collector and archivist of 1960s architecture. He has been archiving [INAUDIBLE] and all the archigram group and Superstudio. There was an exhibition we worked on which was a very nice way of bringing his collection together with my interviews. Because I interviewed all the people he collects, and so we basically did an exhibition with all the voices-- because I have the voice recordings also, not only the transcription-- and then the objects he collected. Anyway, that's the pavilion. Then SelgasCano in 2015. Here, something also to say about this pavilion, because it's the second home. And it's going to go to Los Angeles, actually, in February. So it's going to be installed there. So that's the idea that they have a second and sometimes even a third life. Bjarke Ingels pavilion just opened in Canada in Toronto, where it's installed and where you can see. It opened a few weeks ago. At the same time, it was one of the biggest pavilions, but it was also a potential climbing wall. And that's also what happens with the park nights. We hand over the pavilion every Friday night to an artist, who then can use it as a performative space, as a choreographic space, as a film screening. And during the week, visitors find their own use of the pavilion. Unfortunately, for health and safety reasons, people couldn't climb. But there was always this potential. It was a virtual or potential thing that one could actually climb. And then in 2017, Jana and I started our collaboration. And we felt that it would be important to a next step of openness and inclusivity, so we decided to no longer just invite an architect, but to invite a smaller group of architects to submit proposals every year so that it's a more open process and also, to make it even more open for a younger generation of architects. We also felt that it would be important, because neither Yana nor I come from the architecture world. We come from the art world. We felt it would be important to actually involve architects in this process, particularly when we worked with younger architects, so that they could have a dialogue with each other, but also, in terms of the research. Because we make research all year long and go and see new buildings by young, emerging architects. So it will be interesting to have a bigger group who selects. And so we invited David Adjaye, who is also trustee of the Serpentine, and Richard Rogers, who is a very long-time friend of the gallery, to be with us and with David Glover, the engineer-- it was important also in that group to have an engineer-- and so together with our architecture curator, Amira Gad and the project manager, Julie Burnell, who has managed and organized now 11 pavilions and is a great expert. So that's the group. And we all year long research, bring together dossier. It's a very fascinating process. And that's how we then invited Francis Kere. He told us, in terms of Burkina Faso, it's always around the tree that the gathering happens. It was almost like a situation in the park, where the pavilion was a gathering around the tree. And these gatherings, we wanted them to be not only weakly, but daily, so we invited a lot of activist groups. We handed over the pavilion regularly to activist groups. There was a radical kitchen project, which investigated the future of ecology and food. So that added a whole other layer, in a way, to the programming besides the park nights we had. And so the scheme continues to evolve. And we are very delighted. This year, the pavilion just came down to have the pavilion of Frida Escobedo who already worked with us on a marathon. She had actually designed the marathon we did at the Jumex foundation, which was a marathon in Mexico City on the occasion of the opening of David Chipperfield's Jumex Foundation building. She had designed there the display feature. And the idea was basically to use English roof tiles to create a Mexican [INAUDIBLE] so that there is a breeze during the more and more tropical summer in London. Because of course, Dominique Gonzalez first describes the tropicalization of Paris, the tropicalization of London. And during the heatwave this summer, this was incredibly useful. At the same time, the way she also connected it to the Greenwich meridian in the way the pavilion was aligned. So it was also combining know local materials, Mexican references in a way-- and I'm going to talk about that later-- it's a kind of almost [INAUDIBLE] mondiality idea of combining the local and the global. Also, there were lots of intimate spaces in the pavilion. So you could have bigger gathering space within these niches where people could gather and lots of mirrorings to the ceiling and also the water. So now, back to technology. One of the things we are very interested in also-- because when you think about the goggles in terms of VR, it's still a rather limiting experience. Because you kind of lose people once they have the goggles. They can't see other visitors anymore. And so this whole idea of the exhibition being a medium, where we see something with someone else, for someone else, it's very sad this isolation which happens to the VR goggles. And that's going to be different with AR, with augmented reality, where we no longer only see the virtual part, but we can have mixed reality. We are now working with this idea of having AR projects, so that visitors could actually see the pavilion physically there. But once the pavilion is gone, they could see with AR all the previous pavilions on that then empty piece of land. Because once the pavilion is gone in October, you have an empty piece of lawn in front of the gallery from October to June the next year when the pavilion is again erected. And so we're thinking about applying AR to that. We also think about how to actually create more digital projects related to this pavilion. But one thing which I think is very important is Tim Berners-Lee's quote, "'this is for everyone," which is basically the idea of the world wide web. Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, as I mentioned, in 1989, and that was always his quote. And it's now particularly relevant, because net neutrality, as Tim Berners-Lee himself mentions, is in danger. And he says, we have to fight for net neutrality to keep the internet, to keep the world wide free, at the same velocity for everyone, and not start to have these divisions. That's the map Tim Bernes-Lee made for us for the Serpentine. We ask him to map the world wide web. So it's the world wide web mapped by its inventor. And then if you go back to the pavilion-- this is for everyone-- I think it's very important in our current moment of exacerbated inequality in cities to apply that, not only to the world wide web, but to apply to exhibitions, to apply it also to experience, which is why at the Serpentine, we have free admission. We have 1.2 million visitors every year. And for us, it's very important that everyone is welcome and that there are no obstacles between the viewer, and they can come in whenever they want. And of course, that leads us to an experience I had last year with the pavilion. Because I came back super-early from a trip at 6:00 AM, and I went directly to the office. So the taxi driver assumed I would work there, because no one would go to the Serpentine at 6:00 in the morning. And so he said he always wanted to talk to someone who works at the Serpentine, and he wanted to tell me a story. He wanted to tell me a story of his daughter, because they went on a walk last summer. And all of a sudden, he started running to the pavilion, because the pavilion has no doors. It's open door. You can just walk in. And he said he had to go and fetch the daughter to continue to walk. And he would never ever go to a museum. So I said, why? Because it's free admission. He said, not even with free admission he will go to a museum. So I didn't said why, and then there was a long pause. And he said, because it's not for people like me, which I really thought was very shattering. I think, everything we do needs to exactly in a way go beyond that. Because in a way he told us the story that his daughter had this life-changing experience, and she's now reading architecture books every day, and she wants to become an architect. And that's why he wanted to thank us. and So in a way, it's very for that very reason that this is for everyone. A bit more on the marathon, because I mentioned the marathon in 2006. We had Doris Lessing. It was quite a challenge for Rem and me after 24 hours to face Doris Lessing. And she gave an extraordinary speech about the world on the precipice of extinction, talking about cool stuff and about ecology. And she wrote later in her life these extraordinary sci-fi books, which we should reread which are really very remarkable. The next year, we had Olafur Eliasson's pavilion with Kjetil Thorsen-- [INAUDIBLE] We always involve the architects also in the programming. Because we think one shouldn't separate this idea of content and building that mcuh. It's interesting, we live in this idea of a holistic organization. Holaccuracy-- also more horizontal and holistic. And so Olafur said that he felt that Rem and I had really talked enough, it was so much talking, so he felt we should do something. So that's why we then did the experiment marathon. So we invited 60 artists and practitioners from all over the world to basically come and do an experiment. So John Baldessari came and transformed a glass of water into a glass of wine into a glass of water. And there were lots of other experiments. You can see it online. All these experiments are online-- scientific experiments, architectural experiments. It was experimental. And that kind of made the format more hybrid. Before, it was a public program. It was a talk we had invented. And it has to do also with the idea that in the art and architecture world, we have a long history of using the medium of the exhibition in an innovative way, to invent new rules of the game. Marcel Duchamp once said, we only remember exhibitions which also invent a new display feature. And I think that's also true for architecture. We mostly remember architectural exhibitions when they invent a new device of display. And it's interesting that with conferences, there's always a table, a symposium. There is some microphones, some people talking. There is a stage. There's an audience. It's very repetitive as a format all over the world every day. So we kind of thought we could bring our knowledge about new formats to that world of conferences. But then Olafur and the year after also, with the manifest marathon with Frank Gehry, turned this whole thing again upside down. Because all of a sudden, it was no longer a conference with new rules of the game, but it was also kind of a group show. Because an artist would do performances and happenings. It became a time-based group show. We