Lec 4 MIT 4.370 Interrogative Design Workshop, Fall 2005

um welcome to the Center for advancement studies um I'm so happy to see you all here there's a bunch of unfamiliar fa again unfamiliar faes every time is really important um so because there are people here who don't know what we do I'm just going to quickly tell you what we do and I'm going to give you a little bit of biographical information on our guest Starling and then um we are an organization uh sort of we're we're a small artist Community inside inside the School of Architecture here um we have the program has three parts uh our visiting artists our artist fellows and our Mt student residencies um when artists present their work um they also do ay doing here spend today um walking around looking at um differents and tomorrow it's a pretty interesting way for us to integrate um what we're doing as MIT and Inu to the prac very interesting artists um once artists do a site visit they come to us with a proposal for longer project and we put together a JY we select from those projects for a longer and select one of those projects to be to be realized the following year um our student residents are um graduate students in other MIT departments one on this year at T um and they are they're also artists and they help us link our visitors back into their home communities um so that's what this is this is all all part this is artist bu um So currently Sim I think he actually needs a lot of introduction um he is here um I guess um he's come here byin he's however um he's currently the subject of the solo exhibition um at uh at the buzil um a he's the recipient of the 2005er prize um he's had other solo shows at tap modern at the Modern glasow uccl hammer in La pus FR it in Stockholm and session among others and he's also taken part in such major surveys as the South La he Co represented Scotland at the v c while being featured in one of the best shows there as well called IND and two other shows uh I want mention GPS too and the moderns at Tes in turn um and [Applause] now thank you for coming um it's really nice to be here and um come and talk a little bit about some of my work some of my projects um the I guess what what you'll soon sort of realize is that the work that I make is quite I mean formally it's incredibly diverse and um I guess it has I mean there there are certain kind of um uh themes running through the practice which I've been kind of working with um over the last sort of 10 or 15 years um and usually I try and kind of weav a different path through the work every time I make a talk um I um um I kind of like I mean in a way making making talks is very much sort of I really think of it as being very much part of the practice um partly because the work um as you'll see it's kind of it has a quite sort of an anecdotal existence very often and it and it also involves performance to to varying degrees um I'm not a performer by any means and I always kind of disappear from from the work um when it's uh experienced by an audience but um there is that sort of Dimension to it and um so for me making making talks about the works are very kind kind of natural thing to do um and um so I'm really just going to I'm going to start to um sort of pick a a path through various projects that I've been making um the the earliest of which is um about 5 years old now um and um I'm not going to really talk about the sort of thematics from the beginning but I think it'll sort of slowly start to unfold as we go through um if people have questions as we go along then then that's fine but um we'll also have some time at the end for questions so um uh don't feel desperate um one of the one of the sort of um the things I've been sort of preoccupied with I suppose um over the last few years has been a kind of interest in in I mean in a very general sense in a sort of understanding of of uh what can Loosely be described as kind of globalization and and looking at various kind of narratives that um that spring from that um kind of understanding of the world and um one of the things I've been very interested in is is the the way plants the way sort of nature um moves around the world um in um sort of increasingly rapid um ways and um I lived in Scotland for a long time in um in Glasgow and um made a number of Works related to this plant which is um it's a rododendron uh called rododendron ponticum and um it was uh first brought to Britain by a Swedish botanist who was a a student of lenus and um he went to the south of Spain he was actually studying the the the grazing patterns of sheep or something in Spain but he found a little um sort of colony of um roded endons growing in the Hills between Cadiz and jalta and he brought some of these back to to Britain and um from there um this was in um in 1756 and from there they were um introduced first of all into sort of ornamental Gardens and of course they hopped over the wall of the garden and um became a kind of essentially a huge problem a weed um particularly in Scotland um where they seem to love the climate and um they're really a big problem now for kind of conservationists and um I was invited um yeah some years ago now to to make a a a public art project for this piece of land it's a it's a a piece of Heath land which is as I'm sure you know a very kind of sensitive and particular kind of configuration of of plants and animals and um it's also a uh a sort of ecosystem which is uh constantly sort of under threat and one of the things that it's under threat from in Scotland is Rod dendrons um and I was I I I was invited basically to make some kind of a sculpture or something to put on this piece of Heath land but I felt very uncomfortable about that it's a very beautiful place and it's somewhere where people go and walk their dogs and you know and so I I decided to um I investigate a little bit the the the sort of um the sort of problems of of running the the the heath land and maintaining it and and one of the things that I came across was this kind of huge problem that they have with the roded endons and they were the guys who ran the the the area were about to sort of cut down a lot of these plants um and Destroy them so I I sort of came up with the idea of rather than introducing something to the to the the heath land to to sort of remove something so I I made a proposal to return um some of these Road of dendron ponum to to the hills um where they came from in the south of Spain and um I I dug up seven of the plants and um packed them into my Volvo estate and drove um from the north of Scotland to the south of Spain and um sort of I don't know reintroduced them to their ancestors I suppose um and planted them back um in in amongst the the roaded entrance where they came from um I kind of generated some art on the way um and um this Photograph on the on the right hand side was made um somewhere outside Bordeaux on the trip and what I did was I I just made a series of photographs um which which sort of documented the plants and the car and um etc etc and there it was kind of configured in exactly the same way in each in each location as I stopped on the on the route to water the plants and and give them some air and stuff and then this became a a very very simple um sort of video piece which was a sort of a bit of a slide dissolve work in a sense so you move from the north of Scotland to the south of Spain in the company of these plants and eventually to um the Park Los alono Carles where they where they um came from originally um so it's a it's a kind of in a way I put it at the beginning of the talk because it's a very sort of simple manifestation of of of my work in a way thinking about what it means to move something from one place to another um from inside to outside or from one country to another and etc etc um or or or thinking about a kind of turning a narrative very simply upside down um a kind of return if you like um the the next the next project which is of course absolutely related to the the first um is is something that I made for the Venice Bean Al um it's a project called Island for weeds and um it it's it's very much connected with the same story this Photograph on the left hand side is um the national park of Scotland which is um a very new idea it's Scotland was never really sort of allowed a national park for some reason or they never really knew how to to deal with it so about four or five years ago um they um started a national park which was just about sort of defining an area of kind of um of of land and it's just outside Glasgow um and it's it's based around this large lake called lo lo Lomond and um it's a