some sentences from an interview, in “secession” / rirkrit tiravanija. 2003

“I’m not making a sign, I’m not creating an image, but I am interested in a kind of attitude or a shift in how one thinks. I don’t make things that everyone can agree on, things that say ‘This is what it’s all really about in the end’. It’s much more shifting and ephemeral than that, so I think that statement is really about having a different sense of culture”. […]

“I always want to have the same experience as the visitor in the sense that I don’t know what is going to happen. My experience of my own work is the same as everybody else’s as I don’t really know what will happen. I don’t start from the point of knowing”. […]

“My approach is always to look for more possibilities, seeing different people doing different things and thinking in different ways in terms of being in the space”. […]

“I start with a kind of frame to open up ideas, but not as if I’m the originator of these ideas, it’s more about how one can use these ideas, to start a new frame for them”. […]

Matthias Hermann: “That is the opposite of appropriation art, where people take an idea and appropriate it for their own agenda. You do it the other way round, you take an idea and open it up, but for everyone to use it”. […]

Rirkrit Tiravanija: “It is about someone who works or is in the place and deals with the situation, deals with what’s happening”.

Rirkrit Tiravanija,
in Secession (2003)