would give them 50 minutes, and they would do something with these 50 minutes. Vivienne Westwood, in the Frank Gehry manifesto marathon, would read her ecological manifesto with a whole group of people. Or Eric Hobsbawm would read a manifesto against forgetting as a historian. We worked with Eileen Meyers and many poets in the [INAUDIBLE] pavilion on a poetry marathon. Because we felt, if you look at the 20th century, there are so many dialogues between art and poetry. I'm from Zurich, the city of Dada. And I was born in May '68, and this is severe because May '68 arrives with a delay in Zurich, only 1980. But in any case, Zurich is the city of Dada and that a scene over artists and poets. These worlds were together, so we felt it kind of urgent for the 21st century to bring the art world and the poetry world closer. So that was what happened in the [INAUDIBLE] pavilion. Then we had the map marathon. Here, you see the legendary [INAUDIBLE] about artists as mapmakers, architects, mapmakers. And then the extinction marathon with Gustav Metzger, who Mohsen mentioned, he urged us to work on extinction. So we invited Etel Adnan and many other artists, and poets, and activists to work about this idea of extinction and protest against this idea of extinction, to bring things back. Stewart Brand, who invented the Whole Earth Catalog, he is very passionate about deextinction, so bringing extinct species back. So it was a marathon, really, about extinction, deextinction. Etel Adnan talked about the war in terms of the civil war in Lebanon. She talked about war as a form of extinction. Then we had the transformation marathon, which was all about transformation. And here, you see And here you see Heine Muller and Pina Bausch staged by Dominique Gonzalez [INAUDIBLE].. So posthumously. And in the poetry-- in the transformation [INAUDIBLE] and also the [INAUDIBLE],, who made an extraordinary poetry performative poetry reading. So again, you know, it was very much-- it wasn't a conference. It wasn't the group show. It wasn't an exhibition. It's a kind of a hybrid new format, which little by little every year kind of evolved. So then this year we worked on the Work Marathon on the future of work, because of course in the age of AI, a lot of discussion is about this idea that work might disappear, and new work needs to be invented. So a whole debate also about the general basic income. So here you see a discussion between Sharon Gray from ghetto Castro and also Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, the artist and the architect David Adjaye on this idea of the future production of work. Here you see Bernard Stiegler, the philosopher with whom we cooperated this marathon, who has a whole idea about the conditional basic income. So he works with many mayors in France on this idea of applying the logic of the intermittent of spectacle, which is intermittent basic income, which he thinks is more realistic than the general basic income. And the whole idea is again, a production of reality. So the marathon produces a paper which will then be presented to the United Nations at some point next year-- a kind of manifesto. So the idea also that it's not just an event, but that the event produces reality is very important. Here Hito Steyerl, in our guest ghost host machine marathon, where we addressed the theme of AI, which came directly out of our engagement with digital programs, we address questions such as is art changing in the age of AI, but are the emerging relationships between machines and the human spirit, if we actually don't know what consciousness is, how can we qualify intelligence? And also, are we too late to define the ethics of our machines is a kind of a key question. And last but not least, does the future belong to non-human entities? So these were all questions which the marathon addressed. And stay with Hito for a moment. I want to say a few more things about that. It was very interesting because Hito made a talk here where she talked about AI and AS. So she added to the notion of artificial intelligence the idea of artificial stupidity, referring to a more general phenomenon, like the now widespread use of Twitter bots. In our conversation, Hito said, and this is a quote, it was and still is a very popular tool in elections to deploy Twitter armies to sway public opinion and deflect popular hashtags and so on. This is an artificial intelligence of a very, very low grade. It's two or maybe three lines of script. It's nothing very sophisticated at all. Yet the social implication of this kind of artificial stupidity, as I call it, are already monumental in global politics. And of course that is what we can now observe, looking at the news every day. And it's interesting how low grade AI technology like these bots are influencing politics, and that of course, raises a question-- how powerful will far more advanced techniques be in the future? But there's another thing Hito raised which I think is relevant for art and architecture. She basically raised the question of the visible and the invisible, because again it leads back to my childhood in Switzerland, because I, of course grew up there with the work of Paul Klee. There were two artists who brought me to art. I was obsessed by the long thing figures long thin figures of Giacometti and the little paintings and drawings by Paul Klee. And Paul Klee always said that in art we should make the invisible visible. And it's kind of interesting that Hito says that's what an artist can do in the digital age, because in computer technology most algorithms work invisibly in the background. They remain inaccessible in the systems we use daily. But lately there has been an interesting comeback of visuality in machine learning. And that's actually what we did again in the Google Cultural Institute, because we're trying-- inspired by the Bell Laboratory experiments [INAUDIBLE] idea, bringing artists to the Google Cultural Institute and have dialogues between them and engineers, basically AI engineers. So we invited Hito Steyerl, we invited Rachel Rose, we invited Rem Koolhaas, we invited several artists and architects to have these conversations. And Hito had very fascinating conversations about this visible and invisible. And she analyzed that the ways the deep learning algorithms of AI are processing data have never actually been made visible through applications like Deep Dream, in which the process of computerized pattern recognition is visualized in real time. The application shows how the algorithm tries to match animal farms with any given input. And so in a way, Hito says of the aesthetic of such visualization-- and that's another quote from her-- for me, this proves that science has become a subgenre of art history, which I think is an extraordinary idea, right? Science has become a subgenre of art history. I continue the quote. We now have lots of abstract computer patterns that might look like a Paul Klee painting or a Mark Rothko or all sorts of other abstractions that we know from art history. The only difference, I think, is that in current scientific thought, they are perceived as representations of reality, almost like documentary images, whereas in art history, there is a very nuanced understanding of different kinds of abstractions. So this, of course, leads us then directly to the exhibition we have at the moment at the Serpentine which you can still visit until February, which is the collaboration with PR Week. And PR Week says-- and that's maybe a sentence interesting to reflect upon just for a minute-- I don't want to exhibit something to someone, but rather the reverse-- to exhibit someone to something. I don't want to exhibit something to someone but rather the reverse, to exhibit someone to something. So what Pierre did for this exhibition which takes over our entire space. So that puts the new experiment in art and technology center stage. He basically, worked with a laboratory in Kyoto in Japan with somehow mental digital telepathy. So someone would sit at the machine. There is no photography involved, and the images go directly from the brain to the machine. So Pierre would give the scientists images of human intelligence, machine intelligence, animal intelligence, and then these images would be contemplated by the scientists. It would be-- go to the machine, and the machine, of course, has millions and millions of images, for example. And the study looks at an image of a dog, then the machine has millions and millions of images of dogs, and tries to search for that image he thinks of or looks at. And that's what basically Pierre shows us. It is amazing. They're like chimeras. It is an amazing search process, and I think it's an extraordinary way of making visible the invisible of AI. It also brings Pierre back to the moving image, because of course Pierre, in a similar way like many artists of his generation, worked with moving image in the 1990s. And he realized at a certain moment that he wanted to go beyond that, because the loop is very limiting, because then it repeats. And he started to make more organic systems. Now the exhibition as a kind of a living system was interesting for him. So he did that in Moon Star and in Castle, in these two big installations where there will be animals, there will be cells, there will be living organisms. And he thought he might never come back through the moving image because it's the prison of the loop. And what happens here is the return to the moving image, because this is basically never repeating. It's basically always changing. There's also a feedback loop. You have in the exhibition 1,000 flies, so you never see the show on your own. The flies are with you. And at the same time, you also have the sensors so that your presence in the exhibition changes the images. The flies change the images. So it's a complex dynamic system with feedback loop, and the exhibition is alive. Rachel Rose, another artist who worked with us on this AI project with Google-- she thinks a lot about the questions posed by AI and employs computer technology in the creation of her works. And the films create for the view and expense of materiality through the moving image. So she uses collaging and layering of the material to manipulate sound and image, and the editing process is the most important aspect of her work. So she talks about decision making in the work, and as any of us who has ever been involved in the editing of a film know, there are very few situations in life where we have to make more decisions at any moment than we edit a film. So for Rachel, the artistic process does not follow a rational pattern. She explained this in conversations we had with the engineer Kendrick McDowell. In a very similar way that [INAUDIBLE] brought together artist and engineers from Berlin, we would have Rachel and Kendrick, have not only a one