The Global Need for Collaboration

In 1996 Nicolas Bourriaud (1996) proposed the concept of a relational aesthetics in order to identify the common artistic practices that were evident in the exhibition Traffic. He subsequently claimed that the a interhuman sphere: relationships between people, communities, individuals, groups, social networks, interactivity that existed in the work of artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Maurizio Cattelan, Gabriel Orozco, Dominique Gonzalez-Forester, Rikrit Tiravanija, Vanessa Beecroft and Liam Gillick, was expressive of an emerging and compelling trajectory within the international scene (Bourriaud, 2002b). The following year curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru launched an open-ended exhibition called Cities on the Move. They proposed a model in which the exhibition would be reinvented in each location. Their aim was to face the dramatic changes in urban development by combining architectural methods for the exhibition design and collaborations between artists and architects.