“Art is a form of hope”. Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist

This is the story of a chase that was actually born out of a misunderstanding. A two-stage encounter with Venice as the backdrop, which is actually the protagonist in turn. While torrential rains and river floods devastate central Italy, paralyzing everything else, the sun suddenly appears in the lagoon. Hans Ulrich Obrist – one of the most famous curators of contemporary art and artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery – he is also in town for the Architecture Biennale which for the 18th edition is directed by Lesley Lokko, but is nowhere to be found. Call after call, but of HUO (I’ll call it that for convenience) no trace. “One of my obsessions – he writes in his new book What is art for? (Marsilio), written with Gianluigi Ricuperati – has always been about arriving in a city and, through new encounters, learning everything there is to know, and then moving to another place”. So I try to imagine him like this: a “pilgrim”, as he has defined himself several times, looking for things to learn. I hope to find him at some event or at one of the many dinners that overlap (rather than pleasantly follow one another) in Venice at that time or cross him on the street, on a bridge or in a calle, but nothing. HUO is there, many have seen it, but it can’t be found.