off dialogue, but they are now close as friends and spend, for many years already now, dialogues together. And that, of course, it's only the beginning. These experiments are in their infancy, and they're going to produce things together. And it's interesting that Rachel said that it's distinctively different, the decision making she does from machine learning, because each decision takes this core feeling that comes from a human being which has to do with empathy, which has to do with communication, which has to do with questions about our own mortality, that only a human could ever ask. And then we have Ian Chang, yet another experiment in art and technology which happened this spring. Of course, many of you might have seen the emissaries which were at MOMA PS1, which is a series set in a fictional post apocalyptic world you see here of flora and fauna, in which AI driven animals and creatures explore the landscapes and interact with each other. It uses very advanced graphics, but has been programmed with a lot of glitches and imperfections which imparts a futuristic, and also, as you can see here, very anachronistic atmosphere at the same time. The trilogy of these emissaries charts a history of consciousness and asks again, again, that question-- what is a simulation? But then, something new happened in the Serpentine show. In the second part of the show where Ian launched Bob and I think it's the first time that this has happened in our gallery, and I think one of the first times in the world that an artwork was exhibited with a nervous system. And that's kind of interesting. I was thinking a lot about architecture. Now could that be a building with a nervous system? So Bob is a character living at the Serpentine. Bob stands for bag of beliefs. It's not smart, but it's sentiment. And unlike the emissaries which we just saw before, Bob is aware of you as a viewer, and can interact with you. And you may, in turn, influence its emotional life and what Bob believes. So it's in a way not interactive art, and that's also very interesting, when one reads the visitor book-- the book where visitors write their comments, which we have as an analog book but also digitally. And when you read all these comments about the exhibition, something is categorically different from all the other shows we've ever done, because, for example, somebody wrote, Bob was really mad at me. And somebody wrote Bob was so nice to me I came back the next day. And somebody wrote I came all the way from Birmingham and I stayed for one hour and Bob ignored me. So-- Bob. Yeah then also this other thing happened. [INAUDIBLE],, Pete and I got this phone call, like, in the middle of the night at some point that actually from the parks, because Bob was programmed to be awake from 10:00 AM to 6 PM, and then sleep at night. And we got a phone call that one day at 3:00 AM suddenly the gallery had lit up, and Bob had woken up. So Bob could become a belief system over time, that you trust Bob to believe things for you. And then you need to see from that beliefs orientation towards reality, you just talked to Bob and Bob tells you. And so, in a way, it could actually very much change how we experience moving image at home, but also in public space, because you could imagine such works to be installed in public space and encounter them everyday again and again. Maybe it's in a way also not deep because that would be absolute, because there will always continue to be you know physical objects as wonderful public artworks, but he could be one possibility of the future of public art. So here, Bob is clearly in its infancy. I think one of the things which is also interesting is the aspect of this sort of social dimension. Ian often mentioned the social dimension which is not present in a lot of AI projects. And particularly he worked with the game inventor Evans on a project how he could introduce more a social dimension into AI, and of course leads us back to what Hito Steyerl also said. Anyway, that's enough about Bob, the house that Bob built. Then we move to Sondra Perry, another experiment with the digital. It's Typhoon in the Zaha space, and Sondra explores the intersection of black identity, of digital culture and power structure through video media installation and also performances. Now, one thing which is very interesting is that she wants all her works-- and here you see the avatars, the very unusual way you know of how the visitors actually encounter the avatars-- Sondra wants all her work to be open source. So she wants all the work to be there for everyone is deeply committed to net neutrality, and that years of collective production action. She uses open source to edit her work, to lease it digitally for use in galleries and classrooms, and makes all the videos available free online. So this idea of open access is back, which we mentioned earlier-- the use of digital tools and materials ranging from blue screen technology and 3D avatars to found footage from the internet, and reflects on these modes of representation and obstruction of black identity and the media. Here a quote from Sondra-- I'm interested in thinking about how blackness shifts, morphs, and embodies technology to combat oppression and surveillance throughout the diaspora. Blackness is agile. At this exhibition, again, similarly to the Pavilion, all our shows tool and continue to evolve. And this show went to the ICA in Miami at this very moment, at the Westbau in Zurich. Another exhibition I wanted to mention, which I thought was interesting in relation to our new experiment in art and technology, is the exhibition with Arthur Jafa. Many of you might have seen the legendary film, Love is the Message. The Message is Death. If not, it's a very urgent film to see. I met Arthur Jafa in the early 2000s, when we did a biennale in Seoul. He then went into the film world, and music. He's done a lot of music, video clips, worked with Solange, with Jay Z, but more recently came back after many years into the art world through a Hammer triennial with his amazing Atlas. And we then invited him to do a show at the Serpentine. It's-- one of the things that's very interesting is that he somehow rejected this idea of a solo show. He said we need a new generosity for the 21st century. So that's another thing which I believe a lot in, that we need more generosity. And so he said, rather than exhibiting himself, he wanted his exhibition to be a segue into other people's practices. So one thing-- being a Swiss photographer from the 60s who has documented music in an extraordinary way, and he was very upset that she had not more visibility. So here we have the protest against forgetting. But then, there are interesting miscellaneous, who is a, for him, visionary musician who lived in Florida and whose work was only visible-- his performances were only visible on YouTube. So here he brings the practice from YouTube into the museum space, and all of a sudden creates a whole other visibility for the practice. It's the same for Frida Orupebo, who is a Norwegian artist who was very well known for her collages on Instagram, but had never exhibited this collages in a museum. So Arthur Jafa used the Serpentine show as a segue into this practice and throughout the practice. So this idea of leading us to practices we otherwise wouldn't see. But he wanted his film, Love is the Message, to be shown in many neighborhoods in London and [INAUDIBLE] following this idea that we cannot just wait until people come to the Serpentine, but we need to go-- it goes back to the taxi driver story in a way. And that of course is also Do It. Do It is a project which we started with Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier in the early 90s. And it's an exhibition which has been traveling. The idea was always to do a show which travels more than the Family of Man, and so it's been to 169 cities so far. But the interesting thing for us was that it's not an exhibition which is about being shipped and packaged from one city to the next, which is kind of homogenized globalization, but it's an exhibition which continues to evolve from place to place. I feel a lot when we come with an exhibition to a place, we should not just impose this exhibition but we should listen to the city where the exhibition goes. In a similar way, the Marathon is also all about listening, no? The 20th century was a lot about manifestos of the 21st century. As [INAUDIBLE] always says, should be also about listening. And so Do It listens. And so wherever this exhibition goes, it's about instructions and how-to manuals. So artists give recipes, instructions and the works can be realized like musical scores that can be interpreted. And of course there's a very famous history, Western history, from conceptual art, from fluxus, and from choreography like here on Anna Halperin of instruction art. Felix Gonzalez Torres is a great example. He wrote all these amazing instructions here. How you have a certain amount of locally wrapped candies placed in a corner, then visitors can take them away, and this piece is interpreted from every city differently. Or here, Amalia Pica, Michelangelo Pistoletto, an instruction of what you can do with newspaper. Sphere, which [INAUDIBLE] the museum, Yoko Ono's Wish Tree. All this is instruction art. But we realized-- Jerome Bel choreography-- we realized that actually, you had this idea of instruction art in many different parts of the world. There's a lot a history of instruction art. So wherever the show goes, we bring in local artists, and we have so far 500 artists have written in instruction. And through a program in New York City, the show has now become part of the curriculum. So the idea was asked to carry it into schools So actually, in schools, people can just do it and realize. Very open source, because people can just realize this instruction. And-- I mean, 169 other ones we know of. There are many versions we will never have heard about, because people just do it. And the same is for Take Me I'm Yours, another exhibition where we try to invent a new rule of the game to disseminate art and to have generosity. So here the idea is that everybody can basically take the exhibition home. So all the things you usually cannot do in a museum-- to touch, to take it away. So we don't have the time to go into detail, but you see, the overall idea that Hans-Peter Feldmann created a room with many images. Everyday visitors take the images away, and then it's a refill at night. The next day it's full again. Or here, the batches of Louis Ciuntani inserted in a sculpture at Villa Medici. And this show also has been traveling for more than 20 years the stamps of [INAUDIBLE],, where visitors can stamp and make their own stamp drawing. So basically a visitor leaves the exhibition-- there's a bag at the beginning, which Christian Boltanksi