rescuers say it may take months to finally free the twelve boys and one adult, who've been trapped in a cave in thailand for ten days. they're now trying to work out how best to bring them to safety: if enough water can't be pumped out, they'll need to dive through flooded tunnels to escape. the president—elect of mexico says he's already spoken by phone to president trump about his plan to boost the mexican economy, and cut down on migration. andres manuel lopez obrador has previously been publicly very critical of president trump. he won a decisive victory in sunday's presidential election. germany's interior minister horst seehofer has withdrawn a threat to resign, after talks with chancellor angela merkel. he said they'd reached agreement on tougher border controls. mrs merkel made a deal with other eu leaders to process the high numbers of migrants arriving from north africa. now on bbc news, it's hardtalk with the artist michael rakowitz. welcome to hardtalk.

i'm stephen sackur. the best art helps us to see and feel in new ways. it can challenge and provoke. my guest today has made it his mission to test the boundaries of what we think of as art. michael rakowitz uses sculpture, installation and site specific experience to transmit a vision which reflects his iraqi—jewish heritage and preoccu pations, which range from war to family to food. he's won plaudits around the world. what does his work tell us about the state we're in? michael rakowitz,

welcome to hardtalk. thank you, stephen, thanks for having me. it's a great pleasure to have you. it seems to me, in your work, there is a duality. you are an american kid, stroke american man, yet you seem intensely conscious of your heritage that comes — certainly from your grandmother's side — from iraq. why is that duality so important to you? well, it became important when it went from being something that was so normal to being something that seemed so paradoxical for people. i grew up in a house where my grandmother and my grandfather on my mum's side and my mum had come from iraq via bombay to the united states in 1946, and i grew up in a house where it wasn't at all odd to hear my mother and my grandmother

talking in arabic in the kitchen and to smell the spices that were being used when they were making kibbeh or mashi, which is dolma in the iraquewish dialect. and to have that emanate into the living room where, you know, sometimes there were family gatherings where there were songs that came from the iraquewish community, and the melange that existed there at the time was that the musicians werejewish and the singers were coming from koranic tradition, from the islamic community. and so, it was like a bridge that i didn't realise i was hearing but it sounded so normal, it felt so normal. and then by the time i was 16 or 17 years old, i was more aware of who i was as a person in the world and where politics — and when the drums started to beat

towards war in 1991, i became acutely aware of the fact that the place my grandparents fled from was about to be bombed by the place they fled to. that's a crucial experience for you, when iraq became the enemy. saddam hussein became the hate figure for all of america and the country that you'd known through your grandparents and your mum as a place of heritage, of language, of food, of all of these positive warm feelings, suddenly was defined to most americans as somewhere hateful and frightening. yeah, my mother saw that happening right in front of us, and i remember seeing the first live real—time images of iraq that i've ever seen in my life, which were green tinted, coming from the night vision on cnn. there were pictures of buildings that were being blown to bits, that i was never going to be able to visit. as we were watching this, my mother turned to my brothers and i and said, "you know, there's no iraqi restaurants in new york?"

it was like the riddle of the sphinx. years later, i understood that she was pointing out that iraq was not visible in the us beyond oil and war. and we'll get to iraqi restaurants in new york later. sure. because although you're an artist, one of your installations was indeed inside a restaurant and was all about food and connections between food and culture and art. but we don't want to raise that here. sure. i'm just intrigued, as you talk about those memories of your grandparents and your mum, you're positing it very much in terms of the arabic language, in terms of a rich culture and food. you're not talking aboutjewishness and yet, they were iraquews. was it that they felt more in a way more rooted in their country and the culture of their country, iraq, than they felt in theirjewishness? i think that was a period of time that existed, and it's one of those periods of time that i tried to wield not as a nostalgia in the work that i do but as a blueprint, going forward, of how things can be. because it was, and it wasn't so long ago. they always talk about how iraq,

