Tom Morton: The title of your exhibition ‘Celebration Park’ at ARC / Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Tate Modern, London, evokes a future project, somewhere between an amusement park and an international expo or world fair. Can you tell me about it?
Pierre Huyghe: When you want to push the exhibition towards a more performative scale, you end up rethinking the conditions of its reception. ‘Celebration Park’ is an exhibition of exhibitions, and an exhibition about another exhibition to come. It starts with this idea of celebration – something to embrace, something that you experience on a time-based protocol. The temporal structure of the original world fair allowed experimental proposals, but when people started thinking of the idea of progress as embarrassing, this kind of place lost its meaning. In another way the amusement park failed as a pathetic illusion and vulgar master-plan. I’m looking for a permanent exhibition that grows as an organism, an arrangement between heterogeneity, a series of pavilions hosting an experience of a real situation, a system of representation that participates in the construction of an experience.
more from the interview at Frieze here.