Although highly conceptual, Olafur Eliasson’s artwork has none of the coldness or inaccessibility that this might initially suggest. ‘In Real Life’, at London’s Tate Modern in August 2019 (the height of the school holidays), saw not only children outnumber adults in their assertively curious appreciation of the works, but adults became children, as they underwent the playful disorientations that Eliasson’s works so frequently demand.

Deliberately provocative, the ‘real’ of the show’s title referred to a more immediate and embodied way of being that is largely lost in our hypermediated lives – a theme that stems from Eliasson’s study of phenomenology, and his teenage passion for breakdancing.[1]

Conspicuously absent from In Real Life was The Weather Project, an installation which recreated a misty sunscape in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2003. Drawing two million visitors, it became a foundational work of climate-focused art. For many, like me, who did not visit, the work carries a folkloric status, recoverable only as amateur footage or through anecdotes of those who did. Its riotous crowds famously spelled out ‘Fuck Bush’ with their bodies, protesting the Iraq War. The work’s subversiveness was grounded in the way it invited bodies to assemble, what Judith Butler would call a ‘plural for[m] of performative action’.

Today, Eliasson’s Berlin based studio is a hub of interdisciplinary research with a focus on climate action. In 2017, for example, they launched Little Sun, a charitable project providing solar lamps to some of the 1.2 billion people without electricity, and the year before they published Studio Olafur Eliasson: The Kitchen, a recipe book of nutritious, seasonal and vegetarian meals which, when eaten in unison act as a powerful form of social and environmental praxis. With this in mind, I asked Eliasson about his commitments to ecology, how art can be more sustainable, and why feelings matter.

KG: Although you have consistently explored the theme in your work, in the past few years there has been a renewed attention to questions of climate in your work. What caused this shift?

OE: It’s interesting that, when I did The Weather Project, the climate was not the first thing that people spoke about. Now it is almost impossible to think about that artwork without discussing issues like climate change and the Anthropocene. In 2003, I was also only beginning to turn to environmental questions. My interest in what surrounds a work of art, in what makes up our broader understanding of an experience, led me to thinking about our effects on the climate.

I’ve been interested in the thought of Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and Jane Bennett, for instance – they’ve influenced me and led me to reconsider my own relationship to the environment. My generation is probably the last that will take nature for granted. I used to think nature was separate from culture, and now I see that this is not the case; that Iceland, where I spent a lot of my holidays, is not unadulterated wildlands, but the landscape has been shaped for hundreds of years, if not longer, by human activity. As Latour would say: ‘There is no outside’.

KG: Do you think art has done enough to engage with and visualize climate crisis? Is this changing?

OE: The one thing is spreading awareness, which I do feel is changing, with more and more people conscious of and declaring climate emergency. The other thing is the material causes of climate change and here the art world is complicit, just like the rest of the world. This becomes apparent when you start looking into sustainable transport alternatives, for instance, which my studio is engaged in at the moment, since transport makes up a considerable part of the carbon footprint of contemporary art. There are simply very few low-carbon options out there and the transport companies are not particularly transparent about their routes. I am hopeful that with more and more people engaged in this conversation, we can find systemic solutions.

KG: Your work explores ideas of collectivity and co-participation, particularly as it brings people together in temporary communities. This invites comparison with protest movements like Extinction Rebellion, Occupy, the Trump Marches or Greta Thunberg’s School Strikes. Is your art a space of protest?

OE: I’m not a protest-kind of artist, to be honest, but I share with Extinction Rebellion the ideal of co-producing meaning in public space through physical engagement, and I respect their work a lot. They’ve done so much to move climate change into the realm of public awareness, and the courage with which some of them work is really extraordinary. More generally, I find that culture and art offer spaces where we come together to share experiences, to discuss and disagree, and this disagreement is not only accepted, it is actually welcome. They are somehow safer and more honest than the spaces of traditional politics. I have compared them to a kind of on-the-ground parliament, welcoming of anyone who wishes to participate in the co-production of the experience.

KG: Your work consistently involves bringing nature into urban spaces. What do we miss from the natural world in the city?

OE: A city like New York does something very strange to your sense of scale: when I walk through Manhattan I have difficulty judging how big something is, how far away it is. When I placed The New York City Waterfalls along the shorelines of Brooklyn and Manhattan, it was also to give the city a scale that we can relate to. When you are hiking in the mountains and come across a waterfall, you can use the pace of the water falling to judge your distance to it, you can tell how far away it is and what scale it is. The waterfalls also gave New Yorkers a new perspective on their rivers. We tend to forget that New York is a city on islands surrounded by water. In fact cities are often situated on water; they need it to live. And yet for a long time, they have turned their backs to the rivers and shorelines, since these were often a combination of traffic way and open sewage. It was a way of denying their link to and dependency on nature, and today this is slowly changing, thankfully.

