The Gay Science

project Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon, London, Great Britain
written by Alan Kostrenčić

 

What constitutes your reality?
What do you believe in?
What do you believe in, but cannot prove?
Where do colours come from?

 

It’s nice to talk like everyone else, to say that the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking.[2]

 

Sunny Saturday morning in Hyde Park was not exactly what I imagined as a typical English setting; the feel was quite like Zagreb’s Maksimir back home. Instead of a gloomy BBC murder TV show atmosphere and London fog, I was welcomed by a scurry of very domesticated squirrels (or was this the doing of the blueberries they ate there?) with unusually thin tails, which hopped around undisturbed by visitors. Approaching the Serpentine Gallery from the north, I could see this year’s “summer” pavilion quietly emerge behind tree crowns. Its authors are artist Olafur Eliasson, who gained planetary renown due to his giant sun installation called the The Weather Project for the Tate Modern, and architect Kjetil Thorsen[3].

 

 


[2] Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus

[3] Every year the Serpentine Gallery invites architects from abroad, who have not yet had a chance to build in Great Britain, to make a temporary pavilion. For last year's pavilion designed by Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, see Oris 44/07.