very very beautiful place but one of the things of course that the when you start trying to Define as National Parks do when they you start trying to Define in a way your cultural identity through through your your sort of natural um uh environment things like roaded endrance become kind of problematic because nobody really knows how to deal with them they're on the one hand they are on every single sort of picturesque calendar of Scotland that exists um and on the other hand they're a huge problem a pest they're sort of a non-indigenous plant and um so I thought it would be really interesting to try and sort of work with this sort of problem um within the the national park so I came up with this idea working with a a marine engineer to make a a sort of floating um Island to um sort of sustain and contain a group of of of plants and um this project went on for 2 years years or so and um eventually it it became a kind of sort of I don't know rather controversial in a way because one of the funders for the the National Park is um Scottish national Heritage and they were putting money into making these public works but they also give about5 million a year to Farmers and land owners to destroy these roded endrum so they they kind of they they feared some kind of crazy media a backlash against them saying on the one hand you're protecting these plants and then you're spending £5 million um destroying them you know isn't there a contradiction there and they they basically they got cold feet about the whole thing and they backed off from the project and um so in a way as a kind of Revenge um to sort of throw it back in their faces a bit when I was invited to um to Venice for the ban Al um I decided to sort of present the work um a little bit out of out of context um and um we built a a rather smaller but but sort of working model of the island um and it was shown in this fantastic Palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal um and it was a sort of of course in this kind of floating city it seemed to sort of make sense and it also had a very nice relationship to these rather sort of um overthe top Camp uh paintings um that sort of line the walls of the of the um of the Palazzo and it was almost as if it was kind of tugging on its chains to try and get into the the Grand Canal and escape to Freedom somehow and it it also had a lovely relationship to this extremely ornate Morano glass chandelier it was almost like an upside down version of that somehow down the other side of the space down the other end of the space so that was Island for weeds and I guess I made that I don't know four years ago now or something 3 years ago I don't know yeah and these are the two anchors which would have sort of tethered it to the bottom of uh Lo LOM and had it ever floated we're still trying to find a home for it on the water so if anybody has a big pond that they want a little island for I'm up for offers um the next the next project that I'm going to talk about um sort of comes and in fact comes quite in a way very directly from the work I did with the roaded entrance in Spain when I was kind of researching the the sort of history of these plants um a friend of mine said oh you have to go go to um go to the tabanus desert when you go and and have a look at the um the cactuses there um the Tanis desert is the the only um sort of true desert in in Europe it's a very small area um and it's growing all the time it's it's um like much of the south of Spain it's getting drier and drier and hotter and hotter and um the European um uh Community a few years ago sort of Pumped lots of money in to try and sort of deal with this problem um and it's a really it's a for me it's a really interesting kind of area um for many reasons um it sort of has this sense of being I don't know like a vision of the future or something um it's somewhere you can imagine you know JG Ballard or somebody writing a a book um it it has um it has these huge areas of of um what's called plasticulture which is basically farming um under sort of plastic tents um which happens all year round to grow vegetables flowers and things for the north of Europe um it's a huge employer um they're digging they're they're pumping water from deeper and deeper underground to sort of sustain this um agriculture they don't actually know how long the water's going to sort of last so it's a strange it's a strange sort of um a strange phenomena there's 's also this rather beautiful um solar research center um which again was set up with with European money to try and one of the main roles of the place is to try and use solar power to turn seawater into fresh water and use it for irrigating the desert and for farming and all these other kinds of things um so there's this sort of strange Collision of very Hightech and very low Tech um kind of practices and then of course there's um Sergio Leon who um filmed a lot of his Spaghetti Westerns in in the Tanis desert um in the 1960s and' 70s and um they've made a bit of a kind of culture industry out of the the remains of that practice and they're actually still making films there when I was there they were shooting a a French Western I wasn't quite sure what that was but um and um it's kind of funny to see it was it was basic in a way it's a sort of a piece of globalization in itself this idea of trying to find somewhere sort of Cheaper to make films that look like they're shot in Texas or Arizona or something and and Leon's solution was was the Tanis desert um and you can still go and see all these um film sets but what what I was interested in was the the the planting that was had been going on over the years um in and around the film sets um a lot of kind of introduced um species of of cacti which kind of basically served as props for the filming of of of of the films um and uh there are various kind of the most common is this um plop Puna cactus of course the sort of prickly peir but there's all sorts around and they've been PL they've been planted over the years um they're not all original Leoni cactuses I'm afraid to say but um yeah and um I I was uh I was invited to to make an exhibition at um at porus which is a a gallery space in um in uh in Frankfurt um where I teach as well and um I I decided to make a sort of a project around around one of these cactuses from from the film sets and so I went I went to Spain I drove again I took my my my trusty red Volvo with me and I drove South um to the tanus desert and I managed managed to persuade the people who um run the uh the film sets now to let me dig up one of their cactuses I had to sort of pay them a rather he backhander um and uh and so I so I dug up what something called a surus cactus and I stuck it in the car and I drove back to to Frankfurt with it to a kind of rather wintry uh Frankfurt and I made a I made a project in the gallery called catine house which means Cactus house in in uh in German and it's a kind of um it's a sort of collision of a fantastically efficient um Survivor the cactus and this incredibly inefficient organism that man invented um at the end of the 19th century um the internal combustion engine and um one object kind of sustains the other in a rather sort of perverse way what I did was I removed the the the engine from my car and in installed it as a heating system for the the space so to create create a kind of nice climate in in cold old Frankfurt for the cactus and um the the car was um reconnected to the engine with sort of 30 m of piping and electrical cables and all the other things that you need to make uh an engine run and um each morning the the Gallery assistant would would um open up the the Volvo sit in the in the in the driver's seat and turn on the um ignition and the car came on in the exhibition space and um you could kind of control the heat of the Space by pulling the choke in an out um so the the sort of idling speed of the car um engine sort of controlled the the the space in the the heat in the space and then of course the the petrol was still in the petrol tank and the exhaust came out of the exhaust etc etc it's an ugly big thing a Volvo engine I tell you excuse me and we had a little thermometer on the wall just sort of monitoring um the temperature of the room so it's a sort of diagram of how an internal combustion engine works in a way the other the other project um that that kind of came out of um my trips to the Tanis desert was um something called the Tanis desert run which um I realized about 18 months ago um and um it's of course BAS B on a a project that um Chris buron made in in Death Valley in in 1976 called the Death Valley run which