"In a group, the exchanges are always between the same people, whereas in collaborations, it's occasional: the associations are temporary and more diverse, they disappear and reappear, taking on new forms elsewhere, producing singular situations. Discussion has become an important moment in the constitution of a project; you can enter or leave it at any moment, which also affects the modes of production and allows you to escape a rigid and monomaniacal way of thinking. (...)
"We all have a relationship to the group that varies in intensity. It starts with the groups that form at school, the little gangs, then you never cease moving from group to group, and you keep fine-tuning your relationships with each one; that way you are paradoxically independent and attached at the same time. (...)
"[The group that I began working with in the '80s] didn't have so much to do with the ideological dimension [of the groups of the '70s] as with the dynamics. There were six or seven of us doing interventions in public space. It was a very short experience, but enough to see the limits of a collective, whereas with collaborations, a re-negotiation is always possible. It's a way to keep on learning. When you ground yourself in one form of knowledge, you domesticate it, you polish it. But knowledge should remain rough. To remain that way it has to be fed by a continuous dialogue."
- Pierre Huyghe, in Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews Vol. 1.
END LOS ANGELES
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