Objects always meet your obsession. Once you have an obsession, you step on it at every corner.
Art is a way of taking distance. The pathological or therapeutic aspects exist, but just as catalysts.
I traveled for seven years, and when I came back home I was completely lost. I didn't know what to do with my life, so I decided to let people decide for me. For month I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following, not because the party interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, and finally lost sight of them. At the end of January 1980, I chose a man and followed him to Venice. That's how I started. That's all.
I try every time for a project to have a natural ending. As much as I can, I try to follow the story and to give it its own end.
I know how I live my life. I have a little magnet brain that attracts the kind of things that obsess me.
I don't care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read.
At my age, I know myself. If I make a project, it's a way to help me. I don't do it for therapeutic reasons, but I know that the therapy can be a side profit.
For 'The Hotel' I spent one year to find the hotel, I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frame...it's the last thought in the process.
In April 1981, at my request, my mother went to a detective agency. She hired them to follow me, to report my daily activities, and to provide photographic evidence of my existence.
I went to Istanbul. I spoke to blind people, most of whom had lost their sight suddenly. I asked them to describe the last thing they saw.
I made three works about men in my life. But I had much more than three men. I never wrote about them.
I met a photographer who agreed to give me a few lessons; in exchange, I had to pose naked for him.
I think I've never left my house to take a plane without writing my will. There must be about 30 wills in my drawers, everywhere, in the kitchen. Everywhere, I have wills because I write wills more easily than I write love letters.
My mother was a very absent mother. She was going out, she was drinking a lot, she liked to have fun. It's fine with me. I have no bitterness about it. When I was 3, she went to America for months. I never had any problems with that. I even liked it.
I didn't go to the North Pole to do something about my mother. I was invited to the North Pole and I realized it was impossible to go there without thinking about her.
