Rirkrit Tiravanija’s retrospective The House That Jack Built transforms the Navate of Pirelli HangarBicocca into an open, living architectural environment. Visitors move through a vast scaffold structure draped in bright orange fabric, where spaces for resting, gathering, cooking, and play invite them to complete the work through shared experience.
How deeply can the crossing of cultures, languages, and geographies shape an artist’s work? In the case of Rirkrit Tiravanija, profoundly. Born in Buenos Aires in 1961 to Thai parents, raised between Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada, and now working between New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai, Tiravanija embodies a form of multiculturalism that is not simply autobiographical but foundational. His nomadic background enables him to move fluidly across media (video, performance, architecture, installation), transforming every space into a site of relation.
RELATIONAL AESTHETICS AS SHARED ENCOUNTER
Since the 1990s, Tiravanija has been a key figure of the relational aesthetics identified by Nicolas Bourriaud. His works do not aim for the finished object but for the situations they trigger: cooking pad thai for strangers, sharing a meal, gathering around a table. For Tiravanija, art does not represent: it unfolds. It arises through encounter, unpredictability, and everyday gestures elevated into collective rituals.
LABYRINTHS THAT SLOW US DOWN AND REORIENT US
At Pirelli HangarBicocca, The House That Jack Built leads visitors into a maze of orange curtains inspired by Kubrick’s The Shining. Here, however, disorientation is not a threat but a technique. The labyrinth slows the pace, forces decisions, and encourages unexpected encounters. This “Buddhist” maze (the color choice is no accident) becomes a gateway to a world where architecture, action, and human presence intertwine in fluid and unpredictable ways.
ARCHITECTURES TO BE USED RATHER THAN OBSERVED
Curated by Lucia Aspesi and Vicente Todolí, the exhibition brings together the most extensive selection of Tiravanija’s architectural works to date. The artist reinterprets iconic modernist structures by Le Corbusier, Jean Prouvé, Sigurd Lewerentz, Rudolf Schindler, Carlo Scarpa, and Philip Johnson, not as formal tributes but as open platforms. Their original functions dissolve. What remains is a space designed to be inhabited, activated, and transformed through use.
THE PUBLIC AS THE WORK’S MATERIAL
Several of the works’ technical captions include an unusual entry: “a lot of people.” This is not a joke but a conceptual stance. Without bodies, gestures, and shared time, the exhibition is incomplete. Working kitchens, play areas, musical instruments, rest zones, recording studios, and even a reconstruction of the artist’s home operate only when activated by visitors. Every movement, encounter, or conversation reshapes the exhibition.
A HOUSE THAT BELONGS TO THOSE WHO PASS THROUGH IT
Borrowed from the cumulative English nursery rhyme, the exhibition’s title evokes a structure built through successive additions. The show works similarly: it forms itself through presence, relation, and the unexpected. Tiravanija does not build a “house” as an object but as a process, a dwelling that belongs to no one because it belongs to everyone who inhabits it, even briefly. Leaving HangarBicocca, one senses the exhibition continues to live on in the people who helped build it.
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