Olafur Eliasson on Mistakes

Olafur Eliasson Courtesy of Olafur Eliasson Studio, Berlin“When I took the lamp to Africa two years ago, my partner and I were testing it. It’s a cool story, we tested it, it was more functional, not a very pretty, a quite daunting looking, light. We made one big mistake, we said: “Look, we have done this really functional thing for poor people.” People said: “a) I think it’s ugly and b) I am not poor.” We realised how wrong we were to come into a country like this and say: “you are poor...