KG: The spectator’s agency – or lack thereof – is widely discussed in relation to your work. In works such as Ice Watch,[1] for example, as the ice melts they are acting independently from the hand of the artist who has put them there. To what extent is your vision of nature non-anthropocentric in this way?

OE: Ice Watch is a work that is both very aesthetic – the ice is just really beautiful – and, to a certain extent, outside the detailed decision-making process that I usually invest in the making of an artwork. As you pointed out, the ice is beyond my control: although I requested certain sizes of ice from the team who fished it from the fjord outside Nuuk, you kind of get what you get. The process of melting also means that the ice is constantly changing. I like to think of myself as collaborating with the ice and with the viewers, who change the work through their very presence. Anyone who places his or her hand on the ice contributes to the melting and quite literally sculpts it. And then there are the crackling sounds that the ice emits while melting; air – sealed in pockets inside the ice for thousands of years – is released. The ice sort of exhales this pure air from times past. It speaks its own language.

KG: You have used the phrase ‘seeing yourself sensing’ in relation to works that make you become aware of the processes of perception. In an age where phones have become quasi-extensions of our bodies, does their use help or hinder our spectatorship of artworks?

OE: The relationship between a photograph and an artwork’s aura, if you will, is more complicated than we thought one hundred years ago, when Walter Benjamin so famously wrote about it. Reproductions and images of works also drive people to seek the ephemeral quality of an experience directly. In any case, I have always felt that the viewer is a co-producer of the art, and, on a good day, I see the use of cell phones and personal photography in art spaces as part of this co-production. Sometimes they just distract, however.

KG: Conceptual art is often linked to what Frederic Jamieson calls a ‘waning of affect’ in the postmodern era. Do you see yourself as harnessing a politics of emotions?

The two are intimately entwined: your emotions inform your intellect as much as you reason with your emotions. I have been very inspired by the research of scientists like my friend Elke Weber, who has looked into the connection between the emotional and intellectual systems that go into our decision-making process, specifically with an eye on our responses to climate change. This has influenced my work on Ice Watch and on Little Sun, and on my art practice in general. My creative process in making a work begins with a preverbal feeling or idea, which I try to stay with as long as possible before finding words for it.

KG: You have talked about how we trust cultural institutions more than other aspects of the public sector. Yet in light of revelations about the Sackler family’s involvement with the National Portrait Gallery, what can be done for us to trust these institutions more?

OE: An institution must first of all communicate that it trusts its audience. There’s an enormous difference between entering a space that welcomes you and your entire sensorium and one that speaks down to you or tries to simply sell you products for consumption. If you feel hosted by a museum, if you feel seen by it, then you are more likely to trust it. But another important aspect of trust is trustworthiness and accountability. Although I have admittedly not followed this particular case very closely, I have the feeling that the National Portrait Gallery proved it was accountable to its audience by dropping the funding from the Sacklers. The important thing is to create an atmosphere that hosts dialogue and exchange.

KG: With initiatives like the Little Sun, or your studio’s cookbook, you have expanded the parameters of the artist through socially-minded projects whose impact is perhaps more tangible than an art installation or sculpture. Do you see yourself moving more in this direction? What else do you have planned?

OE: I am interested in bringing art to contexts where you may not expect to find it, as I believe it can be highly productive here – it takes us beyond the more conventional, commercial ventures we are surrounded by on a daily basis. In terms of upcoming projects, the thing that is occupying quite a bit of my time at the moment is the question of how to make my art and studio practice more sustainable. Together with my studio team, I am exploring ways to address the carbon footprint of our everyday activities and transport to stage my exhibitions. The results will form the basis of a manual of sorts that we will share with others looking to do the same.

KG: Horizons are ubiquitous in your artworks. I was struck how in The Fog Room – despite the aura of hazy, smoggy joy the work creates – there is no discernible vanishing point. Where are we headed towards? Are you hopeful?

I think the kind of disorientation that you encounter in The Fog Room is highly productive: limiting one sense can cause your other senses to become heightened, sharpened. Sometimes you’ll even become more capable of finding new solutions. Challenges, too, can be productive if we know how to approach them. Today, we have a lot of the tools we need to face the future, we have the knowledge, and there are many who have the will, so, yes, there are reasons to be hopeful.