we must become idealists to confront this world
Hans Ulrich Obrist
April 2020
Serpentine Galleries, London
Stefano Boeri
Triennale, Milano Cornelia Lauf I thought we’d take the occasion of the world’s circumstances to use this as more than an interview and as a possible manifesto, since we are at a pivot regarding life as we know it. How is the current situation impacting you?
Hans Ulrich Obrist Last night I spoke to the people in Bergamo, via the GaMeC, and the question was how we can find a transnational solution, a topic you and I have been speaking about, Stefano.
Stefano Boeri I started to know about the Coronavirus in January and I closed my office in Shanghai, at the end of the month. And then we followed China from Milan, and we closed in Milan, on February 20. But at the time we closed, no one was seriously thinking about lockdown. My feeling was that what was happening in London, then in the United States, occurred circa twenty days after Italy. So, every day, we had a kind of shift, a new form of global effect. Globalization is not symmetric, but occurs in delays. What happens in one part of the planet is not necessarily happening in other parts of the planet.
HUO It seems difficult today to talk about architecture, as it should be about saving lives, and livelihoods, but when it first started happening, in late January, it was like a Proustian memory trigger, it was something like what the late Helen Levitt said – she was– editor’s note). To hire artists for murals, and photographers to create records – this is where the Roosevelt administration started to kick in and provide work for unemployed artists. As well as work in other regions, secure public art for federal buildings, decentralize artistic activity, and encourage the emergence of young, unknown talent, increase the general public’s appreciation of culture, and foremost, to promote a closer relation of artists with the a social environment. So the question is, do we need a WPA deal, since at the moment, everyone is talking about short-term measures, but it is important to think about the longer-term, and maybe we should analyze what the role of culture can be longer term. In terms of the virus, it started to become a reality when I started to get all these Google alerts, that’s when I really became hyper-aware of it, starting in February in China, and then March, in Italy. People started to re-interpret my book. What can we do to get away from the screen? people were asking. And , is a book about instruction art, something Cornelia and I have spoken of since the 1990s, about instruction art, certificates of authenticity, how they were used in Fluxus art. One of the questions that comes up today is what we can do for someone else, that is really the question now. How can we enact generosity, how can it be relational? I guess that is how I noticed that something was changing, by the many weeks of upswing in interest in . Long before I had to close exhibitions at the Serpentine, and close the museum.
