My Bedside Table: The Curator

I like morning rituals: They’re a way of liberating time when you’re not online yet. The artist Paul Chan calls it “delinking,” which is super-important in an ever-connected world. Every morning when I wake up I read the late French Martinican writer Édouard Glissant for 15 minutes. He is a great inspiration. The morning hours and the moments before sleeping are the best moments to read.

“I like morning rituals: They’re a way of liberating time when you’re not online yet”

I don’t sleep very much. I once tried the da Vinci sleep schedule (also known as the polyphasic method), which means sleeping for 15 minutes every 3 to 4 hours 7 to 8 times a day, but it didn’t prove to be sustainable or productive. Now I always go to bed at midnight and get up really, really, really early, around 5 a.m.

When I moved to London in 2006, I introduced one more morning ritual with urbanist Markus Miessen: It’s called the Brutally Early Club. It can be difficult to find time to gather with friends—artists, architects, scientists—so we’d meet in a café at 6:30 a.m. to talk. Nobody can say they have a prior engagement at that time! It’s a way to get everybody together when the city is completely empty.

Another one of my rituals is going to a bookstore and buying a book every day, so there are always books everywhere: on the bedside table, in the kitchen, piled in the office, even at my parents’ house. There are at least 15 of them in my bedroom at one time.

I spend quite a lot of time in hotels. I was a freelance curator in the ’90s and traveled the world living a nomadic existence. The curation of a bedroom is still very important, even when traveling. When you’re basically never home, you start thinking about bedside tables differently. I always have magazines and books piled on them, and I love hotel stationery: It gets put in a suitcase, goes to the next city, then to the next city, and then ends up at home. I sometimes even go to a hotel to work in my own city because I can get distracted if I’m surrounded by too many things. Hotels give me new constraints.

Wherever I am, I always seem to have Post-it notes nearby. Curating is about junction-making and bringing things, people and objects together. So I put ideas on Post-its and put them all over the place—windows, furniture, wherever—so that they somehow enter new junctions. They help me sort out my own thoughts. I’ve started writing a diary, and I record myself for 10 or 15 minutes on a voice recorder too, so I always have one of them near me. I often lose pens and pencils, so the ones I have are always changing.

Apart from that, I have very little by my bed. I used to have an alarm clock, but now I use my phone for that. I don’t have a specific reading light, but I do have one of Olafur Eliasson’s Little Suns, which are small solar lamps that he helped design.

I’ve always thought I have a good work-life balance because I’ve always done the work I’ve wanted to do. But it’s not all about work. There’s a lot of liberated time in the day: a time for reading, writing, conversation and for being with friends.

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