Excerpted from Hans-Ulrich Oberts’s comments in Foci: Interviews with Ten International Curators:

“Alighiero e Boetti is a pioneer of the idea of the exhibition as a network, and he anticipated the artist’s practice as both a global and a local one. He exhibited on an airliner, with the assistance of the Museum in Progress [Vienna], and he worked with art that was sent through the mail, as an exchange with different communities. But mostly he propelled me to think about artists’ unrealized projects. These are the most interesting. They could not happen within the often narrow parameters of exhibition conventions. This brings us back to the importance of listening to the infinite conversations with artists and architects and other practitioners whose unrealized projects can be a good point of departure.

“…there was a moment when artists were longing for such laboratory situations, not only within museums but outside of them. It’s not that these things were invented in the 90s. They took place in the 60s, but they were forgotten. In the beginning of the 90s there was a desire on the artists’ part to show their work differently, and now this has become a more frequent occurrence. An exhibition can take place in an elevator, a hotel, anywhere; it is the rule of the game, no longer a shift.”