On #Revolution

I really accept that there's people out there who have smarter ideas that I have. The only thing is that my job is to get them in here.

Do not underestimate the audience as part of the engine or as part of the explosions.

If you have one curator, you have one explosion. If you have more people involved in creating a program you can create more explosions. And if you can create more explosions this might be the start of your combustion engine that you want to go forward.

We accepted loss of control. It means partnerships where people bring in proposals that were not our own, bringing in artists who proposed projects that were not theirs but also bringing in other artists again. It was not about the idea of a curator who is on top of the machine and decides everything that comes in. No, we opened and sometimes this led to beautiful surprises and also — I have to be honest — disasters.

We take serendipity seriously.

That is what we call « focused programs ».They're basically the idea that combining the strength of a festival with the strength of a seasonal program. It means that we can program a bit further ahead and that we use the idea of a festival that we work topical, thematical. We use this combination of the two.

There's a very little art centers that are aware of this [digital] revolution. The main capacity we have today as art centers is our communication through the social media and I see a lot of art centers struggling with that.

Since I'm here we tried to provoke small explosions. Small people driven ways of changing things sometimes very simple sometimes a bit bigger but never revolutionary in itself but maybe the adding of up all these different explosions might be a bit of a revolution or at least a strong evolution.

I prefer to talk about small explosions rather than revolution.

[Art centers] They're not investing in bringing people together but they're investing enough in bringing art works together. And I think that's a mistake. It is in the first place about bringing people together.

By opening up [to external initiatives and projects] we didn't have to invent every format ourselves.

Can art save the world? My answer is very clear, very simple, very short—no. Then there is this another question, "Can art change the world?" and there my answer is very short as well, it's also no. But I do believe that people can change so in that sense if people can change and art can really change people then, there's some hope in the purpose of art.

We're not trying to build an audience, we're trying to build a community.