how baghdad actually, was kind of like a jewish city in the 30s and then the 40s and you even had the city shutting down on friday before sunset because of the sabbath. and that kind of relationship between people, regardless of faith, was something that i think a lot of iraqis, whether they were ofjewish or muslim or christian descent, really held dear. and nationalist programmes can complicate that. and that notion of an ancient culture where people could come together and share experience, it's very central to a lot of your work. i want to now fast forward from your memories of childhood and upbringing to the reason you're in the uk, in london right now, which is to unveil the spectacular public artwork which has perhaps the most prominent public art piece in all of the country. and we can see an image of it.

now, it's a recreation of a mythical assyrian lamassu, which is the sort half man, half bull or lion. it has wings, it's a mythical creature. and you've been given that spot on trafalgar squarem on the plinth. tell me the origins of this piece of work. because it has ancient mythical origins, and yet it's something you've made out of trash. exactly. well, the project is an extension of one i began about 12 years ago in my studio, with my assistants, which endeavoured to reconstruct the 7000 artefacts that are listed as missing or stolen or status unknown in the aftermath of the looting of the iraq museum in 2003. so i began there and i enlisted the detritus or the cultural visibility of arab communities around the united states, where beyond oil and war,

where do you see it? well, you see it on the food packaging, it's in arabic and english. and you see it in the arab english newspapers that are given away for free to the refugees. and that extraordinary thing, the lamassu, is made, i believe, of something like 10,500 old cans of date syrup. exactly. and date syrup, there's a long, convoluted story that i could tell you about my experience with dates and reopening my grandfather's import export company to import iraqi dates. but i found out that iraqi dates are the best in the world. there's over 600 different varieties, and the date palm suffered alongside the people and the culture. so at the end of the iran iraq war, what was a 30 million strong date palm industry throughout the country was reduced to about half that, and the end of the iraq war, the estimates were something like 3 million. to you, is this artwork optimistic,

in the sense that you could be saying to the world, look, so—called islamic state or other extreme nihilist organisations can never destroy the idea behind these ancient artefacts? you could be saying that or you could be, on the contrary, be rather bleak and be saying, you know, they've destroyed something so ancient and all i can put forward now is a memory of it, a ghost of it that's made out of trash. so is it optimistic or is it bleak? ithink, you know, one of the things — it comes back to food. iraqi food is so great because it's hamid halu, it's sweet and sour. so if you make a kibbeh, that's sour, you want your stew to be sweet and vice—versa. so things are held in tension. right. so i absolutely believe that these desires, not only in my work but across the world, where you've seen people now, like this wonderful young artist up in the north of iraq who started to reconstruct artefacts also

from plaster, after daesh started to destroy things. this is a good intention, this is a good impulse — to want to rebuild. but i am saying that the past is the past, like you can't 3—d print the dna of the people that are killed alongside the artefacts because the artefacts always perish alongside people. i just wonder if there was some anger in you when, for example, the international media made such a storm over the destruction of the wonderful remains in palmyra, also, one could talk about nimrud in iraq, nineveh as well, of course. ever time one of the most historic pieces was destroyed, or places was defiled, there was a storm of outrage which seemed to, in a sense, get under the skin of people more than the daily toll of deaths of human beings. was that angering you? initially, when i started this long—term project back in 2006

to reconstruct things, it was about a certain kind of anger that you can walk through galleries in new york and not know that we were living in a war culture. and i was wondering when the outrage around lost iraqi artefacts would turn into outrage around lost iraqi lives. but at the same time, i'm not a psychologist, but i do wonder where people put their morrning. you know, i wonder where they put their outrage into symbolic things. art often is about the kind of indirect reference to something that we're all feeling together, and what was useful about the outrage around the looting of the iraq museum was that it didn'tjust localise the problem, it wasn't an iraqi tragedy — it was an iraqi tragedy but it was also a human tragedy. this was our cultural heritage that was shared, and if you can put people on the track towards thinking that way, that it's something we share,

then there are all these other opportunities about sharing this sense of loss in other directions. will you everfinish this mammoth project of yours? because i mean, i know the thing you're calling the invisible enemy should not exist. will you ever get that done? you're only on about number 800 of 8000, i think. it's a lifetime task. that will outlive me and my studio. that's kind of the point, to show that history can't be fully reconstructed and we can't do it without everyone being involved in it. there're a community that has arisen, like i said, of people who talk about 3—d printing and there are conversations to be had there, but i also don't want it to be simply something that is fetishising only the artefacts, that like oh, we can just rebuild palmyra. but like you said earlier, you can't bring khaled al—asaad, this amazing archaeologist that

protected not only the... he was the 82—year—old archaeologist who was actually executed... a tragedy, tragic. ..by daesh on the site of his own pride and joy — which was safeguarding, being the guardian of palmyra. he wouldn't give up the location of certain items and he wouldn't give up the location of certain people. this is somebody who understood what was happening. when books burn, people burn. you know, we've seen that throughout history. i want to widen this out now to think about some of your other work as well. would it be fair to say that that formative experience you had as a teenager watching the first iraq war with the us involvement in iraq, and then watching the second iraq war, with the us actually occupying iraq after 2002—2003. has that turned you into an anti—war artist? oh, i don't think i was ever a pro—war artist, um... no, but now, would you say it's one of your driving forces to deliver

messages through your art that are about, i don't want to put words in your mouth, the negative impacts of war? i think so. i mean, it's notjust that i do with the work. i think i do a lot of things, hopefully, with the work. if i think about my long—term engagements with iraqis and with iraq war veterans back in the united states, it's looking at the way in which both the soldier and the refugee experience, the dehumanisation of that experience of combat and occupation. yeah, i mean, you have got these extraordinary... i don't know what to call them, actually, and it will be interesting to know what you call them. you couldn'tcall them pieces of art, they're more experiential. you've got this one project in chicago where you have iraqis who have fled from iraq, for all the reasons we have just discussed, they are cooks and chefs, they serve food, they also have helping them who are us military veterans who fought in iraq and they are the sous chefs and the waiters. the food is iraqi and it is delivered to people in chicago. first of all, that is fascinating, but is it art?

well, i'm less interested in what people call things. for me, it's art because it exists in this space of kind of weirdness and impossibility. it actually is not a business model that people run to if they were thinking of opening up a restaurant. you don't want to open up your restaurant and call it enemy kitchen, you know, but i think bad business can be good art. but the point is, do you think you want people to go there because they want the food, to treat itjust as a restaurant or a kitchen? or do you want to go there because you want them to be open to a kind of artistic, sensual, sensory, experience that's much wider than just food? of course. that latter excites me more than the former,

but what's been incredible is that we've had folks who have come up to this food truckjust kind of expecting to buy a sandwich, a kabob sandwich. and then all of a sudden, they're realising that the person that is speaking to them is speaking in english and then the person in the back is yelling at somebody else in arabic, and they start to realise in this close proximity, you have the perceived enemies on both sides of the conflict. and bringing it back to the beginning of our conversation, i believe they're using some of your grandmother's recipes? they are, they are. so there's a distribution that — we're casting a wide net now, kurdish recipes, assyrian recipes, but all within what was iraq. definitely i'm getting the sense with you that art and food are very much mixed together. of course. because not just that fascinating experiential art but there's this extraordinary thing in new york where you took over a rather posh restaurant for a while.