designed, the artist-- and the visitor leaves the exhibition with an entire exhibition in their bag and can then install it in their home. So this exhibition has happened, in that sense, not only in many, many museums, but it's happened in hundreds of thousands of homes all over the world. Again, from city to city, grows. We invite local artists to join. Here you have Fluxus artist Alison Knowles and she invented the rules of the game. She says actually she doesn't want visitors to take an object away. She wants them to bring an object. So she invites the visitors of her local community to bring in red objects. So the result is that the museum, by the end of the show, is filled with red objects. And all of that-- every single thing I've said tonight has to do with a Édouard Glissant. So I wanted to kind of towards the end of the talk talk a little bit more about Édouard Glissant, who was my mentor, and I read him every morning, 15 minutes when I wake up. And I kind of believe in this idea of rituals, that we need to introduce new rituals. Something Tarkovsky once said. So I, for example, started this club with the urbanist Markus Miessen and Shurmon Basar called the Brutally Early Club, which is a ritual that we have breakfasts at 6:00, 7:00 in the morning. And we had one actually here this morning with Anna [INAUDIBLE] and her class. So the idea is to do Brutally Early Clubs in different cities. And the idea came because we realized that improvisation is really difficult. You know, when you always have to plan when you see your friends, and meetings weeks in advance, but it's so wonderful when you can just say, let's meet tomorrow. But the only way to do this is to do it at 6:00 in the morning, because no one can say that they have prior schedule, right? So in a way, that was-- and it was also a form of urbanism, because of course, the Brutally Early Club was a homeless club, and so it happens in coffee shops, which are open at 6:00. And at the beginning, was kind of like the Kitchen Show. It was a sort of a failure, because only three or four people showed up. But then the rumor spread. Like often with my projects, it has to do with rumors. And then because of the rumors, more and more people came. And then it became very strange, you see, because people go to a coffee shop, and the coffee shop didn't know about it. You just go there. And then suddenly 200 people would show up. So there's a very confusing situation. But then one evening, we were in the company of these two artists in London, very young artists-- Josh Bitelli and Felix Melia, a part of the 89 Plus project there in the mid-20s. And they said, you know, this is really a mistake because London is so dull at 6:00 AM, but it's so exciting what you see in the city at 3:00 AM. So I said, OMG. And then they thought, this could be the name of the club. We call it OM 3AM. And that was the next step. It became more difficult, you see, because we had to find venues open at 3:00 AM, and that's much more difficult, and led to a whole other series of urban discoveries. And there we invented the rule of the game-- that we would always do a world premiere of a movie. So for example, outside London, there is, on the highway, there's a stop where all the lorries and tourist vans stop. This is a huge park of lorries and tourist buses at night. And there is a 24-hour coffee shop. So we went there and projected a movie on one of the parked buses. We did one in the pedestrian foot tunnel which exists in London. It's a very strange, long tunnel. Also one in the Hilton in Heathrow, J.G. Ballard's favorite hotel. And so the idea became a kind of a way of mapping the city. And also very interesting, the only coffee shop open at King's Cross St. Pancras, which is a coffee shop for stranded travelers, who somehow have to wait for the first train in the morning. So that's OM 3AM. And one of these rituals is that I read 15 minutes of Édouard Glissant every morning. Now, the beginning of my work in Édouard Glissant, it was really when I met Alighiero Boetti, and he told me about this idea that there could be a different form of globalization. And I think one of the big stories of our time is that we live in a world of extreme globalization. It's certainly not the first time the world expands its globalization. There was globalization already in the Roman Empire. And there have been lots of moments of globalization. But this is without a doubt the most extreme, if not most violent, moment of globalization the world has ever experienced, fueled of course by technology. And that leads to all kinds of things. It leads, of course, to extinction. It leads to the disappearance of many things, as discussed before on numerous occasions. Languages disappear, species disappear. Elizabeth Kolbert says we are in the middle, already, of the age of mass extinction, number six. And our own species is threatened by extinction. That's one thing Glissant says we need to resist. We need to fight extinction every day, and maintain diversity, and avoid the things disappear. At the same time, what makes Glissant so relevant is that he understood very early on that actually-- he understood that there will be a backlash, there'd be a counter reaction, to this globalization, which will be terrifying, which we are experiencing now with new forms of localism, new forms of protectionism, new forms of nationalism, new forms of racism-- which we can observe in so many countries all over the world. Which of course, Édouard Glissant said need to be resisted vehemently. So he said both of these things have to be resisted. And we need to find what he calls Mondialité, a kind of a global dialogue which produces difference. And that's kind of-- everything I do is an application of that. So whenever I wake up in the morning, I think, how can I contribute? How can the shows contribute to this idea of Mondialité? So if you think about do it, that's a very global project. It would not have been possible without technology, because we by email, and-- these instructions are sent all over the world, they're translated, they are interpreted it has a lot to do with embracing the possibilities a global dialogue gives us. At the same time, it has it involves a local research each time. It resists the homogenization. It's not a packaged exhibition which will travel around the world. It's each time locally produced, and it involves local practitioners and establishes, each time, bridges. And Glissant, of course, I mean I can only urge you, for those of you haven't read him, to read him because it's a transformative experience. And more has now been translated. Of course, his early writings-- his La Lezarde, it's in English called The Ripening, from '59, where he looked into Creolization, the blend of languages and cultures as a decisive characteristic of Antillian identity. He came from Martinique, and his native Creole was formed from a combination of the languages of the French colonial rulers and the African slaves and contains elements of both. But, and that's very important, is itself something independent, unexpectedly new, and incredibly important. So it's a celebration of Creolizaton is the entire work of Glissant. But also an emphasis of what you can see here in the drawing of the archipelago because the Antillian archipelago geography is important for Glissantian thought, because they are an island group that has no center. As you can see here, it consists of a string of different islands and cultures. The exchange that takes place between these islands allows each to preserve its own identity. Here, a quote from Glissant. "The American archipelagos are extremely important because it was in these islands that the idea of Creolization, that is the blend of cultures, was the most brilliantly fulfilled. Continents reject mixings. Whereas archipelagic thought makes it possible to say that neither each person's identity, nor the collective identity, are fixed and established once and for all. I can change, through the exchange with the other, without losing or diluting my sense of self. And it is archipelagic thought that teaches us this." End of quote. And I think this idea that we can change in the exchange with the other, without having any fear of losing our identity, but on the contrary creating a more complex identity, there could be nothing more urgent for the 21st century. Now what makes this sound so interesting is that these ideas of the archipelago, there is also opacity-- that is, you know, of course the idea of Creolization-- that he actually wanted to go beyond this idea of only theorizing them and writing about them. But he wanted to produce reality. So he was involved, with Frantz Fanon, very much in activism, in the post-colonial struggle. And then in 1967, in addition to the politics, he also founded the Instiut Martinique D'étude, which is a school that influenced an entire epoch. So he wanted to build a museum on Martinique. And these plans were never realized. It came very close to a realization, but it's very interesting. Today, if you think about the future of the museum from art or from an architecture point of view, because it was very advanced also in designing the museum, to actually use this repository of visionary ideas he put together. So he basically wanted to put together a historical and comparative encyclopedia of the arts of the Americas, where the archipelago, which you see here-- the Caribbean, the archipelago-- would serve as a model. He imagined a museum, not as a continent, but as an archipelago. Which would actually house, not a synthesis-- because he says often museums want a synthesis. He says the synthesis serves to standardize. So instead of a synthesis, he wanted a network of interrelationships between various traditions and perspectives. So the museum would not illustrate previously established findings, but function as an active laboratory. It's not a recapitulation of something which existed in an obvious way. It's the quest for something we don't know yet. He wanted to bring the world into contact with the world. He wanted to bring some of the world's places into contact with other of the world's places. To quote him, "we must multiply the number of worlds inside the museum." So we felt that it's urgent to do an exhibition with Asad Raza, to basically realize these unrealized projects for Glissant, and at least bring it back to life. So we realized an exhibition initially at the Villa Empain. Etel Adnan, you know, many of the artists of his generation who he was friends with or acquainted with. Walter Price, who is a younger artist inspired by him. Steve McQueen, the artist and film director, has a homage to Glissant. Boyd, and then Manthia Diawara, the filmmaker who accompanied Glissant on a boat journey to Martinique. So they went on a boat and it's a very long historic interview, which is