Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have collaborated since 1995. Their art fuses the legacy of 1960s and 1970s institutional critique with sexual and identity politics. In their Powerless Structures, often taking the form of sculptural installations, the “white cube” of the gallery space has been sunk into the ground, suspended from the ceiling, reproduced at ninety per cent scale, and opened up to other artists. Many of these works have actually been situated outside of the gallery or institution altogether, such as their Cruising Pavilion / Powerless Structures, Fig. 55, 1998. A park in Aarhus, Denmark, became the site of a gay cruising pavilion; its form mimicking the architecture of galleries while mixing private with public and bringing before visitors the activities that are often conducted in parks, however surreptitiously. I spoke with the artists via e-mail during May 2003.

Brian Sholis: Your decision to move to Berlin was a conscious one, and it coincided with the city's emergence as a contemporary art center. What prompted the move and why did you decide on Berlin over cities like London, Paris, or New York?

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset: Well, first of all we have always been a bit lazy; Berlin was right next to Copenhagen (only 375 kilometers), where we used to live. Working as visual artists and also being a gay couple, the context of the Scandinavian art scene had become a bit claustrophobic for us. It was not exactly as liberated there as it might appear from an outsider's perspective, especially not if you, as a gay man, had to do your stuff within the very macho-dominated art scene of the post 1980's Denmark. There were few progressive art institutions and we began to know them all a bit too well. So we were looking for some new inspiration and energy, some new challenges. Rents and living costs were extremely inexpensive in Berlin around 1997 when we first moved to the city. Berlin Mitte was still a total shithole, full of squat houses, illegal clubs and small alternative galleries. Nobody really had a clue about how the city would develop or what it would turn into; the entire urban structure was chaotic and open-ended. It was quite a relief when we first arrived here from the hyper-organized Scandinavian society, where anyone thinks that the world is about to go under if the bus is five minutes late.

In 1999, we had a residency in New York and were seriously considering staying there—we made so many fantastic friends—but today we are quite happy that we decided to move back to Berlin. The Berlin scene seems more concentrated on content and dialogue than the scene in New York. The artists here support each other in a different way; it's not so competitive. Somehow the art community in Berlin has kept its innocence whereas it can be hard to find a gallery show in Chelsea that is not just a “wrap-to-go” kind of show.

BJS: The flourishing contemporary art scene in Berlin mimics a structural transformation of the city unparalleled since post-WWII reconstruction efforts. How has the changing cityscape affected your artistic practice? How do power dynamics in the city of Berlin affect your thinking about the Powerless Structures?

ME & ID: The title of our ongoing series of works Powerless Structures is derived from our misreading Foucault. He speaks about how the structures themselves can impose no power—only the way we deal with them. The structures as such only reflect the public opinion and any structure could in fact at any point be altered or interchanged with a new set of structures. As a new or rather re-born capital, Berlin was undergoing a transition that gave the city a specific dynamic: it was probably triggered by a general confusion among the decision-makers since no one really knew what to do with a city that had doubled in size overnight. It was as if the regular control mechanisms had broken down. Even today the city planning is rather out of control in both good and in bad ways. Many temporary spaces have made important contributions to the cultural landscape here; venues open, close, and move to other locations all the time. These nomadic tendencies have certainly had an impact on our work and on our ideas of a more flexible public infrastructure.

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