Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 1: Édouard Glissant
Where all the world’s imaginations can meet and hear one another
Etel Adnan
agnès b.
Julien Creuzet
Manthia Diawara
Édouard Glissant
Julie Mehretu
The Otolith Group
Sylvie Séma-Glissant
Asad Raza

26.06.2021—24.04.2022
Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Artistic Director), Arthur Fouray (Junior Archivist and Curator)
With the assistance of Elif Kulözü (Living Archives Intern)

LUMA Arles
Living Archives Programme
Arles, France
https://www.luma.org/en/arles/our-program/event/archives-de-hans-ulrich-obrist-etel-adnan

Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives

The Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 21 May 1968 in Zurich, Switzerland) Archives documents his curatorial and conversational practice. Since the late 1980s, the Swiss-born curator has been developing a multifaceted practice that is shaped, first and foremost, through interactions. His archive is about listening, since it contains a multitude of encounters with some of the most influential figures of our times.

In 1986, Obrist visited the studio of Peter Fischli & David Weiss in Zurich, on the eve of the production of their film Der Lauf der Dinge [The Way Things Go, 1987], featuring a series of chain reactions involving ordinary objects set in motion where one thing leads to another. From this meeting onwards, he began visiting artists’ studios, travelling by night train, each encounter leading to another, each artist sending him to others. This is how in 1987 he visited the studio of Alighiero Boetti in Rome, a momentous meeting during which the artist gave him certain tasks. The most famous of these was to ask artists about their unrealised projects, which he now does in every interview.

What Obrist calls his Interview Project began in earnest in the early 1990s, when Jonas Mekas encouraged the young curator to film his conversations with artists. His first filmed interviews with artists such as Vito Acconci and Félix González-Torres date from 1991 and were shot in a TV studio as part of the Viennese project museum in progress. Afterwards, the oral historian Studs Terkel advised him to make improvised videos without using fancy equipment that could stop the flow. Etel Adnan told him later on that the 20th century was about manifestos, and that the 21st century should be more about listening. To date, the Interview Archive contains around 4,000 recorded conversations, not only with artists but also with architects, musicians, writers, filmmakers, philosophers, scientists. The wider archive consists of many other layers, such as pub- lications, photographs, handwritten and electronic correspondence, notes, sketches, drawings and projects.

This agglomeration of media and documents, which has been gradually growing since the late 1980s, first piled up in Obrist’s student apartment in St. Gallen, where he had organised in 1991 his first exhibition, Küchenausstellung (The Kitchen Show). The archive then went on the move. In 1997, the artist Joseph Grigely began the Nodes + Networks project with the archives of Obrist’s publication projects, which continues today under the umbrella of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). At the same time, the entire archive from St. Gallen was housed in the attic of the University of Lüneburg (Germany). This gave rise to the Interarchive project, which was the first time the archive was made public. In 2006, Obrist rented an apartment in Berlin to relocate the archive, which remained private until it was hosted by LUMA in Arles.

Together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Maja Hoffmann proposed a format that reveals different aspects of the archive over time, such as a project or an encounter. At the core of these series of presentations are the documents from the Interview Archive, which, more than an accumulation of interviews, constitute an infinite conversation connecting people, cultures, languages and disciplines. The presentation format is based on a series of viewing stations consisting of monitors and SANAA-designed ‘Rabbit Ear’ chairs, reproducing the scenography conceived by the architect Kazuyo Sejima for the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale that the LUMA Foundation supported in 2010. This intimate layout was originally created for Now Interviews by Obrist and featured a series of live public interviews filmed and broadcast in situ upon the invitation of Sejima to realise a portrait of the Biennale. At the heart of each episode of this long-term project is the idea of learning to listen and listening to learn.

Acknowledgements

Hans Ulrich Obrist would like to express his sincere gratitude to Maja Hoffmann for her unfailing support throughout this project; to Vassilis Oikonomopoulos and Mustapha Bouhayati for making this project a reality; and, above all, to address a special thanks to Sylvie Séma-Glissant, and the family of Édouard Glissant, their son Mathieu Glissant; to the artists who are participating in the first chapter of the archive, Etel Adnan, agnès b., Julien Creuzet, Manthia Diawara, Julie Mehretu and her studio, especially Sarah Rentz, Philippe Parreno, Asad Raza and his studio, particularly Christopher Wierling, The Otolith Group - Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun; to all the LUMA teams without whom this presentation would not have been possible, Arthur Fouray for the coordination of the project and Elif Kulözü; Luz Gyalui and the production team, in particular Clément Château, Barbara Blanc; the communication team, especially Christine Denamur; and last but not least, Matthieu Humery, Anna von Brühl and Friedrich von Brühl for their continuous involvement; and also to all those who participated in the preparation of this project; Manuela Lucadazio and the Venice Biennale team; the Serpentine Galleries team, especially Max Shackleton; the Fonds de dotation agnès b. team, in particular William Massey; Samuel Thomas for the editing of the archive videos; the Sintagma team, especially Renato Barcelos, and Rosário Valadas Vieira for the subtitling of the archive videos; Jean-Baptiste Marcant, for the sound mastering of the archive videos; the IDzia team for the audio-visual devices; Gilles Pennegaggi and all the exhibition installation teams; and finally, to all the people who participated in the elaboration of the presentation, especially Melvin Edwards, Koo Jeong A, Molly Nesbit, Carrie Pilto, Gianluigi Ricuperati and Lorraine Two Testro.

Index