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focusing of energy upon a single point. In the notion of the station we find something that not only corresponds perfectly to Tiravanija’s work, but which is also totally present in the thought of our day, namely the idea of nomadism. The station is a centre, but a centre in motion, a nomad. From this perspective, it is a representative form of the contemporary energy. The station The Land is on one hand a Utopian endeavour… Today, art has a vocation to create interstitial territories that do not depend on the general logic of globalised capitalism. As such, The Land is a precious initiative, it’s an installation in the primitive sense of the term. In what context did you produce Relational Aesthetics? When I wrote the book – the first text was published in 1995 – I was responding to a very simple question: what is the common denominator among all the artists that struck me as highly important at the time, artists from my generation – from Maurizio Cattelan to Rirkrit Tiravanija, ranging through Pierre Huyghe, Vanessa Beecroft, Liam Gillick, Orozco… The idea was to work on the common trait running through a generation of artists and its problematic base. I quickly discovered that the aesthetic base was the “inter-human sphere”, which played a role as important to this generation as the sphere of consumerism had for pop art. So I went to work on this. Later, partly thanks to the artists and partly because of the texts, these ideas started to become popular and found their way to the centre of the debate on art from the late 90s on. The work of all those artists who emerged in the early 90s exuded a collective sensibility, a new way of thinking that had not yet been theorized. All it took was to put a name to this syntony that was being created for it to slip naturally into the flow of things. At the beginning of the 90s, the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Huyghe, etc., was referred to as conceptual art, or Fluxus, to use the models of the past. This was precisely because there was no other reading for different models. I started off by explaining in what way these works were entirely different to
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