Manifesta 12: Palermo

“I will never do it again”

In recent years, you have tested the consequences of the artist as celebrity. ​How did you experience the difference in quality between the original performance of “Relation” with Ulay from 1977, when you sat watching each other in a museum space for 17 hours, and “The Artist is Present”, your 11-week-long performance at MoMA in 2010?

“Art has an incredibly important role in the revolution”

They speak with calm, soft voices; their lectures are lessons in clarity. One senses that their talks are more grounded in actual concerns than those given by their European colleagues. To participate in the “Artists Organisations International” conference at Berlin’s HAU theatre, calligrapher Mazou Ibrahim Touré had to take a four-day car trip through the desert to Ouagadougou in neighbouring Burkina Faso, where he waited for a month and a half to get his German visa. He couldn’t go to the public authorities in Mali, since he fights against the Malian state as a member of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). Kolja Reichert sat down with Touré and the poet Moussa Ag Assarid to talk about the role of art in nation-building.