was he built a um a very small um a sort of moped using a very small Japanese engine um and he made the sort of most efficient Crossing of Death Valley that he he could um with this um this very sort of ergonomic um moped I think it took him 7 hours or something to go the the the distance um and he carried some fuel on the back of the bike to to refill the the fuel tank etc etc and um I thought it was kind of a nice a nice idea to to sort of in a way re recreate this this this trip but in this kind of etts wild west in um in the south of Spain and so I built a kind of contemporary I don't know descendant if you like of of burden's little moped um using a a fuel cell um which is of course has a sort of slightly perverse relationship to a desert because the only waste product that it produces is water and um I made a a crossing of um the tus desert which is a mere 42 miles or something on my fuel cell powered um moped the fuel cell the fuel cell was actually invented um really early in in the 1830s by a British um chemist called William Grove um but sort of following the the rise and Rise of the um um the sort of petroleum age um it it sort of died away for a long time and and was sort of um rediscovered much much later as a as a sort of feasible alternative to the internal combustion engine or whatever and um this is a a a sort of commercially available fuel cell made by a company in Canada called called ballad which is basically a sort of yeah a generator for electricity and I got these these very lightweight um um gas bottles to to to sort of carry the hydrogen and O over the 42 miles I I managed to collect um about 600 mlit of of um water um a lot of the water actually sort of evaporates and and you lose it but I I collected quite a lot of it it's actually made the moped's made from two um rally racing bikes kind of welded together cuz the fuel cell so big it wouldn't fit in a normal um bicycle frame and I sort of made some improvised snaps on Route um I tend to do these things um alone so it's always a bit of a problem sort of documenting things but um yeah somehow it's nice to do and then I I kind of I I made the piece that that was presented in the exhibition in the end was was a sort of um uh I I I collect as I said I collected 600 mL of water which I then used to make this kind of rather crude um almost naive kind of watercolor of one of the cactuses that I I passed on Route um across the desert one of the um plop pontia cactuses um so that was sort of contained in this in this sealed vitrine this perspects vitrine um and um yeah I suppose as a little kind of I don't know sort of Nod to Hans Hacker's condensation Cube or something I thought it would be nice to sort of contain the whole the whole little sort of ecosystem of the project in this perspect box the I don't actually kind of in a way I don't sort of feel so I don't know why I decided to do this I don't usually talk about projects that I'm still working on cuz I I always think it's probably bad luck or something but um I um I'm in in the process of of making a a project in in Toronto for the power plant um for an exhibition I'm making there later in the year and um which is also related to sort of um non-indigenous species to kind of infestations if you like and um it's it's um again it's a sort of um in a way like the Tanis desert run sort of is direct ly sort of appropriated from from the Chris burden piece um I'm I'm using a a work by Henry Moore um Henry Moore has a very sort of close relationship to to Toronto he he was he was commissioned to make various large public sculptures there and he was very he was very imp impressed by the the sort of local government and the way they managed to raise quite a lot of money to make all these projects possible and so he at the end of his life he he left a quite a large number of his his Works to the ago the Art Gallery of Ontario and um Henry Moore had a bit of a sort of pun of picking up stones on beaches and um he used to find these little pieces of flint and then use them as sort of the starting point for for sort of large figurative sculptures and um um it this kind of this idea um somehow in my mind collided with this um problem that they have in in the Great Lakes in general um but particularly in Lake Ontario with with zebra muscles which were introduced by accident um into the lake in the kind of buge water from Trading ships um and um they come originally from around the uh the Baltic um and um no from the Black Sea I beg your pardon and um so they they they've radically altered the the sort of ecosystem of the lake and nobody really knows how what's going to happen now but um there is this rumor that they're starting to sort of die off cuz basically what they do is they clean everything out of the water all the kind of anything you can eat they'll they'll eat it um so they sort of filter water they're actually used in in in Lakes very often to to clean sort of pollution and things so um there is this rumor that they're starting to sort of defeat themselves almost so um yeah I decided to sort of make a a a kind of a work that's a sort of collision between the sort of Henry Moore story and the and the story of the the Zebra muscles and um yeah this is the one of the major works that that Henry Moore made in in Toronto it's in a a major sort of Public Square it's called the Archer and then this is the ago where the um the work that I'm sort of co-opting uh comes from when of course when when I started to sort of think about make the a project with the the muscles of course this man um Marcel bruti came came to mind um uh and it sort of has a nice relation to to he he of course was using the the muscle as this kind of symbol of of um of Belgium and um made various pieces um sort of encrusting muscle shells onto to to surface the piece the the postcard on on the right hand side is is called um Pano de Mo um and it's a it's a a wooden panel covered in these like a kind of abstract painting almost covered in these these muscles um and um what what what I'm actually doing for the project is is this this is a a piece Henry Moore made between 1954 in 1955 and it's called um Warrior warrior with a shield um it's a a bronze piece um about I don't know five five or six feet high um and um it's one of the works in the the ago collection and um after an extremely long process of sort of negotiation with the ago and with the Henry Moore Foundation in Britain um we are in the process of making a um a replica of um the sculpture which fairly shortly will be thrown into Lake Ontario um and will sit about 10 m um down um and hopefully will become kind of home to quite a lot of um Zebra muscles but it's one of these things I don't know it's like never work with small children or mollusks I don't know it's sort of it's a little bit scary cuz we're going to we're going to sort of fish this thing out of the the lake um probably a few weeks before the exhibition begins and uh maybe there's not going to be anything on it I don't know so um yeah it's a kind of yeah an infestation piece somehow um the the ne the next work um that that I'm going to talk about is is something that I made um in tyin um a few years ago um it's a piece that I showed I showed it at the the Venice banale also the same year that the the island for weeds was shown so some of you may have seen it there I don't know um again it's a a project that that sort of came out of its out of its sort of out of its context very much and um about came out of sort of stories um that um sort of connect with with sort of a global understanding of the world a global market in this case and um it's a it's a project called um Flagger this is the the the famous lingotto Factory um in the heart of um tyin this is the the the test track where they used to drive every car that came out of the um the factory would drive up onto the roof up this ramp and have a spin around the the test track just to sort of make sure it was all honky Dory before they sold it to somebody um and um the um the car on the the car on the right hand side is a a 1974 um Fiat 126 which was one of the last of the Fiat 126 is to be to be produced in in chin um Fiat kind of quite early on discovered that it was much much cheaper to build cars in Poland um so they set up a big um uh plant um in the south of in the south of Poland and the whole of the production of the 126 moved to um to Poland and um they kept making pretty much exactly the same car for 20 years in Poland which is quite a strange it could could only have happened under this kind of um Communist Regime um and the the one the Fiat 126 a little bit in the same way that the the Fiat 500 was really the kind of the Italian people's car um in in the 1950s and 60s the the the Fiat 126 became the Polish people's car and so I I decided to make a project um using this little red car we we man managed to sort of track one down it's very hard to find them now which which have the the kind of marking from the the urin factory and we we eventually sort of in the middle of nowhere found an old lady who sort of drove her car about twice a year as far as we could make out who who turned up with this Immaculate um 1974 Fiat in her sort of Sunday Best and there was a tear in her eye when we drove away in her car but she was sort of happy to see it go as well I think and I drove the car from from tyin to to Poland and in Poland I um I found a a mechanic to work with and um we made a kind of an exchange a transformation of the car and um all of the the the sort of movable body parts of the 1974 Italian car were were replaced with um white polish produced body parts um which were manufactured um in 2000 and they still would fit on the the 1974 Car which is quite extraordinary um these are these are a few of the the sort of cars that I discovered when I arrived in in Poland there's a sort of whole culture of um sort of using and abusing these these cars and and a lot of them get sort of souped up and big engines stuck in them and um spoilers and things like that um and some of them just get kind of Forgotten and um but they're everywhere families of five would go on holiday and these things um in the summer it's quite extraordinary so this is the the altered car um and um I basically I once the once the work had been done at the garage I I drove the car back to um back to T in and um worked with um some engineers is there to install it in the in the gallery Franco noero the the gallerist he had a very very small space at the time and the car would just about sort of fit in the door and um we yeah we installed the the car um pretty much like a a painting I suppose um in in the in the gallery um it's yeah it's just sort of hung on the wall um it was very nice watching people drive past looking for a parking space that was really that was really good fun so the car was there and then in the back space there was a um a text on the wall which just described very very simply the the the journey that had been made and the and the exchange of of of body parts um all of the all of the Polish fats have this PE for Poland after the one 126 which is how you can tell very often where they were manufactured they actually made in in 2000 when they when they stopped manufacturing the the car they made a special edition called the happy end um and uh yeah you see them around this is the the little text um on the wall it just says a Fiat 126 produced in tyin Italy in 1974 customized using Parts um produced and manufactured in Poland um following a journey of 1,260 something kilomet from tyin to Chin so that's Flagger Flagger is the Pol polish word for a flag of course and the the car sort of sits somewhere between being a an Italian FL and a Polish flag somehow we also made a book I often I often make um books for for the projects and um they they've sort of again because of for the same reason I like sort of doing talks the the books are quite are quite key very often and and we managed to track down one of the original car manuals from from the the Fiat from the' 70s and I work with this wonderful graphic designer in in in Berlin called Philip Arnold and we um put together this um sort of almost faimily of the the original book um we actually had to sort of re redesign type faces and all sorts of things to get it to um to get it to work and it had this rather Deluxe kind of fold out page with a a plan of the gallery and the position of the car on the wall we did actually remove the engine from the car cuz it was rather heavy for the um um in a way I suppose sort of continuing this sort of idea of redeploying um existing artworks and objects um I thought I'd talk briefly about a project I made in in New York um 2 years ago um which was shown at uh Casey Kaplan Gallery um and it it sort of involves various kind of well it sort of conflates various sort of stories and one of the stories is um the story of how um marel Dua I'm sure it's a story that all of you know it's very very sort of um well known now um Mar du was sort of acting as a as a sort of dealer in a way for for branzi who who was living in Paris and and Duan was making regular trips across the Atlantic to um to work and also to to um bring brano's work across to to sell to collectors and things and um on one of these trips um Dua um brought the the bird in space sculpture it's a a piece he made in 1924 um and it was to be sold to Edward styen um the the photographer um and when they arrived when Dua arrived in in in New York um he went through customs with with the work and the Customs refused to accept the fact that what um Duan was presenting them with was was a an artwork they'd never seen anything quite like this before um and at the time um the um there was a a rather stiff import Duty on on metal objects coming into to um into America whereas with artworks there was no tax there was no import duty at all so basically the the US custom said no this isn't an artwork it's a piece of metal and they charged duon 40% tax to import the piece which of course Edward stiking as the buyer of the piece had to pay so in the end um bruzi took the US Customs to court to sort of fight this decision and there's this kind of amazingly bizarre transcript of the court case which is available as a as a book now um and in the end the the bruzi won the court case and they they redefined the um definition of an artwork within within the American legal system [Music] um it's sort of I just threw this other image in of course the the bicycle wheel because they sort of in a way they there's this sort of anecdote the the the two the two pieces come from the same Source there was a a story about duchan and um branzi going to this um Air Show in Paris um in 19111 I think it was and just before ducha made the bicycle wheel and they sort of were recorded as having sort of marveled at these beautiful um metal propellers airlane propellers and of course since then there's been this sort of suggestion that um uh bruzi sort of got the idea for his um sort of anamorphic bird sculpture um from from this trip and and also uh duon perhaps is kind of mobile the the other two the other two characters involved in this this work um Mr Bush on the left and Mr Blair on the right um Mr Blair is involved in a slight slightly oblique way because he there was a big Scandal a few years ago in in Britain because um Tony Blair had written a rather nice letter on behalf of this steel tycoon called lakmi Mel um who um wanted to buy the Romanian steel industry um which was kind of falling apart and he has a reputation for sort of turning these things around and Mr Bush um in return for a rather large donation to the labor party um gave um his sort of backing to to M Mr Mel to the to the the Romanian government and Mr Mattel subsequently bought the Romanian nationalized steel industry and um around about the same time Mr Bush introduced a 40% tax on um steel coming into America um to sort of of course protect um the steel industry in in um uh in the states and probably win a few votes and various other things as well um so I sort of yeah I decided to sort of yeah collapse these these sort of Two Tales one on top of the the story of the bird in space and the and the the sort of contemporary story of um the uh the steel tax and um I decided to import uh a piece of Steel into the states and an artwork rather than as a piece of Steel um to try and avoid the um the 40% tax on the on the um on the piece so we didn't really know what what was going to arrive I mean I sort of ordered something of a particular size and this incredibly Rusty but rather beautiful slab of 2 and A2 tons of Romanian steel turned up at the gallery one day um with this very beautiful Romanian sticker on it or rather sort of sprayed logo for the um cidex um steel plant which is one of the plants now owned by Mr Mel um and the the the piece of Steel was was very very simply um installed in the gallery um it was kind of floated in a way as a sort of Nod back to bran I suppose um we we floated this 2 and 1/2 ton slab of Steel on these inflatable Jacks which are extraordinary things they're just these kind of rubber pillows uh and if you put some helium gas some inert gas into them they can lift I don't know 7 and A2 tons or something