Yes­ter­day evening Olafur Elias­son held a lec­ture at the NAI, form­ing part of the “7 pil­lars of architecture” series (check our cal­en­dar for upcom­ing events!). His nar­ra­tive was refresh­ingly engag­ing, hop­ping from the rea­son­ing behind his work to early works, from per­cep­tual exper­i­ments to the organ­i­sa­tion of his studio.
Elias­son (OE on wikipedia) gained world-​wide recog­ni­tion with his ‘the weather project’ instal­la­tion in the main hall of the modern tate.

“What does it mean to get involved?” is the ques­tion OE tries to answer through his work. In the early 90ies, he dropped a bucket of green color into a local river pass­ing through Oslo – thus cre­at­ing a beau­ti­ful and alien­at­ing effect, and the ade­quate alarm of the press. The aes­thetic com­po­nent of the project is not the Elias­sons point, though: “It’s not about dec­o­ra­tion, it’s about cri­tique and dialogue” he claims.

His research and work then moved on from color per­cep­tion exper­i­ments to shapes gen­er­ated trans­lat­ing sounds into three-​dimensional space. A log­i­cal next step was to exper­i­ment not only with nat­ural oscil­la­tions, but to directly gen­er­ate shapes via para­met­ric soft­ware. His work then devel­oped towards spa­tial exper­i­ments – expand­able tents, pavil­lions, facades.

He states that all his spa­tial work is about people, and the con­se­quences of the space upon them. Thus he crit­i­cises the gen­eral loss of faith in the con­se­quences of one’s actions, the lack of exper­i­men­tal­ity, fric­tion, and pur­pose. This is also his cri­tique toward’s the archi­tec­ture: “I talk to archi­tects on a daily basis. And it’s never about why, only about how.”

He hopes that a new field will evolve from the domain of archi­tec­ture: “A spa­tial prac­tice about com­mu­nal and social inter­ac­tion, to sus­tain a kind of col­lec­tive, with respon­s­able criticality.” Asked for his dreams, he answered, “This is so boring, but I dream that con­tent will kill form.” Which sounds unfit­ting. His entire work, based on per­cep­tion and inter­ac­tion, is highly aes­thetic. The projects do start with ratio­nal exper­i­men­ta­tion, and this origin res­onates in each work – but to let con­tent kill form would prob­a­bly also kill Olafur’s stun­ning work.

See also Eliasson’s web­site (where somo of the pics of this post come from), more pics of the lec­ture on our flickr page and kun­staspekte (de) for an exhi­bi­tion calendar.

This summer Elias­son is going to pub­lish a mag­a­zine, to be called either “take your time ” or “small spaces of experiments”, which will con­tain all the little things that don’t get to be built. Stay tuned.

More pic­tures: