London, 2017

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of Serpentine in London, and Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991 he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Most notable amongst these are the Do It series (1993–), Take Me (I’m Yours) in London (1995), Paris (2015) New York (2016), and Milan (2017); and the Swiss Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice (2014). Obrist has also co-curated the Cities on The Move series (1996–2000), Laboratorium (1999); the operatic group exhibition Il Tempo del Postino in Manchester (2007) and Basel (2009), and The 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Rooms series (2011–2015). Obrist’s recent exhibitions include Enzo Mari at Triennale Milano (2020) and WORLDBUILDING at Centre Pompidou Metz (2023) and Julia Stoschek Collection Dusseldorf (2022). The Handwriting Project, which protests the disappearance of handwriting in the digital age, has been taking place on Instagram since 2013 (@hansulrichobrist). In 2011 Obrist received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2015 he was awarded the International Folkwang Prize, and in 2025 he received the Prix François Morellet. Obrist’s recent publications include 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021), Edouard Glissant: Archipelago (2021), James Lovelock: Ever Gaia (2023) Remember to Dream (2023), Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in The Digital Age (2024) and A Life In Progress (2025).

WHAT IS YOUR DEFINITION OF AN ARCHIVE?

The archive is a place where many layers of documents of all types—analog and digital—lie, where an accumulation of material is systematically displayed. I think that there is not just one archive; there are many together.

WHAT KIND OF ARCHIVES HAVE YOU BUILT UP OVER THE YEARS?

I have several archives: an archive of my books, of my own publications and those of others, archives of music, and architecture. There is the archive of my interviews, 2600 hours so far, most of them filmed, some of them audio, but also minicassettes. An archive of photographs—I take photos every day—and I archive post-it notes written by artists. Then there is an archive of my notes, sketches, and drawings that were partially published in Paul Chan’s book. In fact, there is an archive for each project: Cities on the Move, Do It, for each specific exhibition. An archive is always many archives, a multitude of archives in my case.

HOW OFTEN DO YOU USE YOUR ARCHIVE, IF YOU DO?

I do not want to look back too much. For me the urgency is to focus on my next project. I do not spend much time archiving, although I do have a nighttime collaborator, Max Shackleton, who works for me through to 6 am and does most of the archiving of my digital interviews. The majority of my physical archive and library is held at Maja Hoffmann’s LUMA foundation in Arles. At LUMA Arthur Fouray is the archivist and curator working with this material. 

I ALWAYS FEEL A SENSE OF URGENCY, A NEED TO DEAL WITH ARCHIVES WHILE THEIR CREATORS ARE STILL ALIVE. WITHOUT THEIR STORIES AND THEIR PRESENCE IN THE ARCHITECTURAL SPACE OF THE ARCHIVE WE MISS SO MUCH.

Exactly! We lose their input when they are gone. In this sense, when I said that the twenty-first century will be the century of archives I was expressing a wish. An institution taking care of living archives is very desirable, and not only for curators’ archives: I would like to save the archives of architects, scientists, novelists, and poets too.

HOW DO YOU IMAGINE THE ARCHIVE OF THE FUTURE TO BE?

I think there will be movement back and forth between analog and digital. The future of the archive is a hybrid where negotiations can happen and multidimensionality takes place. We tried to address that with my exhibition on Cedric Price and Lucius Burckhardt at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014. I think it is important to bring the archive to life. In the digital age, we have an increased desire for the live experience. In my opinion, there is no hierarchy between the digital and the analog; the two are complementary. Rem Koolhaas’ project Charrette for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was a very interesting way of creating a negotiation between the digital and the analog. There you could see not only the collection the curators had chosen to show but also find the other part, the “hidden” collection and navigate your own way through it. Every visitor could also see sections of the archive that are usually invisible, and visit an imaginary museum. In this sense, the Charrette submission for the MoMA Expansion and Renovation Project was very much ahead of its time. Rem Koolhaas was not even a finalist in the competition but his was the most radical project.

WHAT IS YOUR EXPERIENCE OF REACTIVATING EXHIBITIONS BASED ON THE USE OF ARCHIVAL MATERIAL?

Together with Chiara Parisi, I worked on Take me, I’m yours in Paris and Rome. We didn’t want to restage the exhibition in the same way it had first been presented in London in 1995. That would have been too nostalgic, and I am not interested in remaking my own exhibitions. Instead, we wanted to give it a new life; we presented a completely new version based on the rule that each work in the show could be taken away. I have built up archives as depositories of these instructions: they can be used over and over again. These exhibitions are also to be replayed. They can be dormant, but they are never dead, never finished. Every day I wake up and I know that Do It is out there, which is a nice feeling. Many of my exhibitions are concerned with establishing the rules of the game. Exhibitions grow organically, so you do not have to reconstitute them because they never stop. They are live entities.

LET’S TALK ABOUT THE EXHIBITION RÉSISTANCES AT THE LUMA FOUNDATION.

I see this as another way of activating the archive. I hope that it’s going to extend Koolhaas’ initiative for the Venice Pavilion, where the archive was made accessible and the visitor was in conversation with it. Jean-François Lyotard’s Les immatériaux [The Immaterials] and Résistances are a different story, because we are not trying to curate an exhibition based on an archive but on an idea that Lyotard could not realize. It is somehow an exhibition curated by a dead person. Les immatériaux explored the digital network age in which we live, but also a lack of resistance in the super fluidity of communication highways. Towards the end of his life, Jean-François Lyotard, the philosopher, said that he wanted to curate an exhibition about physical resistances and what happens to them in the digital age. Back then, Philippe Parreno was a student and participated in one of Lyotard’s seminars. That is where he said that he wanted to realize this project… but, unfortunately, he died before he could make it. So Daniel Birnbaum, Philippe Parreno, and I worked with LUMA to organise Resistances in 2023.

ARE YOU USING SOME ARCHIVAL MATERIAL FOR THIS EXHIBITION?

There is very little archival material about this project. We looked into what Lyotard was saying about it to his friends or students. We had to extrapolate, which is also an interesting endeavor. Lyotard’s idea is a kind of constellation from which we then developed the show. We started to record the conversations for a film about this project three years ago. These archive projects take time. Do It is an ongoing archive that I have been developing over the last thirty years, Cities on the Move lasted five years, etc. I am interested in this long duration dimension, which is also where my interest in the archive comes from. I am making exhibitions as répertoires, from which the project can be restaged. do it can be restaged in fifty or a hundred years, without me, without the artist, just by following the discourse. I want them to be brought back to life constantly. They evolve, grow, and breathe. They have to be movable partitions. I am interested in developing archives for exhibitions to be played and replayed.