actually, i think maybe you're still doing it from time to time, are you? no, no, no, that was a... it was a one—off. 0k, anyway, so you took over the posh restaurant, you served iraqi food, but not only that, you served it on plates that you's specifically requisitioned through ebay from saddam hussein's family household. in fact, they were so much a part of the saddam hussein story that in the end, the iraqi government wanted them back. they were amazing. so what is it about food that speaks to you in such a broad way, in such a sort of artistic, experiential way? well, just as a point of clarification, which is interesting in answering your question, i was collaborating with a chef at this restaurant called park avenue and the chef's name was kevin lasko, and what we did with that project was really kind of look at the way that a menu happens. and a menu is presented to you almost like, almost like the accession cards in a museum now that tells you exactly what kind of pigment is used and so, the menu tells you where

your rugelach comes from, it tells you where your meat is harvested from. it's a way of making the dinerfeel good, and i wanted to make the dinerfeel bad. so iraqi date syrup in the united states hasn't been labelled as "product of iraq" for years because it's been impossible to get it through customs without event, and so it says "product of lebanon" or weirdly enough, "product of netherlands", where i've never seen a date palm grow. and to be able to actually reveal, you know, on the menu that there was a dish that was made with iraqi dates syrup was part of it, so for me, it came back to not only yes, the culinary experience being like something artistic. and ifeel like when i am making kibbeh, i feel like a sculptor. when i'm making kabob, i feel like a sculptor. but it was also about taking that kind of like way of enticing the viewer, enticing the reader. there's a playfulness

in you, a sort of provocativeness and a playfulness, and it works on many different levels. ijust wonder, and i want to bring in a second image, i just wonder whether sometimes you're at risk of taking that playfulness to a place where it can be seen as disrespect. sure. this image is taken from, i think something that you put on in london a while ago. a show that in many ways made comments on saddam hussein's reign in iraq and this very famous, notorious symbol of his power in iraq. he had his own arms and hands cast in bronze for this sort of victory arch, which of course the real one, which i have walked under in baghdad, it had these vast, monumental sabres in both hands. you, with your playfulness, have turned it into light sabres from star wars. yes.

now, some might look at that and say given everything we know about saddam hussein's iraq, that's disrespect. sure, sure. well, i know that i work with difficult material from time to time and, to be honest, this is the most uncomfortable sculpture i've ever made because... not because of what i used to make it, but because the original is alsojust so, i mean, hard for me to get down with. you know, like, it's his hands blown up a0 times. it's using the melted down metals from munitions from the iranians, that the iraqis... it's the personification of his tyranny, really. yes, it is, and it's narcissism. it's... you know, these kinds of monuments exist everywhere but, but you know, when i was on ebay, and what really brought me to ebay first was the fact that mesopotamian artefacts were showing up there after the looting, i wanted to know what iraq didn't want back, and

one of the things i found online was a helmet that was being sold by a member of the us armed forces that was based in mosul, in the 101st airborne division, that was cast directly from darth vader, darth vader's helmet, and it belonged to the fedayeen saddam, and when the soldier... they really used these darth vader helmets? they used these. they used them. and so, then the soldier asked the locals what this was about, and he explained that saddam and uday were huge fans, and after all of this kind research that i did ifound out that saddam was a collector of an american artist named rowena morrill, and rowena morrill‘s mentor was an artist named boris vallejo and boris vallejo designed a poster for the empire strikes back that has saddam... that has darth vader holding two light sabres over his head. it's clunky story but somebody‘s has got to tell it because it's true, you know. i've interviewed a lot of artists on hardtalk, but i've never interviewed one who intrigues me in the way that you do because most artists clearly,

you know, have a commercial impetus toward most of their work. they end up with a thing which can be put in a gallery, bought and sold, it can be moved around the world and invested with value, but so much of what you create can't really fit in any of those categories. for example, we're talking about the restaurant in new york or the enemy kitchen in chicago. these are experiences but, but they only exist in their own time and place. you can't sell ‘em. no. you know, you couldn't put them up to auction at sotheby‘s. frankly, you can't really make money or make a living out of them. no. so, are you a commercial artist or not? i wouldn't consider myself one, no. it's not the place that i come from. i come from working in public space, i love working the city, i love working with architecture and i love working with the people living inside those buildings. however, there is a kind of component to my projects that really does look not at the market per se,

