With The House That Jack Built, Rirkrit Tiravanija — born in Buenos Aires in 1961 and long suspended between New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai — does not simply construct an environment; he fractures the very idea of the artwork. Since the 1990s, his practice has progressively shifted the axis of art: from object to relation, from contemplation to participation, from closed form to a process that remains constitutively open.
The title offers a false lead, brushing against the imaginary of Lars von Trier, yet it is rooted in a cumulative nursery rhyme in which each element exists only in relation to what follows. It is an additive, unstable logic, translated spatially into the labyrinth installed at the Hangar. One does not enter to see, but to lose oneself: the path does not organize, it disorients.
Tiravanija extends and radicalizes a research that for decades has challenged traditional categories — installation, performance, sculpture — dissolving them into a hybrid field where everything is potentially active. The visitor is no longer a spectator but an implicated presence, a body that traverses and, in traversing, transforms. In this sense, the work is never given once and for all: it happens, it shifts, it is continuously negotiated.
The labyrinth thus becomes an existential figure before it is an architectural one. There is no center, nor any hierarchy among the installations scattered along the path. Each element is a fragment pointing elsewhere: stratified cultural identities, mobile geographies, global systems that infiltrate the perception of space. Tiravanija operates within a constant tension between the reality and the imagination of places, dismantling the idea of a stable “inside” to inhabit.
This destabilization finds a counterpoint in everyday practices, long central to his work. Here too, that dimension quietly resurfaces: the act of lingering, of sharing, of moving together through space. As in his well-known convivial situations — cooking, eating, temporarily inhabiting a common space — art becomes an occasion for encounters traversed by cultural and ethical differences that are not resolved, but exposed.
From this perspective, the exhibition also configures itself as a silent critique of Western institutional frameworks: it does not attack them directly, but empties them from within, restoring to objects and actions a vitality that the exhibition apparatus tends to neutralize. The work is no longer something to be legitimized, but a tool for reactivating relations, for reopening possibilities.
The daily performances further inscribe this instability. They are not ancillary events, but moments in which the entire system is reconfigured. On Friday, April 17, the presence of Giotto Orsini introduced a hypnotic vibration that traversed the labyrinth like an invisible current. His music, repetitive and overwhelming, did not accompany the path: it deformed it.
Sound became immaterial architecture. Walls lost their solidity, turning into porous surfaces, crossed by waves. The visitor’s body, in turn, ceased to be a fixed point: it entered into resonance, dispersing into another temporality, slower and denser.
Here the existential stakes of Tiravanija’s work emerge with clarity: to inhabit does not mean to possess a space, but to expose oneself to a continuous redefinition of the self. The house evoked by the title is not a refuge, but a precarious condition, a construction always on the verge of undoing itself.
One exits the labyrinth without having found orientation. Yet perhaps this is precisely the most radical form of awareness the work offers: there is no stable center from which to view the world. There is only a shared and unstable passage, in which art does not represent reality, but unsettles it.
And from here one can enter the permanent installation by Anselm Kiefer, The Seven Heavenly Palaces — but that is another story… not to be missed.
