Tiravanija teaches a course at New York’s Columbia School of the Arts titled ‘Making Without Objects’, which introduces students to his 30-year career of staging happenings and engineering social interactions, from banquets to pirate radio stations and other activities loosely deemed ‘relational aesthetics’. ‘I don’t make art if I don’t have to… but in the process of not doing anything, I think about what is going on around me,’ he explained this year. His retrospective DAS GLÜCK IST NICHT IMMER LUSTIG (Happiness is not always fun) at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, which closed in January (other shows include solos at Gammel Strand, Copenhagen, and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris), did have some objects – including a selection of rarely shown Super 8 films – but more typical was untitled 1996 (rehearsal studio no. 6, open version), a kitted-out rehearsal studio that anyone could record music in. His commitment to not producing has an increasingly ecological interpretation, so it comes as no surprise that the artist is also president of the educational-environmental project The Land Foundation, located in Chiang Mai, Thailand.