My name Not Vital. And it is not pronounced not vital. My name is not out of function or not alive it is a very common Romansh name, Not, and Romansh is the fourth national language of Switzerland spoken by only about 36,000 people and the roots are Latin, its actually vulgar Latin to be exact, but I don’t want to talk about languages here. I am a sculptor and painter, and since 2009 I have a studio in Caochangdi, but I also live in other places. And what I want to talk to you today,is and why you invited me, is to share a great passion of mine I have had since I was young. I went to school in a tiny village called Sent, Graubünden and school consisted of five months of vacation that meant from April to October I didn’t have to go school. And, during this long summer period my main occupation was to build huts or tree houses in the woods with materials found and sometimes stolen in the village. These constructions needed to be quite sophisticated also in its simplicity because the climate up in the mountains is very harsh and if you wanted to spend the nights up in the trees these tree houses needed to be quite well built. Later on when I read The Baron in the Trees by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, it was somehow that I had already lived through that. When you grow up you tend to forget about these passionate moments of your youth, you still realize dreams, you build houses, but not with the same passion that you did when you were a kid because you need permission, you need loans, you need restrictions, and you can easily spoil the pleasure of building. I was lucky to be able to return to these passionate moments again when I went to the Sahara desert in Niger. I went to a town called Agadez. Not knowing much about this town, but since I’d been traveling and I am still traveling a lot I was attracted by nomadic people and their two main tribes in Niger, the Tuareg and the Berber. I arrived in Agadez at the end of November, late at night and went to the hotel to L'Aubergwhich is the only hotel in town. I rose like all Africans, early in the morning and left the school only to walk to into a bazaar which was installed at the entrance door early that day. The Tuaregs already knew of the arrival of a white man and wanted to make some business selling their silver jewelry, that is what they are famous for. I told them I was not so interested in buying jewelry, but rather in to purchasing a piece of land so I could build a house. Part of the problem, that’s usually the quick answer and they led me to a hill in the southern part of town in Agadez, and they could see immediately my interest in the place. And they called the owner of this land and the price was right and by 9’o clock in the morning the deal was already made. I made a small drawing of how my house could look like and a few hours later men arrived with shovels, picks, and also shiny eyes. I showed my drawing to them but they ignored it completely because they don’t draw. So I traced the outlines of the house with my feet directly in the sand and work began. I made a small model out of cow dung and handed it to them. And they saw that my house had three stories, and no house in Agadez exceeds two floors. But no complaints were made, on the contrary, they seemed to embrace this challenge. The house grew fast, the clay arrived from outside of town, sand, since you are in the dessert, is everywhere, and straw and dung was added and mixed with water by dancing bare-footed men. Bricks were formed and laid in the strong African sun. The first house was finished quite fast with a large room of sixteen by sixteen meters, five meters tall, on the second floor a bedroom with four doors in each direction and on the top we have a small room that you can watch when the planes arrive and that happens once a week. This big room is cool and windy and some people use it to drink tea or to rest or also sometimes to pray. The whole construction measures thirteen meters. Next to this house I added seven rooms to house the arrival of my friends. I wanted to share my Saharan dream with them but they never arrived, so I used a different room every day of the week to sleep in. As you can see all the walls are surrounded by cow horns, the slaughterhouse in Agadez is in the center of town. And all parts of the animal are used but the horns. So they burn them and the smell is so intense that I decided to have a boy collect them every morning and bring them to the house and place all these cow horns around the walls. The house is called mekafoni, and that means in Tamasheq, that’s the language of the Tuaregs, the house of horns. I didn’t know at the time that when the house was finished, the workers didn’t leave but they stayed on to take care of the house like a newborn who needs care. After the rains a new skin or a new layer needs to be added to the walls. Since Agadez is the first in the city from the capital of Niger called Niamey, and Niger is among the poorest countries in the world. I don’t have to describe to you how the local school looked like. You can just imagine. So I decided to build a school next to the mekafoni. The school needed a lot of sitting places since there are so many children, and so I built this pyramidal form allows all students to sit on it. At the beginning there were a hundred fifty and they covered a quarter of the building. The school is on a hill and has a nice view and it’s windy and cool. It attracted over the years almost four times as many pupils so the school house is completely covered with children. It is a kinetic sculpture made of children who sing, who cry and shout, and pray. I must say it’s a very touching sight to watch this daily activity unfold in front of you. The inside of the house can be used to sleep or recover from the rain or heat, the school is called Makaranta, I’m not a man on a mission or sent on a mission to Africa to help, I’m not. But I do believe that our duty also an artist is to be more engaged and to pay more attention to the problems of the third world. I have always been involved since the 90’s with projects like, for example, building a burn unit in Katmandu for children. Since I’m not an industrialist I have to subsidize these projects with my artwork. I must say it gives me enormous satisfaction, not being a trained architect to construct a school building, I could not even dream of building a school in Switzerland or in the US or in other parts of Europe with all the regulations, but in Agadez I can. The pleasure is mine and of course also the children. So it gives me this phenomenal opportunity to build something that in most places in the world would be refused to me. As Nietzsche said “Friendship is not giving but taking”, so I take, and so