The following is a transcript of an interview with Olafur Eliasson, conducted at the Espoo Museum of Modern Art on February 7th, 2017. Some of the questions have been edited for brevity and clarity. A different version of the interview written in Swedish can be read here.

Helen Korpak: Do you enjoy these in-n-out interviews where people throw you generic questions? Is it a necessary evil or have you gotten used to it?

Olafur Eliasson: I enjoy the attention that people put into it and I also just think it's so important because I learn a lot when people ask me things... They obviously talk about themselves, and it's a great opportunity to see what people actually think about when they think about my work. I do enjoy it. It's a luxury to have the exposure that I have for the time being, so I try to take it seriously.

HK: Maybe it's scandinavian to be humble? I've written down what Pilvi [Kalhama, director of Espoo Museum of Modern Art] has said about you... she called you "one of the most remarkable artists of our time" and the first thing that popped into my mind was... what does it do to a person to constantly hear that?

OE: Actually remarkably little, because it does not make real life easier. I still have to take the kids to school and when my son has a problem at school, I still have to go and sit and talk to other parents... To be exposed in the culture sector, like I am, does not translate into a different set of rules in my private life. I guess sometimes some cultural people, maybe more in film, or in music, or in maybe in fashion, for them there is a more direct interlocking between the exposure they have and how the private life is shaped. The exposure I enjoy is the exposure of my work, not of me as a person... I try to deal with the exposure; I'm very involved with younger artists, and the importance of them not being eaten up by the art market -

 HK: Yeah, that's a huge problem that I've encountered...

OE: Yeah, so I think that's important and that's a place where I can use my exposure, I've also been trying to focus on the fact that there is a lot of great creative talent in parts of the world that the art market is much less involved in. I teach at the university in Addis Abeba in Ethiopia, and it is so rewarding and interesting, I learn so much from it, actually I'm the one being taught, you could say...

HK: Is it BA? Young, twenty-ish students?

OE: It's a mix of BA and MA. My class is actually an art class but the students of industrial design and the media students are also attending it. What we do is we just sit and talk, so it's not the French academic model, it's more a discussion-based way of teaching. My point is that I try to use my exposure here and there.

HK: You were quite young you were when you got your big break – culminating with the Weather Project at Tate Modern – how has it been to continue? Do you always feel an inner pressure of pushing yourself or leading your team towards grander things, or do you have some kind of zen inner peace? I mean for instance David Lynch, who me and all other pretentious kids loved when were seventeen or something...

[Eliasson laughs]

...he is always talking about transcendental meditation and about not having to suffer as an artist...

OE: I actually think David added that as a supplement later in his career...But the truth is that in my evolution I have never experienced these huge jumps in exposure. I represented Denmark at the Venice biennale and I had had museum shows before The Weather Project and you know, the people at the Tate, they don't invite totally unexposed artists, so within the cultural community I was already relatively exposed. What the Tate show meant was that suddenly I was exposed to a lot of people...

HK: So for you it's been quite organic?

OE: Yes, I've never had a kind of sudden success. What I did was when I was younger is that I hiked a lot in landscapes, so I did have some sense of large scale and space...

HK: That's interesting because I actually wanted to ask you if you hike.

OE: I used to, now I don't do as much, but I used to as a teenager, every summer I spent a lot of time hiking in Iceland. At first I was very interested in landscape design, then I went from that to urban planning and master planning and the ideology of master planning. I was very interested in the translation of humanistic values into urban planning and whether the private sector influenced planning and I read all kinds of things like Norwegian Norberg-Schulz. So when I was given the opportunity to work in large scale I had the structural tools to deal with that. In art school I more or less only learned to deal with paintings on a wall. My interest in landscape, city planning and architecture made me confident about large projects. So for instance when I was asked to show at the Tate I was not afraid at all. The piece was a hundred meters long and thirty meters tall. At the end of the day, that's not so big.

HK: Well it looks so epic in the pictures...

OE: Yes, it's big too, but it's not... I'm just saying it's a question of one's tool box. And of course the risk... beause it's so exposed the risk is quite high. And that freaks me out sometimes. Because suddenly you are on a platform where eventually if you make a mistake you can't close it down. It's not like a film which is over after two hours and then people will hopefully forget it soon... So that is annoying but the scale itself is not.

HK: So what enables a young artist, as you were, to start working on such a scale... Also economically? A few weeks ago I attended a public lecture by Elmgreen and Dragset. What startled me during their talk was how quickly after starting to work together they were doing it on a huge scale.