each of them um so the the this this the sort of really heavy piece of Romanian steel was kind of Flo Ed in the gallery in New York um for the exhibition I also made a a photo work which was sort of also shown at the same time which sort of came out of another project I mean I I won't go into the the details but of course it's a I I tried to make a a sort of a fiveman bicycle once and uh I just used standard Wheels to start with and it just didn't work and this is what was sort of generated from that so I made this I made this Photograph um as a result of that which is sort of somewhere between duch's bicycle wheel and brano's sort of amorphic somehow um and then so sort of I suppose connected to that to this sort of international trade stories um when I I was I was invited a couple of years ago to think about making an exhibition in Switzerland in in the museum for gagan vs kunst in in Basel and um I'd been uh I've been reading about this fantastic um money-making scheme that the Swiss came up with which involves at at nighttime the uh the Swiss buy cheap electricity from their neighbors when they don't need it and they use the electricity to pump water into holding reservoirs and um then during the day when Italy and Germany and France are desperate for energy they use the the the the reserves of water to generate hydroelectric power which they then sell back to their neighbors for much for much more money than they paid for it it's a kind of beautiful beautiful model somehow and this this sort of became I don't know it became the sort of the starting point for for sort of I suppose it's it's anyway somehow connected to a lot of the projects I've made but it it it sort of became the sort of the starting point for thinking about the exhibition and um I uh I made various works that sort of had a very close relationship to to the river in Basel which is which is a very sort of the rine runs through the middle of Basel and it's a very sort of powerful sort of force um in the city um there's lots of kind of nice stories about like the the the C the c um the kst harer in Basel is actually built with money generated from one of the Ying fairies that run across the the river the the the association that started the kunala they um they managed to get a license to run one of these faeries which is only driven by the the current of the stream and you're sort of on a a a steel cable and you run back and forwards across the river and um I'm just going to drink some water so I don't choke to death so they ran the the Karine um ran this Ferry for 25 years and all of the money from running the ferry they put into this pot and into the bank and they used that money to build this very beautiful exhibition space um so somehow I don't know the the river I it's just an example of one example of how the river is so sort of tied up with the way that the the city is is um sort of structured and this is I I don't know I'm not going to talk so much about this work I mean in a way there's not so much to say I suppose but it was I had from the very beginning I had an idea to they were just restoring the my show was the first show at the at the gagen Vats Museum after it had been restored and this sort of led me to think it would be nice to do something rather sort of destructive to it um so I came up with this idea to make a very very simple exchange of two parts of the building and the original plan was to take a 2 m diameter section of the concrete and plast a wall from the top floor of the museum and exchange it with the same size piece from from the bottom floor of the museum on a revolving metal arm so you'd end up pretty much with what you started with but the bottom would be the top and the top would be the bottom of course and again a bit like my Island for weeds that that was a sort of ongoing project for a long time and I was working with engineers and everything seemed to be going fine and then at the 11th Hour they they sort of pulled the people who owned the building not the people that run the museum but the people who owned the building that the museum is hous pulled the plug on it and I think it was because they actually were really scared that the building had been very badly built and they thought that if I started cutting holes in the wall that it might start to fall apart so um instead of that I I was still very keen that this very simple kind of in a way model um for the exhibition um would would somehow have a presence there so I made I made these sort of much smaller very simple um versions just using the 12 CM thick plasterboard wall that H that lines the the museum so I made this much lighter much simpler kind of work so we just exchanged um on on the ground floor there was a sort of horizontal exchange and on the top floor there was a um a vertical um exchange from from top to bottom so these these were there were lots of there was lots of screw holes from from sort of attaching the metal plate to the wall to sort of stabilize everything so they became very much like little drawings in in the space almost invisible at times um and then we just left the the hole as the the the central sort of access for the the the the piece this is the these are I'm sure many of you will know these photographs they're by a very wonderful artist called Christopher Williams who who works in La um and um I've always been a bit of a fan and um I I sort of start started to think about these photographs again because there there photographs of he made seven photographs of this Dam um called the grand sance um which was when it was built in the 1950s was the the biggest dam of its kind in the world and um it was made the photographs Williams's photographs are kind of in a way made as a as a sort of tribute to to Jean Luke God who's who's um Williams is a a big fan of Goda and um Goda made his first ever film um believe it or not at this Dam when it was being when it was being built um I think the I think the story goes that actually Goda was working as a as a laborer kind of um while he was studying or something on on the building of the dam and somebody found out that he was kind of making film and they asked him to make this short documentary about the the building of the dam I might be wrong about that but I think that's how it worked and he made this this film called um operation beton Operation con which is a sort of very sort of romanticized um sort of eulogy or something to to concrete and it's potential and so Williams made this sort of pilgrimage to to the dam and and made these seven photographs um and so I I I started to sort of think about trying to sort of continue that that process um that sort of um sort of reference ual process if you like and I went I went to I discovered I tried to find out where these photographs were in the world and I went to all of the collections in in Europe where these seven photographs exist and um I um these are a couple more of them um and I made I made I made photographs of of interestingly enough the the photographs were all when I when I found them in the museum they were all in storage um and generally on these kind of big sort of sliding racks that that museums use for storing photographs and prints and things and so I made a series of 21 images of the three sets the three editions of these photographs that exist in in Munich and Berlin and and uh Rotterdam and then I sort of returned them in a way to to Swit land um these are just the the the work has this kind of extra sort of layer or Dimension if you like which is which is through the sort of physical in a way physical transformation of of of Williams's images his images are a kind of traditional Silver prints and I decided to sort of play with the almost the sort of the stuff of the photographs and I made a series my my 21 photographs were made with this very traditional um Platinum printing process and one of the one of the parts of of of making this and a few other projects was to make this trip to the the mine um which is um this is a a platinum mine in in South Africa in P Gus um it's a huge huge hole in the ground as you can see and I was I was really fascinated by one of one of the reasons Platinum is is so expensive is that it it requires huge amounts of energy to to extract and is very sort of disperate in the Rock and um you need 20 tons of ore from this mine to make 1 oun of of platinum so there's this incredible sort of um yeah it's a sort of phenomena in a way and um so I I started to sort of think about this in relation to Williams's pictures of this mind this huge kind of engineer ing project um in Switzerland and again kind of forced