the film, The Raqs Media Collective. And then of course, artists from Glissant's generation with whom he worked on the museum. Like Antonio Segui, or Wilfredo Lam or Matta. Here you see Matta on the right and Wilfredo Lamb. These are artists of Glissant's generation who were all very invested in this idea of a museum of the Americas, of Glissant's Mondialité museum. Many of the manuscripts. And of course we were interested in also how one can actually make an archive alive. So together with [INAUDIBLE] we used my archive, because I always film. And you know also record the voices of these interviews I have. So I have an archive of about 4,000 hours. And it was very inspired by, in Chicago, is very inspired by this idea of this amazing radio archive of Studs Terkel. Studs Terkel was the greatest art historian of the United States. And he had 10,000 hours. And he just told me to not stop. And he also told me, in a way, to go beyond this idea of only doing interviews once. He said we should speak to people again and again. And so I have about 50 hours of Édouard Glissant. And so we thought, to bring this archive exhibition alive, we did a choreography. So whenever you enter the room, you entering the room would activate the voice of Glissant, and tell you a story. And then you'd have a story in the next room. Here, Phillipe Parveno's map of archipelago. Simone Fattal and Walter Price. And Sylvie Glissant, Édouard's partner, the artist, with whom we discussed, of course, also possibilities of not bringing this exhibition to Martinique, because as I said I never tour shows. But thinking about how an evolution of this show could actually happen in Martinique. And then something really fascinating happened because Gabriela Rangel, the director of the Americas Society in New York-- and you can still see this show until the 1st of January, should you be in New York City. At the Americas Society. She invited us to bring the exhibition to New York. And we of course explained that the Glissantian idea has to be that the show evolves. So my idea was that we involve Glissant's artist family in New York City. And he, of course, was very good friends with Chuck Whitten-- the late Chuck Whitten, the amazing painter. He did drawings here in the background. And he was friends with also the amazing Melvin Edwards. And so we wanted to bring in his New York artist friends into the exhibition. But then the amazing thing happened, that actually Gabriella said-- if you really take seriously this show, it needs to change completely. You know? It's not just a small change. And she came up with this epiphany to combine Glissant with Lydia Cabrera. And the fascinating thing is that Cabrera is a very preeminent scholar of Afro Cuban culture and religion, relocating from Havana to Paris in the '30s, only then to return to Havana due to rising fascism. She reflected on her experience in Paris, saying, "I always say that I discovered Cuba on the shores of the Seine." And after the Cuban Revolution, she was forced to live in exile between Miami and Madrid. And continued the essential work recording the traditions and languages of the Aruba and Bantu cultures that continued to grow in the Americas, complicating a nationalist identity that worked to exclude those of the African diaspora. So it's super connected to Glissant, because she took a very anti-nationalistic approach, and said it's important to create visibility and memory for these Aruba and Bantu cultures in Cuba. She also, interestingly enough, wanted with her legacy to provide a critical alternative to the writings of her brother-in-law, the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, and his concept of transculturation, a term he employed to critique the colonial narrative of progress found in the anthropological jargon of the period, which suggests that colonized cultures only assimilated and that this was beneficial. So Ortiz's concept of transculturation expands the consideration of cultural transitions to include what is lost through the contact. So in a way, it connects to Creolization of Glissant. Because it suggests that cultures should not be seen as ahistorical entities, as they are in Continental thought. But in a constant act of convergence of this adjustment, of readjustment. And so Cabrera took that and expanded the notion of transculturation, making, I think, through our own spectatorship, we are never objective diagnosticians, but always participants. So she wrote this amazing book, Lydia Cabrera, called Afro-Cuban Tales, which you can find in English. Because she is even less translated than Glissant. So this show is also trying, in terms of production of reality, to get more translations under way. Afro-Cuban Tales is one of the very few of her books translated into English. And you have details like tobacco guitars and Ave Marias, which emphasize the cultural practice in these stories. Actually, that they do not represent a historical culture that can be used to adorn the reach of a dominant culture, which is of course the modernist appropriation of African artifacts, which she criticizes. But it's something very different. The stories preempt the idea that these aspects could be fully subsumed by maintaining the difference and opacity of Afro-Cuban languages and Yoruba and Bantu cultures, showing that these cultures are constantly evolving and growing without losing their singularity. In a way her whole oeuvre is also about resisting the extinction of these cultures. It's an act of solidarity in which Cabrera's selection of details refers to the transculturation caused by Spanish colonialism and the plantation system, forcing us to see how Spanish colonization has altered this culture. So like Glissant, she does not dissect these cultures, but allows their customs and habits to stand between the reader and their understanding. And that's her masterpiece, El Monte. For those of you who read Spanish, it's a very urgent book, El Monte. And it is a scandal that this book has never been translated into English. So also, her work acts as an archive of the plurality of Cuban culture. So it's important that for her, these are not transcriptions. And this now interesting, of course, for me in relation to the Interview Project, because these are not transcriptions. But, you know, transpositions. So for her, it's not about, in a way, something that exists in a time outside of our own. So the transpositions preserve an integral part of oral storytelling. The ability to change a mouth to remain fluid with each performance according to the audience. So that it isn't-- that's, of course, again, Glissant. You know, it's what he describes for his museum, that it doesn't freeze. Anyway, one could go on hours and hours about that. Because I have now become very obsessed by Lydia Cabrera. And the amazing thing is that really this adventure was that basically Cabrera [INAUDIBLE] gave us a new toolbox. And I shall now soon introduce the ritual of reading every morning 15 minutes of Lydia Cabrera. Now also, you have here, of course, artists who were added to the exhibition who connect to Cabrera. For example, Tania Bruguera, who was showing a piece from '98 called [INAUDIBLE],, Displacement. And that's an early performance, where she appropriated Nkisi Nkonde, a power figure of the Congo people of the modern day Republic of Congo, as a metaphor for the unfulfilled social promises of the Cuban revolution. So in a way, the exhibition doubled, and it will be very interesting now to see how the tour, in a Glissantian way, will continue to evolve. Because of course, we want to bring it to Paris, because that's the exile of both Glissant and Lydia Cabrera. We want to bring it to Miami, because that's where Cabrera lived. And we want to do something with Martinique, where Glissant was born and spent so much time of his life. So very last, but not least-- brings us back to the architecture world. Another exhibition which kind of looks at this idea of archives-- because I've always been very obsessed by archives, in terms of the protest against forgetting. I'm working also on an archive project in Chicago with the artist Joseph Grigely, which is a kind of an evolving archive which tries to establish many connections between archives. It's kind of an inter-archive project. But one example for how we can make an exhibition out of an archive is the Lucius Burckhard and Cedric Price show for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014 that I curated in the Swiss pavilion. Because of course, the problem when you have archives in exhibition, is that there is very often a lack of embodiment. I mean, with Glissant, we tried to do this with the voice, to sort of somehow create an embodiment through this presence of the voice. But in a way, it was even more complex with this show of Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price, because I wanted to celebrate in the Architecture Biennale, these two visionaries who somehow changed architecture without creating buildings. Lucius Burckhardt was a sociologist a teacher of health serfdom of all an extremely influential French pedagogue in Switzerland he's also the inventor of a new scientific discipline called Strollology, which became a university discipline in Kassel. And he's very beautiful, because it's the science of going on a walk, which he made into a university discipline. And the faculty of Kassel accepted it to become a discipline. And I think every university should have a Professor of Strollology. Now ultimately, Cedric Price of course needs no introduction. I, similarly to Glissant, had a very intense friendship and dialogue with Cedric Price, because he wasn't really comfortable towards the end of his life to exhibit in the architecture world, because he felt very antagonistic to the architecture world. But he was very comfortable showing in the art world. So we did many exhibitions together. And of course, the fun part was a big inspiration for me. You know, I was always somehow thinking what could be the Fun Palace for our time, an interdisciplinary institution. You can also think the marathon is a kind of a sketch of what could happen in a Fun Palace every day. And so I thought it would be interesting to make an experiment in the Swiss pavilion, to kind of celebrate the archives of these two visionaries. You know, it's very difficult to make them visible. Because there are no buildings. And yet it would be interesting to have a more embodied presence than a book. So we brought the archives together. We worked as the archives of Cedric in Canada at the CCI in Montreal with the [INAUDIBLE],, and also we worked with the Lucius Burckhardt archive in Basel. And I kind of brought together a group of practitioners to solve this conundrum. You know, how can we do an archive exhibition which is not boring, which is kind of difficult. And so