But then I had some kind of backlash, or a realisation, like 'Oh my God! So this is what I am doing? So this is what I am going to be doing for the rest of my life?' Making shows in spaces, meeting people, exchanging emails, coming out with ideas and making work. And then it felt all as if it was already set. Is it necessary?
There shouldn't be any determined rule for how people live.
For instance, our home, I started to remake everything, the bed, our table is a painting. Even the shelves. Everything is transforming into some very strange place. Not a like an art piece but not exactly like an exhibition as well. Somehow it is under transformation all the time. It's like looking after the soil.
We chose to be here because this is our village. Everyone talks about each other, the stories about whose chicken did what, who married who.
In the last ten years we've been working on decentralising the world. There used to be New York and everybody bowed down to the king. Now you can be from Timbuctu, make great work, be as contemporary or up-to-date as anybody else in big cities like London. It's a combination between the internet and EasyJet.
We said that today there is no perfect city, and we compared it to twenty years ago, when people would just grow up in one city and live all their life there. I think this has to do with contemporary life: why do you even want to live in other cities? Because is that need of different information and the possibility of getting it from different parts of the world. I lived all my life living only five years in each city. I kind of have a rooted feeling about changing cities but also changing the faces that you see everyday, where you get your information from, how you share it…
I've been over-inundated with lifestyle-slut stuff. And all of that is actually for me research. I've drawn from that more that from the really amazing experiences for my own work. The losers in their forties still going to openings, bottle parties, they're really great muses actually. And I think it's a new class of person that's emerging. Being very aware that you're very lucky and fortunate to be in that situation, how could you complain with other things going on in the world? There's people crossing the Mediterranean in boats right now and they'd rather die at sea that being stuck and being raped in Mali. There's really bad stuff going on. And yet here we are in these blasé places, with lots of free food that lots of people would love to have and being bored and horrified. And that's a weird product of this lifestyle-slut thing. I've been invited to things just because they wanted people to be there who were from a certain world. And it was fabulous weekends and everything paid and all of this stuff. A friend would call up and say 'Do you want to come here? Do want to go there? Everything is paid for.' The first time I was like: this doesn't make any sense, but whatever. When you're 24 you just do stuff. And a friend of mine had said to me at some point—it was this crazy all expenses paid weekend, a limo came and picked us up, it was so weird—and he said: 'You know what this is all about? They are exploiting us but if you just don't get used to this life it's fine'. Because you so many of these people who just start to live like that way that pretty soon they are not actually doing anything anymore. And they are just invited to bottle service parties and they look good, but then you only look good for so long in your life and then… You see many examples of this, people who are well into their forties and haven't produced anything since they were twenty-nine. And they are just going from party, to party, to party. One should not make that into a lifestyle otherwise it just kills creativity, if you ever had anything interesting to say you just won't anymore. Getting invited to random things you turn into that asshole, standing there with some beautiful art, talking to really cool people and being so bored and so alienated.
Living in the fast world, the city… are we made for that? We're not programmed to live like that. There are two ways to go: to continue to go one way, being dysfunctional as a personality and being filled with stress, doing one project after the other. Or the other way is the unknown and perhaps really to follow one's faith, plying with fire, with your own life. And there is something very transgressive, something on the edge of perversion, how by total refusal you could end up fucking up everything you built up: nobody will take you seriously, or ask you to do something, or be friends, you might end up losing our personality. Or you might get rid of the conditioned masks. The refusal has something perverse, because you are really taking risks, you don't know what the outcome would be. You are not playing it safe. I think everybody needs to refuse. Refusal, which actually sounds so negative, should be the new positive: not doing things. It does not pretend to make objects, or paintings, or installations for the sake of art; it goes further than performance; it's life. It's artful living. It's a constant reminder that you have to try to free yourself from conditioning. It's basically all about boredom and how to break this boring thing of ikea tables and generic bios. Because how are you going to have time to process things? How is it possible, if you're flying all the time, to have ideas and emotions, especially emotions with ideas.
There's also this possibility of magic in the sense of bringing people together, not in a big brother way but so that you never know how it's going to click, you never know what's going to come out of it. It's like some kind of possibility for pollination—who knows, some beautiful flowers might bloom.
A great thing would be finding some interesting dialogue between how people work or think, even if their work is formalised in completely different ways. Art isn't only about aesthetics. Of course a part of it is aesthetic but then if you just focus on that you miss the whole reasoning behind it. My point of view is to allow everything to just transform.
That's where we have to understand what we are and what we do probably a little bit like the forefront of this experimentation of moving around in extreme quantities. I haven't been on a real vacation in years and so there's always a reason to go. There's always some kind of work-related aspect to every travel I do. It's occupation rather than work.
Club Med is an interesting example because after WWII it was started as this utopian post-war retreat. It allowed people to get out of the shit that they were in in their bombed cities. And now it's just packaged holidays, capitalised and regulated. And that's how it comes to a natural end. This is when you start to swarm. We are always back to the same idea: recycling, re-inventing movement.
We're seeing all these things in Greece, but as an artist I've already put myself in an extreme situation before any crisis or anything. You have to fend for yourself in an extreme way, and you embrace that. Other people don't live that way, they don't choose that.