these things together um in a way in the work and produced these um 20 I'm sorry I don't I don't have any details of of the photographs but you can probably just about see what's going on they they're just very simple sort of documents of Williams's 21 photographs some made very close up some made of the the whole storage where the the photographs were were made um yeah and it the the piece has a has a very long title which is basically the story I told you at the beginning of explaining this work about how the Swiss buy cheap electricity from their neighbors at night and then use it to pump water into holding reservoirs and then during the day use it to generate electricity which they then sell back to their neighbors so it's it's a kind of yeah lots of kind of ideas I suppose packed into the one the one piece but somehow it has a very simple a very simple manifestation at the end um I'm just going to talk about one more project which was also made for the same exhibition in in Basel which is the of course this kind of decrepit shed that you can see just around the corner from the photographs um I I I kind of it's I've always I've always been an extremely lucky artist somehow um I kind of I often have these very sort of um strong ideas in my head about a work that I want to make and um but it sort of always requires finding things and um for example I I once I once made a work for a show in Australia and I needed a Boler tree um and I sort of knew that Boler trees came from Ecuador um but not much more than that and so I wrote a fax to the the British Consul in in gu keil in Ecuador sort of saying um blah blah blah I'm doing this project I'm an artist and I wonder if you can point me in the right direction and then about 2 hours later I got the same fact back with a sort of scribbled note on the bottom and it said uh yep no problem uh I have a banana plantation one of my bolster trees got struck by lightning 3 months ago it's yours I'll pick you up from the airport so I went I went to uh I went to Ecuador and this guy arrived in a big Range Rover and with his diplomatic plates and drove me around and took me to his banana plantation and sure enough there was a big Boler tree and I could take as much as I wanted so these things kind of it's this sort of strange Serendipity somehow that that when you go looking for something you you tend to find it and this this project is absolutely a kind of case in point I suppose um I kind of had this it was a slightly half-baked idea um again connected to the river in Basel um that I wanted to make a sort of piece of mobile architecture or a a sort of mobile architecture system if you like and um I I I borrowed the the curator's bicycle and I went on a a ride up the river passed all these kind of chemical plants and etc etc and um I was getting a bit I was like 10 km outside town I was getting a bit sort of depressed or I don't know I'm never going to find anything and then I sort of came out into this clearing and there was this shed um this old wooden shed with a paddle on the side and uh it was just like a kind of a gift somehow and um the whole project suddenly like in 20 seconds kind of fell into place um the paddle on the shed is is from a a traditional boat that they they still Sail on the um on the rine called or paddle on the rine I should say called a viding and it's um it used to be used for for kind of trade and and sort of moving stuff about but now it's just mostly a kind of um a sport they they sort of race these boats and it's a bit like a gondola you stand up in the back of the boat and you you push on this this long paddle and then on the way up the river you use a a pole very close to the bank where the water is not moving so fast and and move that way um and so there was this shed this this wooden structure with a paddle on the side and and as I say the rest is kind of yeah history it the the other piece of luck was that the people who owned the shed were desperate to get rid of it they they'd been sort of thinking about how to deal with it what they should do with it should we just burn it whatever and we we sort of phoned from the museum and they were said yeah of course you can have it and and they gave us a big space to work in as well so what what I did was um as you probably guessed by now is um built a viding from The Shed from the wood from the shed um with the help of two very nice artists Johannes and himo um it took yeah about 3 weeks or so to build um the shed was every every part of the shed was numbered um and then the shed was kind of taken apart and um we sort of started to look for the best pieces of Timber um for building this boat it was actually we discovered it the first wooden viding to have been built in in Basel for for many many years and the the people who owned the the viding club nearby were extremely excited and um kind of um yeah got very involved that I suppose that in a way the the the idea for the the the project comes from this kind kind of age-old relationship between architecture and and boat building um the you know the Vikings for example when they turned up in Denmark in in in the winter would turn up turn their longboats upside down to make these very simple sort of shelters to keep the the cold weather out and um the the sort of it it's it's there's always been this sort of link between between architecture and and um boat building the the the word for the Nave of a church comes from the same source as Naval or navigation um because essentially it's a a boat upside down and the the RO the word I think the word in Japanese for a a a ceiling is the same as the floor of a boat or something that I don't know if that's true but that's what I read somewhere there's a very nice text by by Buckminster Fuller on the on the subject which I think he sort of wrote for for children or something but um yeah that was a bit of an inspiration anyway so we we set about um sort of refining the the Timber from the shed into something that resembled a a boat it's in a way it's probably the most simple boat you could possibly build um it's just three planks of wood held together with a series of of very simple um ribs and that's what it looked like um when it was finished um we were all very proud of it and the local vling Club turned up and roasted a a suckling pig on a spit and drank lots of beer and um fired a cannon and uh we we threw the boat into the water and then the sort of second phase of the project began and we started to um transport the the remains of the shed Downstream to the museum where the exhibition was happening um so the the boat became a kind of transport system for the for the structure it had been made out of and the one of the the installers at the at the Museum turned out to be a bit of a a dab hand with a a viding he'd done it a lot when he was a teenager so he agreed to to sort of man the man the boat and of course going Downstream it's it's pretty straightforward cuz the current just carries you this is going through the huge um there's a they they also have a dam on the river which they use to generate power for the city um so you have to go through this lock at a certain point in the in the trip and then we we sort of took the boat apart and um which was quite hard to do actually it was uh yeah it had been such a sort of labor of love that yeah I couldn't really watch and uh and then we rebuilt the shed again in the museum um so it was a kind of it it was a sort of scarred a scarred version of the structure that we found up Upstream um but essentially essentially the same thing the one of the interesting things with that the the shed had actually been in many different locations throughout throughout its life um it had been a a a border patrol post at some point and then had been moved and moved again so there were all these kind of layers of History to the to the structure already so we were just kind of adding one more one more layer to the to the story of this this kind of slightly sad looking shed um and also it had been sort of repaired at different times in its life the the the roof and the floor were were much newer Timber than than the rest of it and of course you could sort of particularly from the inside of the shed you could start to piece the boat together in your in your mind um and um look at all the the marks and cuts that were made to to to produce the boat that's the end um yeah thank you [Applause] I don't know if anybody has a comment or a question or anything [Music] but sorry what happened next to those they're back in the shed they they're they're in the shed the shed is now in the collection of