I find myself doing fieldwork physically, in the tradition of anthropology. I literally go to the opposite end of the world, to the most exotic faraway places I possibly can, only to find the closest things to me when I get there.
Aleksandra Mir"Naming Tokyo" kicked off at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in June, and it's going to travel to various art institutions for years to come. Every time it is shown, I'm developing the research and involving more and more people in it. The final conclusion of the work would eventually be to put up street signs in Tokyo with my names on them.
Aleksandra MirThe Stonehenge proposal got a lot of interesting criticism. One of the best - or worst - said something like, "Go home to Las Vegas." I think this project could possibly be realized at a very late part of my career. Right now, I don't have the authority, the budget, the credibility.
Aleksandra MirI'm neither shy nor impressed by media and press. It's just another industry to me. My response to the criticism was, "I work with a steel factory. Why can't I work with the media?"
Aleksandra MirOf course I can have a simple reaction of sympathy and sorrow to destruction. But you also know that you can't have new things if you don't occasionally destroy the old. That's something you're really not allowed to say because things are often destroyed according to particular power relations so it means taking a stand in those cases, which I am not really interested in doing either. I think I am simply interested in looking.
Aleksandra MirI'm completely uninterested in the origins of Stonehenge. I don't care about the real story behind it or whether it should be saved or not. What I'm interested in is this: in the Victorian era, you could go there as an early cultural tourist and you were given a chisel to chip off a bit of the stones and take it with you. That's what you did in Victorian times.
Aleksandra Mir