Herzog de Meuron, of course, because Lucius Burckhardt was their teacher. They were also the first architects I met when I was 17 in Switzerland as a teenager. So we invited Herzog de Meuron, we invited also Atelier Bow-Wow. We invited Liam Gillick and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster who you see here. They did the title. So basically, Liam did the Palazzo Fun Palace and Dominique, the neon for the show. Atelier Bow-Wow revisited the aviary of Cedric Price. Because Cedric Price designed, of course, the aviary with Newby and Snowdon in the London Zoo. It's an only partially realized project, because the aviary moves in the wind. But what Cedric, as he told me, really wanted is that the aviary could actually fly out of the zoo, according to the moods of the birds, so that they would not be imprisoned in the zoo. And that's exactly what Atelier Bow-Wow did. They did an open aviary, so the birds are actually not in the aviary. The birds were in the trees. And then, we invited also Philippe Parreno. We invited Asad. So the idea of us to bring artists and architects together. And I always believe that-- I kind of come from Vasari. Because my very first book on art I read was The Lives of the Artists and The Lives of the Architects of Vasari. So for me, architecture and art was never really separated, because Vasari kept it together. And when I started to teach, my first kind of teaching job was in Venice in 2000. I realized that my friend Stefano Boeri was also teaching there. We made this experiment, which was incredibly exciting, which I think should be repeated, which is that we basically had a giant class. Because I was teaching the art class and curating class. And Stefano had an architecture class. And we just combined the two classes. And the architects would follow my art courses and the artists would follow Stefano's architecture courses. And more and more of the students and the participants in these seminars met, and actually new offices were born. The artists and architects would have offices together. So this is an example of a curated team. You know, we brought the team together. So Herzog de Meuron, Bow-Wow, Philippe Parreno, the artist Philip Parreno has experimented in an extraordinary way for now 30 years with the medium of the exhibition. He has also created exhibitions as organic systems. He's just done a show at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, where bacterias activate the exhibition. So the exhibition is alive. And he has created these blinds for us here, so that basically we could just push a button and then the space would go dark. And then we could push a button and the space would again-- so we'll be completely flexible and could project and then not project. And then we had this epiphany. That was really the main epiphany, because Tino Sehgal was also invited to be part of the team. And he, of course, works with live art and brings his choreographic live art pieces into the exhibition. But not as performances, because performance has a duration, like from six to seven. Like my lecture, which is, I promise you, soon going to end. Has a limited duration. However, Tino makes live art, which does not have a performance beginning and end. But it has opening hours. So the live art piece is there from 10:00 in the morning to 6:00 at night, with the difference that then this culture stays in the museum and the live art piece goes home and comes back the next morning. So Tino was invited to choreograph the show. And so we were in the library in Basel looking at the Lucius Burckhardt thing. And we sat there with Tino Sehgal and Herzog de Meuron and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe, and all of a sudden, the librarians brought us documents on a trolley. And we thought, wow this is the display feature. Duchamp had the callbacks in the Surrealist show that made the Surrealist show very memorable. We said our display, our callbacks will be the trolleys. Then Tino came up with his choreographic idea. Herzog de Meuron helped with this idea of creating the archive, and shelving the archive and creating a space. And Tino helped us with choreographing that space. And basically, the trolleys were really the joint idea. The group had this idea. And Tino created a choreography with the trolley, so when you arrived in the morning, the space was completely empty. The only thing you had was the Fun Palace. And we needed to make a replica of the Fun Palace, because the original was a problem for the landlords, that it would be moved. So then a replica was built and the idea was that we worked with participants, with lots of PhD students-- about 100 over the six months of the show, who had either an interest in Lucius Burckhardt or in Cedric Price. And there would always be many of these PhD students present in the pavilion. And once visitors arrived, they would wheel out trolleys and start conversations with the visitors. So it wasn't like that they would explain it, but they would engage with them in an explanation. And they would have a lot of knowledge and could. And the visitors could-- the documents for all facsimiles, so visitors could touch them, could move them around. And it became a conversation piece. And sometimes the space was jam packed with many, many trolleys. And of course the idea was also that for these young architects, these PhD students, it became a kind of a workshop all summer. Many people met each other. It was like an ongoing conversation piece. Permanently different documents being brought out from the archive. All of a sudden the space would go dark. It was scripted and choreographed. And then we would have films from my archive, from my interviews with Cedric, from Lucius Burckhardt, who I've also interviewed. I went on many walks with him. The projectors would be on the trolleys. So the trolleys served as a display feature also for the video projectors. And then we had from Koo Jeong-a, to Carsten Holler, many artists doing works in the park. Now, more recently this led to a project in New York. Which has a lot to do with that Venice project, which was the prelude The Shed. Because I'm working as the senior artistic advisor with the CEO Alex Poots, with whom I've worked a lot in Manchester. Because that was actually a thing-- because we couldn't talk about everything tonight, it's another lecture, which is to lecture about live art. Which, I've worked a lot on live art exhibitions over the last 10 years, like operas. And a lot of these exhibitions, of course, needed to happen outside the museum space. Because we need an opera, we need a different forms of spaces. And so lots of these collaborations happen with Alex Poots in the Manchester International Festival. And so then Alex moved to New York and became CEO of The Shed and we continued this collaboration down. And our first joint project was this prelude of The Shed where we commissioned the architect Kunlé Adeyemi in close dialogue with Tino Sehgal to develop a space which was completely flexible, where every day different constellations could happen. A choreography could lead to a lecture. The lecture would lead to a rap concert. And you know that's why we had so many different protagonists, from Azalea Banks to Asad Raza, to Tino, of course, to Arca, to Abra, to Kunlé the architect. Very important also, Bill Forsythe, who is celebrated at the moment here in an amazing exhibition I saw this morning at the ICA. So the choreographer Bill Forsythe created a new piece. And so you see here [INAUDIBLE] inside their chairs and then [INAUDIBLE] actually become a kind of a choreography. And then it's Flex. And Bill Forsythe did dance performances. And then all of a sudden, within a nanosecond, the space closed and we did a talk. So for example, a conversation with Yuk Hui and Nora Khan. And Shuddhabarata Sengupta from Raqs Media and Wolf Singer addressing the question how Western modernity is still marked by regimes of separation that have actually produced binary categories. There is nature, there is culture, there is body, there is spirit, there is the secular, there is the spiritual. And of course, all of this is about going beyond these binaries, and beyond this dualism. So we could theorize it, and at the same time practice it. In a way, that's of course very inspired by Cedric's idea of the Fun Palace. Last but not least, I wanted to show you a few images from the first exhibition I curated online. Because I was always resisting social media, because I didn't know what to do with it. And then I was once in the house of Umberto Eco in Milano, in his amazing library. Has a lot to do with archive. You know my obsession for archives. And it was an amazing archive of all the libraries of the different books he wrote, and there was a room there only he had the key. It was actually very uncanny. He had this big key as we talk-- In The Name of the Rose, and then he opened the room, and we entered this room. It's all his rare books there. And at the end of the visit, he looked at me and he said, there is a huge problem in the world. And that shows that these conversations are often producing reality, because he said, you have to do something about it. He said, I'm very old. But your generation has to do something, because calligraphy disappears. Handwriting disappears. People no longer draw and doodle. And what will happen to civilisation when calligraphy and handwriting disappears? And then a week later, I was with Ryan Trecartin, the artist. And he basically downloaded the Instagram app on my phone, and he said you need to join Instagram. And he had many followers, so he posted that I had joined Instagram. And so this is lot of pressure that I would come up with something. And then I never knew what to do, because I knew that I wouldn't want to photograph food. And I also knew that I wouldn't do selfies. So that was kind of easy. But then I kind of was lost. And then I had this bad idea that I would whenever I would meet an artist or an architect, I would ask them to do something for my Instagram. That was super silly, because it embarrassed everyone, and people didn't have an idea immediately. And it was kind of like an unfortunate failure. And then I was with my partner Koo Joeong-a, the artist, and also Simone Fattal, the artist and Etal Adnan, the poet and the artist. I was in on a holiday. And we were basically on a walk in Breton. In Breton, in France. And it was December and the weather was ghastly, and so we needed to find shelter in a coffee shop. And then the rain would not stop. So we stayed there for hours. And had a long conversation, at a certain moment, Simone, and Koo and I all kind of start to be on our phones. And Etal, who is 92, would take out a piece of paper and start to write a poem. And it was the most beautiful thing I have seen in a long time. So I took a photograph. And