the museum actually so it's yeah it's going to stay there so yeah how did you determine that there was enough wood in the shed to actually construct the boat before you I mean there was far more wood than we needed oh yeah yeah we just we probably used a quarter of the Timber from from the shed and the rest was as I said transported by a boat down Downstream so yeah I mean you can just see by yeah looking at a boat and looking at shed and realizing that it's going to work I mean the problem was that quite a lot of the wood was not in such good shape so quite a lot of it was a little bit rotten and full of bugs and stuff so um yeah we had to be very careful about you know picking the right most of the most of the wood for the bottom and the sides of the boat came from the floor and the ceiling of the the shed because they were they're much more recent I think the the guys who owned it said they probably from the 60s or something they they'd replaced the floor and the and the roof so they were in quite good shape um so we just had to eek out enough of the other Timber to make the the beam the the ribs of the boat we had we had to add one thing which was um some there's this stuff called corking which you put in the in the joins between the boards which is a cotton kind of rope which you bang into the c um into the seams but apart from that and a few screws and things that was pretty much and some glue that was pretty much yeah all shed um I'm I'm curious about how inherently performative all of your works are but at the exhibition stage very reserved they appear and I I'm just interested in hearing more about the the process of removing yourself or whether it's I mean as you create more and more of these are you more intrigued by is is the performance still just of work process or is it becoming a mormal canaps or or even the Human Relationships involved in the PES and then they're presented in a very I guess it's something that I'm I'm sort of I'm sort of thinking or rethinking all all the time um but it's just I don't know it's it's it's just not on a on a very basic level it's not in my nature to sort of perform in that way you know although I'll do it in this kind of context it's it's just um I don't know I mean I suppose it's it's it's it's a different it's a it's about not I don't in a way I don't want the work to be about a kind of it it it doesn't want to be too sort of gung-ho and Macho and sort of in in a way that perhaps you know burden can be or or it's it's not about sort of of putting yourself through something or um of course there's an element of that but I I don't want that to be the sort of concern of the work you know it's not about dragging my body over broken glass or you know it's it's it's much more um yeah I'm I like to I don't know just distance myself from it um but yeah it's an it's a sort of ongoing it's an ongoing thing I suppose and also how there's always this there there's always this sort of anxiety because you're always leaving a lot of stuff out um when you when you make the exhibitions there's always sort of stuff that gets lost perhaps it kind of comes back in in situations like this or in cataloges or um but it it's it's it's a sort of yeah it's an ongoing discussion within the work I suppose and finding ways to to deal with that um but um yeah I don't really have I don't have a good answer to that question but yeah it's something I'm thinking about all the time um yeah have you ever been invited to a situation in which you couldn't find a convergence of things to create a work don't know I suppose you yeah I mean the I guess maybe maybe when I present the works like this I you know it probably seems all a bit sort of seamless and and like I have a very clear strategy or something but it's really not like that at all I mean I just um I think when I make these kind of you know slightly sort of themed sort of readings of the work or whatever then it it it sort of it seems much more like that than it is and it's the work is in invariably kind of very varied and and and the way it's generated is is very varied but somehow there's a yeah it's sort of you're it's you're always sort of bringing your baggage to a particular um situation and and that baggage combined with with the sort of the site or the context or whatever tends to to sort of function in a way so so far I don't know you always sort of find a way to to to negotiate it or navigate it um but it's not really yeah it's not so sort of systematic or anything the the approach I try and sort of approach each project quite I don't know sort of a you I suppose but it yeah of course always always sort of bringing my my kind of ideas and concerns and interests with it and yeah it's sometimes it's sometimes a it does sometimes feel like a real pressure as cuz I because you sort of get a reputation for doing these projects which sort of appear from from a kind of engaging M with a you know a particular situation and and you you feel people really want that from you and it's not always what I want to do so so it's sort of yeah I don't know I think this is sort of sometimes a little bit of disappointment from people when I say I'm going to do you know something something completely different or so I don't know but yeah anybody yeah what did you do with the ball of w i ah yeah I made a I made a radio controlled airplane with part of it not much of it but it was it was a project there's a there's a very beautiful house in the outskirts of Melbourne called um Heidi um which was built by these kind of patrons um called John and Sunday Reed and they they were they were sort of trying to create this real sort of Bohemian thing in in um in Mel um in the sort of 50s 60s and they built a house for themselves with it it's really a kind of international modernist style house um designed by two Australian Architects called Neil Everest and um David mcglashan and it's beautiful beautiful house and they they they planted um they were they were very keen gardeners and they planted this incredible arborium with trees from all over the world um but also sort of in a way quite radically at the time they kept a lot of the indigenous trees that were growing on the land often they people would destroy them and and there's this very beautiful tree um called a red a red river gum tree which has this fantastic Scar in The Bark which is um so the story goes from uh an Aboriginal uh boat builder who cut a piece of the bark to make these little it's just by a a river the house and um so this was a kind of trigger for for sort of making this project so I I I um I went to Ecuador and and found this tree and then used um a section of the tree to to build this small um radio control plane which was actually just flown once for the opening of the exhibition above the house um and then it was exhibited sort of with the the remains of the tree and one of the the rooms overlooking the garden and um yeah it was a the plane is actually one of the planes that uh I sort of needed an excuse so I I flicked through um Loco's um towards a new architecture with this chapter about um Aviation design and found a little picture of a farm and mosquito from the 1920s and I managed to track down some plans for building this so I built a copy of this plane yeah was there some okay there are different types of returns in your work for instance the shed work it starts to a shed and then it's transformed to the boat and it returns to the shed trace of it's I think you said scar yeah and then there are these returns to um du or frzi or Williams and I was wondering think of there being any correspondences between those types of I I it's actually it's it's a it's a lovely idea it's not something that I sort of sort of have been so conscious of but yeah I suppose there are there are kind of some maybe connections there um I I suppose I suppose the the I mean one of the one of the links is that you're you're sort of dealing with with objects that you're sort of intervening with or or um scarring or remaking or um so the yeah I mean there there's a sort of physical connection there I mean whether there's a a sort of more complex I don't know sort of historical thing going on I don't know really I haven't sort of it's not something I've sort of thought through but yeah no it's a nice I notic uses as his Point of Departure photographs the down by in very close proximity to the show yeah and I'm just wondering something produced in that I mean no I mean I yeah I mean I I I mean I suppose for the the the the show in Basel for me was a really it was a real sort of experiment it was the first time that I'd really