OE: I think if you look at their work and at my work, that what we have in common is that none of the bigger works are very expensive. I think there's a tradition in large works where there is a ton of money involved and also the price of the works are high... And of course that comes with the influence of the American art market and... you know, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin... they paved price structures and the budget of Jeff Koons. My generation with Michael [Elmgreen] and Ingar [Dragset], we are the plasterboard generation, we built our works ourselves out of this material [knocks on museum wall]. It's all from the hardware store. So if you look at the first ten years... With the Weather Project I was the only Turbine Hall-exhibiting artist at the Tate Modern who had made a project within the budget, and I even had money left over for the catalogue. Because it was just a piece of plastic with yellow lights behind and a smoke machine, and mirrors, and the budget – I think it was 250,000 pounds – was enormous for the time. So the thing is, I don't think that scale and cost are necessarily related... I just think it's a little more complex. But I do think that young artists are subconsciously fulfilling the wish of the market for commodified and objectified art.

HK: Absolutely. Everybody I know is struggling with that.

OE: Yes. And the thing is, this generation with Michael and Ingar, it's not that we went up against that and went against it. The truth is that I started art school in the peak of an economic crash, and in the very early nineties and throughout the nineties there just was not any art market. I even had a gallery in Berlin called neugerriemschneider, with whom I still work, and the concept of selling a work of art was not there. We might as well just totally experiment. Everybody at the gallery had part-time jobs elsewhere. And so it often sounds as though I worked against the market... but I just did not even have a market. So this means that when the crisis came in 2007 I was not really influenced by it because for me it's like the fourth or third or whatever... So the great challenge for young artists is this normalized presence of the market and how it influences the artist even in art school. It's really very very difficult because it blinds them and they don't see that there is such a richness and opportunity in not having to fulfill the demand. And so one thing is, I think, to also look for alternative spaces and alternative economical models such as artist association-powered systems. And not just doing it in an elitist way but to be very active with reaching out and writing to people and doing inclusive types of work: street performances, street activity... When I had my art school in Berlin for five years I made a huge effort in teaching on the street at least once a week. The educational methodology represented my interest in urban planning and psychosocial experiences. I just mean that the art schools... Essentially it comes down to quality. The art schools fail to upgrade themselves and work against the influence of the art market. This is a big and longer discussion...

HK: I think it's very nice to hear you say this, because I can definitely see influence of this in your work. And that's also why it appeals to such a broad audience - which I think is a wonderful thing. When looking at art I sometimes think about what I would have liked when I was a child, because I still remember some exhibitions I saw as a kid and how excited they made me and I think that's a very relevant thing... I saw your solo exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2015 and I really like your works that don't incorporate very fancy expensive materials. Like the yellow room [Room for one colour], or the fact that you work with glass. For me you work with ideas rather than with expensive materials and that brings me a lot of joy. But I wanted to ask you about a text I read in a Swedish magazine written before your show at Moderna. In the article you were criticized for not talking about your works in an academic way, and for not answering when questioned about why you created a rainbow in the early nineties ...

OE: Did I not?

HK: At least this guy in Sweden wrote so. And I thought it was an interesting article, because as a museum visitor I often get irritated by texts that explain everything, and I fail to grasp the point of spelling everything out. How do you respond to this kind of critique from angry academics?

OE: I think I should be criticized, and I also make mistakes, it would be wrong to say that I don't. I think I follow what inspires me. And sometimes that brings me into more academic work and sometimes I am utterly and totally unacademic, I will admit to that in an instant. But I think that I swing back and forth on a hinge. I'm interested in a kind of jazzy version of academia, which allows me to tiptoe through what I find interesting. And I can see why a really reductionistic approach might find that somewhat superficial. But I'm very interested in the informality of things. When I went to school, Deleuze was so trendy, and that influenced me a lot. The more hardcore Foucault-people, the post-structural disciples, they always bashed me or hit me with the October magazine. They were less... jazzy, you could say. When I had the show at Versailles last year I immediately looked for the great student of Deleuze, Christine Glucksmann, who wrote a book in the eighties on the ephemeral of the baroque. It's called something else in French. She introduced this idea of a relativistic idea of the baroque. So I reached out, and through her voice I could feel the vibrations of how Deleuze had inspired me when I was younger, and that inspired my show at Versailles. She's one of the great women in French academia. Just last night I went to the ballet in Paris to see the piece for which I did the stage set [Tree of Codes] at the Palais Garnier and I invited her to go with me. She's like eighty years old and doesn't speak English, and I don't speak French, so basically we could just sit and hold hands and that's the kind of typical academic relationship for me... I can hold hands with her because I care for her, for all her work. So I have a hands-on and a very pragmatic direct relationship with academia. It's a great source of inspiration for me. So I don't think that I'm an un-academic, I just don't... yeah.

HK: Yeah. I think our time is up...

OE: This was great, great questions, I'm sorry we can't talk longer.

HK: Thank you.