that's really the day when I had invented my rule of the game. It's similar, it's again like with the exhibition. It's about inventing with an artist, a rule of the game. And ever since, whenever I'm with an artist, or an architect a scientist, I would ask them to hand-write or doodle something on a Post-it, and it became kind of the Instagram. So a lot of things happen in that. It's a bit like with [INAUDIBLE],, right? When you have a constraint, you can have freedom. As Georges Perec once said, this constraint of a little Post-it and a handwritten note leads to many things. So Gustav Metzger, many-- because I saw him very often. So all of us together. And we need to be idealists or die. And then it became illegible because he says that's his extinction handwriting. Nature, it's a lot of extinction handwriting. Then of course, also, artist friends of mine are not on Instagram. So I am their Instagram. So they are in residency. So Anri Sala sends me a clock every week. So Anri Sala's clock Instagram is-- his Instagram in my Instagram. So it's, in a way, like a Russian Matryoshka, if you know what I mean. Then-- so here are the clocks. They're many, because it's a weekly clock. It's very exciting. It's always wonderful, at the beginning of the week. The clock arrives. And then conversations. I met Anne Imhof, she drew the Brand New Gods. [INAUDIBLE] Flexibility is the future. Yeah, that's almost like-- that's the one I have more quoted most often. It's almost like Édouard Glissant. That is such a statement for the 21st century. That's actually the first Post-it note or handwritten note written on an iPad. In my series, there have been many since then. But David Hockney was the first one who insisted that he write it on the iPad. And that's, of course, also interesting. Because in a way, Steve Jobs was against stylos, right? And so that's why, for such a long time, we did not have handwriting these devices. But now, there are more stylos. [INAUDIBLE] from Henri. And then that's the motto we think about every day. And if we have it on the door of our offices at the Serpentine Sahar's Post-it. Also, in a way, something else happened, which was really interesting, with the Instagram. Because we were actually in this AI art dialogues, and then we were in a canteen having lunch. And I asked Hito Steyeri to do another Post-it and she said, yet again? And it was just about to start it, and then Ben Vickers said, maybe the rules should somehow evolve. And he remembered the Exquisite Corpse, which is this wonderful game the Surrealists played. When you have a piece of paper and then you fold it, three or four parts, and you're with three or four people. And somebody draws the head, and so on, until you have the full picture. And you can't see what the other person draws, but you make the joins. And so then it somehow always works. And it's of course it's a Surrealist game. And so we started now, whenever we have three or four artists, we do Exquisite Corpse, so that's another Instagram, in a way. Within the Instagram. And then the other thing which happened is that at a certain moment, Instagram stories was invented. And at the very moment, I started to be a little bit imprisoned by my own rule of the game. Because I can only do these Post-its. Instagram stories created a form of liberation, and there are now fragments of interviews and exhibitions and all kinds of things which are posted on Instagram. Maybe we can open it to questions now. Thank you all very much. [APPLAUSE] I'm just scared of starting questions. No, but before the talk Hans Ulrich told me that he had shown his presentation to, I don't know, Paige or Ken, and you said you had 300 slides. [INAUDIBLE] Four hours. And he had cut it to 100. Then it was going to be an hour and 10 minutes. And then I saw an hour and 10 minutes come, and go. And then it was an hour and 20 minutes, an hour and 30. No, but what is exciting-- I don't know if you feel it. It is like the marathon. You reach a certain point, and after that the body relaxes. And in a way, you could go on for much longer now. I just feel that it could go on. Yeah, Buckminster Fuller's lectures were like, six hours, so this is short. No, I know. Yeah. I know, no, no. It's short. But it's actually the idea of a marathon within a lecture. But maybe there are some questions. I did want to raise one point, because before also we talked about the role of the museum, and museums that have a collection, and galleries or museums that don't have a collection. And it seems like because the Serpentine doesn't have a collection, you are able to just keep changing, doing more things, and so on. And so something that you said at the beginning was like, the interviews were a means for you to explore, for you to find that. And it's like a learning thing in a way. But I'm curious. I mean, you then do so many things. That you do so much. There is a question of how one motivates oneself to continue. But at the same time, I think because of what you were saying about the relationality between things. Because, let's say, the idea of Creolization. It's also that there is the space which is at the intersection of things. Where is the space for that? Is the gallery, then, as a place that houses the space for that? Or are there now, do you see, are there ways in which these relationalities could themselves be given specific forms of identity? I thought in the work of Jafa, for example, there was an attempt to construct that relationality. But I would be very interested to know more about the relationship between something that is specific, because each artist comes with a background, but you're moving as a curator. You're not in their space in some sense. So as a school, we also are working on certain forms of Creolization, if you like, because we have, let's say architecture, landscape architecture, their relationship to other disciplines. But their inter-relationality, in some ways. But we also feel we have to work on that. The presence in the same space isn't enough. So just your observations on this idea of things that require time and slowness and the temporality of speed and the kind of relationality of these things, especially through the inspiration of Glissant and others. I would welcome your thoughts. Thank you, yes. So I think in a way it's always oscillating, maybe. I mean I always felt that there is an oscillation between what's happening inside the exhibition space, and what's happening outside the exhibition space, and that one maybe can create such an archipelago, as in the drawing of Glissant. And I also feel, I mean, from the beginning of my curating, I've always felt that it's important that we know that art can appeal where we expect it least. No? It's all about [INAUDIBLE] with our quality, that art can happen where we expect at least. That something amazing can happen when you suddenly encounter an exhibition in a very unexpected place. And so in this sense, I've always believed that we can also convince people to do shows in places by just but just asking. So for example, one day we just went to the Sir John Soane's Museum, the 19th century museum in London, which was always my favorite place. With [INAUDIBLE] Evans. And you know, he was a young artist. I was a young curator. And we knocked at the door of the director. And we said, here we are, and we have an idea. We want to do a show here. And the director was Margaret Richardson, the sister of J.G. Ballard. And she says, this sounds great. And then so it was basically just-- it was possible. And so this idea that I was always saying, you know, we should do an exhibition with an airline, no? Because Alexander Calder had painted airlines. And I thought to be actually great to curate the inside of an airline. Because it's kind of a space where people have time, and stuff. And then we went to see the CEO of Austrian Airlines with my friend Joseph [INAUDIBLE] He says, so exciting. We basically have these artists [INAUDIBLE] our country. [INAUDIBLE] and Nancy Spiro, want to do something on the plane. He said, let's do it. So I mean, in a way, I've always believed in this idea that we also need to go outside into society. It's like what John Latham says. You don't go into society. But then of course, it's very important that the exhibition space is a kind of a relay from which these all happens. And it's a relay. For example we did a show called Laboratorium, where the entire city became a laboratory in Antwerpen. We did that with Provinciaal funding, and we used the scientific laboratories. And it's kind of interesting, because you never know where the labs are in a city. They're perfectly part, of the invisible city, the scientific labs. And so we did open door things there, and the Museum was the relay. There was an exhibition. People came to the museum, they got the map, they saw an exhibition, all of that. And I think the other thing, of course, which I do think is very important about space which exists in terms of art is that there is a protected space. And that's of course a space like the Serpentine and many other exhibition spaces are. They're spaces which are a protected spaces for art. It's a safe place for unsafe ideas. And I think that's what we need. And then from that space, we go into society. So it's "both and" instead of "either or." Instead of no-no. It would be great to ask you something, actually, about the concept of unrealized projects. Because you mentioned that. But of course, we're in a house, in a building that on a daily basis is producing unrealized projects. But that's its mandate. And so when you actually know that, you know that you are in the business of producing unrealizable projects, what's the consequence of that? What does it mean to knowingly be the producers of unrealizable projects on a daily basis? So maybe you have an answer for that one first, but-- Yeah I can talk about unrealized projects. So basically unrealized projects-- I've been archiving them, as mentioned, for a long time. And I have these unrealized project to make a big exhibition of the 4,000 unrealized projects I've catalogued. And whenever this exhibition comes to fruition, something bad happens. So it's kind of like a very real doom on this show. It's my main unrealized project is a big exhibition on unrealized projects. I would also say that one of the things which is interesting is that, of course, by talking about them they can often be they can often be realized. So for example, you know some years ago we were at TLD with Rem Koolhaas, and I asked him on stage if he's got an unrealized project related to education. And he started to kind of describe the idea of a school. And someone was in the audience, and [INAUDIBLE] was born, because the person who paid for it heard that. And that's also why I very often go to non-art conferences. I speak at tech conferences, I