tried to bring a lot of projects together Under One Roof and to some projects which were new but also some projects which um kind of had other lives and I was trying to sort of work with again um and sort of build build some sort of new dialogues between all of these projects um but I was I was also sort of very conscious of trying to I'm not really answering your question but I I I was also very conscious of trying to build sort of different kinds of experience into the into the exhibition so some of the you know some of the work um has has this sort of uh complexity and and uh sort of is is is sort of structured um in in a in a in a kind of I don't know webik way or something and then other works like the cuting piece is is very sort of reduced and sort of serves almost as a sort of diagram or a model for for some of the other um other more complex pieces so soort of to try and get in to try and get sort of very in a way very sort of language based um Works to to sort of talk to these sort of dumb much Dumber pieces in a way I suppose and to try and sort of um sort of see how that see how that worked to sort of create different Spa different kinds of spaces for people and also to think about think about the the the context for the exhibition in quite a sort of exploded way the to to to work with a very very localized context being the building and then this kind of the context of Basel and the river and then this kind of you know the story of the electricity and this kind of more sort of um International or Global sort of span for the for the work so yeah trying to sort of make all those things things sort of coexist so and also I suppose it's always it's always a very when I'm making exhibitions it's it's it you know I I I sort of knew that the quality of the the the prints that I was making the the the sort of platinum print they they would sit very nicely with this kind of um moldy old shed somehow um so it's it it's on a very sort of um yeah sort of haptic or something level as well it's just yeah it's about stuff too so yeah sorry that was a very roundabout sort of approach but yeah kind of a related question it seems [Music] that um and project I'm curious how you feel about the artifact results that actually gets um exhibited had some interesting ideas about what actually [Music] conses I I don't know I mean I I I suppose I I always try and sort of maintain a slight I don't know sort of am ambiguity in relation to that I mean because I for me the of quite often the the projects sort of exist in in many different forms I mean like the the the the flager piece the car which I drove to Poland um for me in a way the the book is the project it's somehow the most I don't know the most important thing that was that that was generated from that I think um but it it does it does vary it sort of does vary from but I in I suppose I I I'm in in one in one sense as I was um saying just before the the kind of the physical um quality of the work is very very important to me it's it's sort of it it has to feel kind of invested in I suppose that that there's um that it can be sort of read in that way you can almost sort of I don't know the hope is that you can almost sort of feel the sort of energy that went into making the project in in the final object you know you can read the scars of of of the shed somehow so it is a very it's a very yeah it's it's a very sort of um I mean sort of like suppose like traditional sculptural sense of things in in that in that way um so yeah I mean I like I like the idea of the the projects being quite you know maybe a talk about a project is is as much a manifestation of the work as as as the book or the object or I don't know um probably shouldn't tell the collectors that but yeah yeah maybe yeah [Applause] yeah okay asally get lost without this added component of of the talk of the presentation and unless you you also do it in some of the documentary um work is is the relationships that are developed in order to to make these projects happen the relationships in the the conversations and the and I wonder is this are these kind of talk presentations the the way that those um relationships are incorporated into the projects or are there is there other documentation like your books that record those they they do sometimes yeah to a certain extent um but no yeah it's it's sort of inevitable but a lot of that stuff gets lost to most most people but um I mean it's a yeah it's such a I suppose that's why that's in a way one one of the reasons that the work has become so formally diverse is that I'm really I really love working with new people all the time with new skills and um you know going to this funny old shed on the back of a house in in the south of England to make platinum prints with this guy who's sort of um are you know working with these two artists to build this boat and there's there's it's such a it's such a kind of privilege in a way and yeah maybe it is a a frustration that that some of that stuff gets gets lost but I think very often it it's sort of those sorts of experiences feed back into the work later on and and perhaps manifest themselves in in another way um not explicitly but they're sort of there or thereabouts I suppose yeah no it's a it's a nice job yeah yeah yeah and it's amazing how incredibly generous people are as well you know if you can just sort of spark something that that but it's one one of the things that I've enjoyed is is sort of in a way people that that that I work with often there's a sense that I'm making work about them to a degree that I mean for example I made a I made a a work in uh in Romania um a few years ago for an exhibition in France I it was a one of the Frack spaces in in melier and they they I discovered that they produce all of their cataloges in Romania partly because it's cheaper to print things there um and partly because of a kind of strange um personal connection with the curator and the and Romania but um so I sort of set up this this project which involved going to Romania to produce a catalog which was sort of about making itself it was a sort of closed system around making a book for an exhibition so I I went and worked with these printers in in Romania to to I took some photographs on the way to the The Print Works and then we used those to generate the first few pages of the book and then I photographed those pages being printed and blah blah blah and there was there was this very nice it was a it was a really nice experience CU you could there were this wonderful moments where you'd be printing a basically a picture of The Print Works and you could they would like do you think that yellow is the right color and you could just hold the page up to the wall where the yellow thing was and compare the two so it was it was a really nice it was a really nice process and there's a lot of yeah there's a lot of that that I suppose in in the way the way that I sort of formulate these things oh sorry sorry I'm actually really to buy something that you seem to be in your work which is something that seems to start out as sort of an intellectual interest or I guess I I would have thought this about your work before iuc speak that something starts have a sort of an intellectual interest that obviously you do a lot of research but by the end of the project it seems like youve layered an incredible amount of tenderness around the object that you first identify so I'm yeah I I mean I think with you ending with the the shed boat shed you know that is so apparent in in all the processings but then also the way that you're talking about it but then once I see that and then I sort of look back over the other work I'm just sort of rethinking you digging something up and you know bringing it some place but it almost feels like at the end I think I guess what I'm interested in is is how the object then becomes so layered with your tenderness um and I just I just find that really interesting in this time in in Contemporary Art especially with the fact that if I especially with the fact that I didn't know that actually I didn't know know this about me I mean I guess I I guess I just would be interested in in what you think about that and um yeah I guess I just be interested in what you think about that I don't know I it's it's such a nice comment I don't know if I want to reply to it it's yeah tenderness it's a it's the first time everybody said that about the work but maybe yeah it's it's yeah I don't know what to say um yeah um I don't know my mind's gone blank suddenly um but yeah let's just let that ride I think that's [Applause] good than thank you [Applause]