do the children in Agadez. Since all the workers, and there were fifty five of them needed work and I wanted to, so I continued to build. I purchased an oasis about five km north of Agadez in a place next to a river called Koori, I’ve never seen a drop of water in this river, its only during the hot summer months, during the rainy season that the river carries water. That is the time which is too hot for me to go there as temperatures reach over 40 degrees. The first house was this house to watch the moon and the sky. It’s a solid construction of mud and mud bricks and its six and half meters high. You can reach the top by an outside ladder and it requires concentration to lay on top of this house without falling because the space is very narrow on the top and therefore you increase your concentration also to view the night sky. I tell my friends in Europe in the US about this experience and me spending hours every evening on top of this house to look at the sky and they look at me like I’m an idiot. The next construction is a house against sandstorms and heat. This structure also measures thirteen meters and has a high a narrow entrance and a small opening on the top of the building, enough to let the hot air escape and to prevent sand from being blown into the house. The metal rods sticking out from all sides are both for attaching ladders when you need to climb the house when you need to apply a new layer of mud to the surface but also for decoration. I place,every time I go there, something different in these holes. Here you see brooms sticking out of the tower as they would clean the air when the wind blows sand with extreme speed through the desert. For every one of you who has been to Africa I don’t have to describe the intensity of the sunsets and it’s also very fast. In no time it becomes dark. It’s a daily spectacle that cannot be missed. And because I’m in an oasis surrounded by palm trees I had to build a tower from which I am able to have a frontal view of this spectacle. So I built this tower, but this time it was four stories. In the entire country of Niger there is no building with four floors made totally of mud. That caused a tremendous excitement amongst the workers and there are no engineers amongst the Agadez either. I was called names meaning he’s going crazy. A small model was done and work began. The rooms measured three by three by three meters, just big enough for a bed a table and a chair. The first floor doesn’t have any windows, just a door and that’s the kitchen and the food storage. The second floor has one door and one window, third one door and two windows, and the fourth, has three windows and one door. There are large stairs leading up to each room, and holding up the tower, otherwise this tower would not be able to stand, because there is no cement, it’s all just dirt. So each floor can only be reached by outside stairs and that provides each room with privacy. The whole building is again thirteen meters, and the big stairs leading to the west where the sun sets, has more than fifty five thousand bricks that were sun dried on the side. And I must say that when the house was finished and I spent the first night in it after seeing the sunset over the dessert I was unable to sleep. The emotions were too intense. If the next day or the day after, two days after, if the house would have collapsed, I would not have been devastated. It would have made sense to build this tower even if it was to spend only one night in it. I invited some of my friends, artists to come to the oasis, one Richard Long, who when sitting one night on the steps watching the sun go down presented me with a structure of the sun. It’s a concentric circle of sun dried bricks and it his biggest sculpture, it is thirty meters in diameter. I only realized the purity of this tower when it was finished, there is not one element that needed to be added or needs to be removed from the building, and therefore in itself pure. That’s when I had the idea of building one of these buildings to watch the sunset on every continent, not unlike the U.S. who builds military bases on each continent. For the Americas it is on an island that I could find in Patagonia in Chile, there, there is a tunnel that has been excavated fifty meters in the island and from a small window to the west you have a spectacular view of the sun setting over glaciers. The island is formed of white marble and the floor is one piece of marble fifty meters long. For Asia I tried for a long a time to get land in Yangzhou, in Guangxi, and since two months I found a place on the island of Flores in Indonesia and from that house the sun sets will be seen over three volcanos. In Australia it’s going to be a mobile structure that can be moved on the Australian desert. And for Europe it’s going to be in Sweden in Göteborg. I learned during my projects in Africathat by involving local people to such challenges you also give them hope, you give them strength and you give them trust. We need to understand that by helping Africa with money donations alone is like pissing in the wind. By being there and building and working and dreaming for and with them using their own materials and giving them challenges is what makes the difference I believe. It works in favor of both sides even though it’s as basic as making a house just to watch the sunset. When a few years ago the city of Agadez was flooded by heavy rains I was told that people ran up to this house with sandbags to protect this house and when they were asked why they did this, they said, this is the best we have. What a compliment. Montaigne was said that to live is to learn to die. If our lives were to last forever there would be always sunsets to be watched, but since that it not the case, each sunset is very special, because it could be the last one. Since there are three brothers in my African family I built the Notonkan house for them so each brother has his own entrance to the room, but they can also meet in the center courtyard. This is another house it’s a house about fifty km south of Agadez in a Tigatid, on a mountain. It’s a house which is carved out of rock. It’s like a suit tailored for me. It has an entrance and it has an exit. And it’s so tight that I can sleep upright, standing up. And there are more projects planned in town which is in need of just about everything. One project is to build a museum to house dinosaurs as a there special species of dinosaurs only found in the surroundings of this town. Another place is to make a place drink tea, as tea is most valuable to the Tuaregs and to the Berbers. And a third one, a third project is to build a place to play football. Thank you for listening, and thanks to let me share my African dream with you.