speak at business conferences, to disseminate these unrealized ideas. And then hopefully get them built. So it's very pragmatic. I think it's something, because I think there is a danger when you talk about unrealized project that you put architects' and artists' projects as a kind of utopia and then that anyway where society wants them. And I think in a way we need to resist that and always talk about concrete utopias. And in that sense, it's about helping things to be done. I mean, the curator in that sense is an enabler, hopefully, you see? It's all about utility. It has to be useful. Right, yeah. Any questions, or? You look stunned. No. Yes, please. Thank you very much for an absolutely extraordinary presentation. And quite a lot of information to digest for weeks to come. So I just have a really simple question. Can you please elaborate on, how do you curate the amount of extraordinary things that pass through your fingers? Yeah, I never stop somehow. I started in the 90s. I traveled like 300 days a year. It was very nomadic. And then at a certain moment, I felt that there needed to be a concentration in one place. I wanted to write books and to curate. And also it felt strange to put all these exhibitions and never have the feedback, because I was telling you about the feedback we had on the BOB and the Ian Cheng show. It's kind of wonderful when you work in a space for many years, that you can react to what was before. You can listen and the feedback loop, et cetera, et cetera. And that doesn't happen when you're a curator and just travel and put shows all over the world. So I felt I wanted to concentrate. And then I realized I didn't want to stop the research. Then I came up with this new system, that I would always be in the office from Monday to Thursday. And then go on a trip. And so I would do that 52 times a year. So that's very productive. And just never stop. And then the other thing is, in the 90s I also decided not to sleep, and so that augmented the number of things I could do. But I just had a moment, [INAUDIBLE],, I met her, and we worked together. She pointed out to me that if you don't sleep, then you don't dream. And that seemed like a loss. She wrote this wonderful little book about her dreams. So I wanted to also write down my dreams. So I had to start to sleep. So it's an evolving pattern. I mean one of the things is what [INAUDIBLE] already said. I think it's just got to do a lot with the fact that all of these projects at once-- one thing triggers the other, and then they're all somehow interdependent. And then I think it's also, in a way-- I think Emerson said once that nothing great has ever been achieved without enthusiasm. So I suppose that the energy comes from that. And It brings us back to the idea of the monastery, because I think monasteries are very important right now. And I think we need monasteries for the 21st century. Ben Vickers has come up not religious monasteries, but monasteries. And Ben Vickers, our Chief Technology Officer, has come up with his idea of the unMonastery. He has created an extraordinary project called the unMonastery. I grew up near a monastery-- because in a way, the monastery of St. Gall in the eastern part of Switzerland, the famous plan from 1,100 and the Rococo library with all these amazing medieval books was my first museum as a child. And I think it's kind of important-- the first museum you visit as a child is extremely influential. And so my parents would always take me there and we could look at these felt shoes, and then I always liked Joseph Beuys, and then these white gloves, and then you can look with the white gloves at these medieval books, and travel like a Millennial. And I was always very fascinated by this idea of looking at these books as a kid, that you could know everything. And then, of course, at this other moment I realized that one could never know everything. But of course without the [INAUDIBLE],, for example, there was this idea of knowing everything. And so I think a lot comes from this impossibility of knowing everything. But at the same time wanting to know everything. Something like that. I'm taking a class at Harvard Art Museums and where we talked about the future of the museum, and we talked about a lot a lot about the technologies and the museums. And what came out is, that although what you showed us is awesome, what came up during this semester is that although technology is always seen as bringing art to the many, there's also this version of it where the museums that don't have the financial means to always keep up with technology and the modernization that is never stopping and the constant updates are somehow excluded out of this new kind of museum, and this new technological museum. So I wanted to ask you if you could imagine the future of the museum as under a Creative Commons license. That museums don't become a public good somehow? So how do you imagine could that work? Can you give an example? Like for example, by having the means the Serpentine Galleries have, you create a kind of knowledge and all these scripts written for all these installations. They are then somehow yours. Museums that don't have the means can't access this knowledge and can't bring it further. So if these codes, or this art would be common or public, then everybody could go further and keep this progress running. Yeah, I think it's a very interesting idea, because of course it's somehow connects to do it, I think. Because do it-- that was always the idea of do it. That everybody can just do it, you know? And somehow there has never been a license fee, for example. People can just realize this exhibition. I mean when it's an ICI tool, then there is a very modest symbolic fee to cover the ICI costs. But it's not the cost of a touring show, which are very huge and which most museums can't afford. So basically, that's also why the exhibition went to so many places who could normally never do an international group show. Because suddenly with do it they could have Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Mike Kelley, and artists whom usually they otherwise could not exhibit, because they couldn't pay for the transport or for the loans, or all of that. And so in a way the do it model is, of course, very limited to that one thing of instruction out. But it's interesting to think how that could be expanded. I think also what is very important is is idea of what's happening between institutions, and that it's less competitive. Because I think if you look at cities, very often now there is almost like brands which compete. And I think in the 21st century, there need to be new alliances. And that will lead to more of what you describe. Because the alliances will lead to the fact that there is sharing, and that together, one can do more. But it's also that, I think, we for example believe also that it's important not only to work with other institutions all the time internationally, but it's also important to work with much smaller organizations. To give you a concrete example, when we did the John Latham show about APG and placing artists, Barbara Steveni and John Latham's idea of positioning artists in society. John Latham's house is kind of a house museum in London. But it's a very tiny house, and it has residences for young artists. It's a very low budget operation. And so we combined efforts, and we basically said the exhibition happens at the Serpentine, and in Flat Time House. And we advertised the artist-run space. And that's again something which I think is very important. The bigger institution should be more in solidarity with smaller spaces. When I started in the art world, somebody said, with museums-- a [INAUDIBLE] museum director at the time said with museums in the future, we would have to operate like airline alliances. And I thought, it's exactly the opposite in a way. And I think that idea of alliances needs to go also beyond the museum world. For example, what you were describing also with this technological project, these experiments in art and technology, it's expensive and it needs access, et cetera, et cetera. That means that the art institutions also have to build alliances with other partners. Partners in tech-- that's, for example, how we work with all of these different partners. DII experiments with the Google Cultural Institute or Acute for all the VR-related projects, et cetera, et cetera. Otherwise, we could never do that. Or the science lab in Kyoto, with Pierre Huyghe. So it means that museums suddenly partner with science labs, with technology companies, so all of this is also part of these new alliances. And if you imagine that as an archipelago, that is much more interesting than a continental idea of a continental museum which is not welcoming and sheltering. It has to be welcoming of all these nuances. Of course, the connection to schools is quite key also. Because I think there is not enough exchange between museums and universities, and between museums and schools. And that's also something which I think is-- I kind of grew up in the Stadelschule environment in Frankfurt. And that was a very interesting model of a school for me to kind of be, because it was my first job with Kasper Koenig. And he ran the Stadelschule in Frankfurt. And I would basically work there, but I was the age of the students. So I would work with him during the day, and then every night I would go to lectures and talks. The Stadelschule is a relatively small art school, and it has an even smaller architectural school. And at that time Peter Cook was the architectural dean of the Architecture Department, and brought in people like Cedric Price and then Miralles. And every week-- and Zaha. Then at the same time, there was the art thing Kasper Koenig ran. There would be every week artists coming. At the same time, there was the Portikus, which was an experimental little exhibition space, where basically practice would happen. So there would be exhibitions every month. And this whole environment was very important, because there wasn't a separation between the practice of the school and the practice of the exhibition making. And you had art and architecture. I think it's still the case. You have art and architecture at this Stadelschule together. It's not separated. I think that's another important aspect. It's to just bring, to have more interdisciplinary alliances, will museums to realize what you describe. I just realized that we must have been at the Stadelschule at the same time. Yes. In like 1980 something. Early '90s. '90s, OK. I was there before. '90s. Anyway, I'm sorry. Thank you for, as somebody said, inspiring. We will think about it for weeks. [APPLAUSE]

Channel: Harvard GSD

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Id: T4MrU7xwNkQ

Length: 126min 28sec (7588 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018