I WANT TO HAVE AN IMPACT

Olafur Eliasson in conversation with Mirjam Varadinis
(Excerpt from the book)

«I want to have an impact», is one of your quotes that struck me. It makes clear how important it is for you to move something – both in the real world and in the minds of the spectators. What impact do you want to acchieve? And how can art effect such an impact?

I WANT TO HAVE AN IMPACT
Olafur Eliasson in conversation with Mirjam Varadinis

(Excerpt from the book)

 

«I want to have an impact», is one of your quotes that struck me. It makes clear how important it is for you to move something – both in the real world and in the minds of the spectators. What impact do you want to achieve? And how can art effect such an impact?

I’ve always felt that art has agency, just like the visitor has agency in meeting up with the artwork. They’re both situated in a place, of course, in a world – the agencies of the work and of the viewer are part of larger networks. The question then is what happens in that meeting up of work, visitor, and the world. Does the artwork move the viewer? Do viewers move the artwork into their ‹now› – the moment and world in which the encounter takes place? I think all three are potentially movers and they can also be moved.

If we look at impact in a broader perspective, art has always been in dialogue with the time period in which it is made, and while art and artists have sometimes been viewed as outsiders, I feel there has been a change in perception in the last decade. I’am actually being invited – as an artist – to discuss solutions to local and global challenges with policymakers, politicians, businesses, NGOs, and activists. And I believe that my art is robust enough not to be ‹functionalized›, taken over by the interests of the other parties in these conversations.

One of the reasons that art and culture are being taken more seriously is probably that many feel the need to imagine other scenarios, other futures. And we do so in an ‹embodied› way. I think that art can articulate and give body to some of the topics that the UN, for instance, can ‹only› address in terms of data and graphs.

Climate change and migration are two of the most pressing issues of our times. Both play a vital role in your work in recent years. You address those issues not only from an analytical point of view but instead create immersive installations that involve all our senses. What role does the emotional aspect play in terms of perception?

The immersiveness is what I call art’s embodied approach. When it comes to climate action, we know that it requires more than simply giving people the relevant data. The language used to communicate the data matters. Your cultural background matters, too. And we know, as you say, that emotions matter, but if there are too many, if there’s an overload of worries, for instance, then you fall into apathy. Elke Weber, a friend of mine who is an expert in behavioral science and has studied the psychology of decision making, talks about having a ‹finite pool of worry›, meaning that we can only be concerned about a certain number of issues so we have to pick those issues carefully (and some of the issues pick us, of course – we just inevitably become caught up in them).

I strongly believe in the importance of having physical, embodied experiences. Feeling the melting ice in ICE WATCH, 2014, conveys a different story from the one we get through simply reading about glacier ice melting. It matters to actually engage with our senses.

Needless to say, we have to make decisions for the longer term – and not just focus on short-term fixes that get politicians re-elected. To make this happen, I really believe that we need hope. This is what will enable us to live with the climate crisis. It’s what keep us from despair, from becoming traumatized. If our vision of the future doesn’t have an element of hope, we are less likely to do something. By working with the senses, art works against apathy.

[…]

The discourse about ‹multispecies› or ‹interspecies relations› has recently gained a lot of attention. In this book we have compiled a series of texts and excerpts by some of the most important thinkers in this field that have played an important role in your artistic practice in recent years. In your opinion, what consequences do these theories have for the relationship between people, and how can we help them be heard at legislative level?

A number of people – like Donna Haraway, the eco-feminist and theorist of so-called post-humanism, and the philosopher Timothy Morton – have been calling for multispecies environmental justice, taking into account the interests of non-humans. I don’t think that this precludes more people-centered approaches to climate justice, as there are many stories that must be told. The former prime minister of Ireland, Mary Robinson, for instance, advocates for climate action in her book CLIMATE JUSTICE by offering vivid anecdotes of how people are coping with climate change – often women, as it happens, showing great resilience. I think this is a strong approach because it appeals to our sense of empathy for our fellow human beings; we can relate, and being able to relate is a first step towards action.

But the idea of multispecies justice is fascinating and it asks a lot of us: to reconsider our identity as humans and to see ourselves as entangled in vast networks, with no clear hierarchy, no human hegemony. Haraway talks about inventing other sorts of ‹we›, other sorts of ‹selves›. It is a bit of a leap to embrace a multispecies approach, advocating for solidarity with non-human animals, as Tim writes, but I believe in this type of expansion of the fields of agency and identity. It must have significant consequences for how we live our lives.

It’s also fascinating to see the legislative measures being taken these days as part of the rights of nature movement. About 20 countries have so far put forward legislation to make nature – or parts of nature – into entities with legal rights, meaning that people can go to court on their behalf.

[…]

SYMBIOTIC SEEING, 2020, the main new installation in the exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, is linked to Margulis’s idea of symbiosis and refers back to the so-called ‹Urschleim›, the primordial matter at the bottom of the ocean where evolution of life somehow started. But in your work, what looks organic is actually produced by highly technological equipment. The fusion of nature and technology, or magical wonder and scientific experiment, is very much present in your work. What is it about this combination that interests you?

I’m really interested in 360-degree perspectives, in thinking in terms of systems – for instance in the relationship between our gut bacteria, our well-being, and the world around us. This is more important to me than primordial soup, although my team did look into that when we began developing the exhibition.

In SYMBIOTIC SEEING I project lasers onto oil-based fog. The combination of lasers and fog makes the micro-turbulent activity in the air visible; these miniature vortices and currents are created by, for instance, the body heat of a visitor standing right beneath the fog. I see the coming together of the different materials, the sounds, hear, and bodies in the artwork as a way of making explicit the construction of that shared space.

I try not to speak in terms of nature-technology dichotomy – they are categories of the past. As I see it, the Anthropocene has introduced the necessity to see things in a more networked way. Human and non-human activities are one. I’ve come to realize that we have to navigate our ‹now›, not based on what the past taught us, but as seen from the future.