but at the way that markets emerge as a sight specific place. so it was the existence of an antiquities market that allowed for the iraq museum to be looted in the first place and for a lot of people, those artefacts were the ticket out of the country. and so, with that kind of market, being where it was, and thinking about the contemporary art market and the fact that those things do intersect sometimes, you go to most collectors‘s houses that collect contemporary art and they'll have an antiquity that they may or may not want to talk to about. that's an interesting take on the art market, but i want to end by taking us back to the beginning, which was that discussion that you're so passionate about, about iraq, family and memory. it amazes me that despite your preoccupation with your

heritage and what it's given you, you've never been to iraq. why? well, my family left because they felt like they had to leave and they were heartbroken. but you could go now. i could go, of course, i mean, and that to me, i think about that all the time. i think about, you know, going back and i have that privilege of the american passport, but over the past 12 years, i've been working with a lot of iraqi refugees as well in my projects and they can't go back and they're injordan, they're in the united states, they‘ re in canada, and we've forged close relationships with each other, and in a way, i feel like that distance has almost become like a material in my work. but they said to me, "i'll tell you how you are going to go back, we're going to go back and we're going to invite you to visit us." and that's how i would do it. and when you do it, we want to talk to you again. inshallah. but for now, michael rakowitz, thank you very much

for being on hardtalk. thank you, stephen, i appreciate it. good morning. the summer of 2018 is shaping up to be quite memorable. june may be a distant memory, it looks as though the statistics will make it go down in history. this was glasgow last week, june 28 in motherwell, where we saw a high of 33 degrees. we thought that was the hottest june day on record, but it was the hottest day ever recorded in scotland. quite incredible. it looks as though there is little in the way of significant rain

in the forecast not only throughout this week but perhaps into next as well. high pressure stays with us, subtle differences. more of an easterly breeze will bring changes and it does mean that first thing in the morning there will be a bit more cloud along the north sea coast and it will be a little bit fresher as we go through the day. further west, with a little more shelter we got that warmth and those temperatures yet again are set to respond. highest values likely of around 27 degrees, that's 80 fahrenheit, a little bit cooler along the east coast. perhaps a little more pleasant for many. as we move out of tuesday into wednesday, the high pressure releases its grip a little. there's still unlikely to be any significant rain in the forecast, largely quiet, but perhaps a little more in the way of cloud around and the threat of a few sharper showers across southern england. very hit and miss but i'm sure they'll be welcome news for gardeners and growers out there.

as a result of that cloud, temperatures are degree or so down. looking at a high of 20—26 degrees. still a dry story into thursday for most of us, but look at this, a weather front, something we've not seen for some time, introducing more in the way of cloud across the northern isles into the western scotland and maybe northern ireland but no significant rain i'm afraid in the forecast. maybe a few isolated showers and the risk of a few showers just threatening across the far south. the highest values still of 17—28 degrees, that's 82 fahrenheit. the wind direction looking likely to change again as we move towards the weekend and that will allow those temperatures to climb, with more of a southerly 29 or 30 degrees not out of the question again somewhere in the south. the high pressure establishes itself as we move out of the working week into next weekend. that means that things stay dry, settled and relatively sunny. if you haven't already got the message, it looks likely that the rest of the week will stay often quite sunny, very warm for many with little in the way of significant rain. take care. this is the briefing —

i'm sally bundock. our top story: found alive and safe — the 12 boys and their football coach remain underground and trapped in a flooded cave in thailand — but their ordeal is not over yet. the german interior minister has dropped his threat to resign after chancellor merkel agreed to tighter controls on immigration. back from the brink — belgium come from two—goals down to beatjapan — and keep their world cup hopes alive. to beatjapan and keep their world cup hopes alive. and here in russia, after a night of high drama, the last quarterfinal places are up for grabs. iran's president rouhani starts his european tour today.