EXBERLINER Issue 163, September 2017

6 QUESTIONS
You once said breakdancing impacted your art. How
so? I started dancing in my early teens and was very
obsessed with it at the time. It gave me a physical relationship
to my environment and enhanced my ability
to sense my surroundings through my movements.
This has had a great impact on my artistic practice, by
giving me an emphasis on the viewer’s physical experience
of the artwork. An artwork activates the viewer
to become a co-producer of their experience, and I
think I first saw this potential in breakdancing. It just
shifted from my own performance to the artworks,
which are now the performers.
Is Berlin over? You might say that the city has become a
victim of its own success and that it has often failed to
protect, sustain and support the spaces and practitioners
that it has attracted over the years, but I still believe it is a
uniquely open place to work as an artist.
6 QUESTIONS FOR...
Olafur
Eliasson
How was it setting up your studio in Berlin
in 1995? I moved to Cologne first, in 1993,
because I thought the art world there was
livelier than in Copenhagen. But then I visited
Berlin occasionally and saw that it was a more
inspiring place. So after a year and a half, I
moved here. It was a struggle to be here in
the mid-1990s; it was tough and very demanding,
but there was such a high concentration
of talented people here. There was
space for creativity and for connectivity. In
a lot of ways, it was a different city from the
one it is today or even 10 years ago.
Why call your Prenzlauer Berg studio a “reality-producing
machine”? I consider my studio to be part of the city
and of the world outside. When you enter it, you do not
step out of Berlin and into the utopian space of an artist’s
studio. You enter a place that is deeply interwoven with
reality, where we are busy contributing to the production
of reality. I strongly believe that reality is relative, that it’s
negotiable, and that we are all engaged in producing it
together – the trick is to recognise this fact and act on it.
With your Institute of Spatial Experiments
at UdK (2009-2014) you said you aimed “to
curate learning situations of uncertain certainty”...
Can you explain? There is a positive
notion of uncertainty that I like to keep in my
practice, an uncertainty that wakes you up
from your assumed, received way of seeing
things and makes you curious. But this can
sometimes be frightening or overwhelming.
What I am interested in is where you learn to
accept this uncertainty as integral to working
as an artist, to no longer be frightened of it,
but to become certain of it.
Why resurrect 2014’s Festival of
Future Nows... now? In this new
edition, we’re further exploring
the questions central to the
Institute for Spatial Experiments.
It’s a kind of intensification and
scaling up of what we were doing.
Visitors will encounter an intense
energy field of spontaneity and
planning, full of performances,
events and experiments.
Danish-Icelandic megastar Olafur Eliasson is putting on the second
Festival of Future Nows at Hamburger Bahnhof (Sep 14-17),
featuring works and performances from 100 international artists
in a dizzying array of interdisciplinary formats, from improvised
installations to sound poetry. See page 40 for the full preview.
Photo: Ari Magg
SEPTEMBER 2017 45