Ottmann: You live very removed from the world. How do you feel coming to a place like New York?

Laib: For me the choice is to live outside of a village. I really want to be independent from a situation, a city. I feel that living in a city makes you more or less dependent on what the actual situation and the actual thinking is, and I hope to be outside of that, to be more independent. Then when I come into the city, into different cities, nowhere really is my home. I can see and watch these things much better from the outside. I’m not really belonging anywhere and this gives me, I hope, an incredible freedom. Also, when you live in a place like New York, where you see all this art around you and you go to all these exhibitions, I think that’s very bad. I can do that for two or three days but not all the time.