'As the opening approached, there was still very little evidence of an actual show.'

Brian Eno, 2002

Bettina Kubanek's text work for Self Storage

Artangel approached me in late 1994 with the idea of doing a project in a huge storage warehouse in Wembley, North West London. The idea was to create a path through the complex (which was a labyrinth of three unmatched warehouses that had been joined together) punctuated by occasional storage rooms containing... something. At the time I was a visiting professor at the Royal College, and, since the warehouse space was so huge and seemed to demand much more material than I could possibly produce alone, I put the idea out to the students at the College.

Eventually we ended up with a team of about 25 people from many different departments in the College - including Industrial Design, Fine Art, Curating and Illustration. The question now was what we were all going to do and whether it would - or should - make a coherent experience.

We had several meetings out at Wembley. It was freezing. It never seemed to get warm the whole time we were there. Things went very sluggishly at first, and everything seemed vague and half-formed. There was a lot of discussion which produced many proposals that were technically too ambitious, or far too expensive, or too 'arty', but gradually there appeared some brilliantly simple ideas which looked like they might work.

Over a few weeks the ideas started to take shape. An identity began to form - a sense of what kind of adventure this might turn out to be. I had been working with some of Laurie Anderson's recorded stories, and her soft voice started to suffuse through the industrial permafrost, pulling things together around itself. The voice suggested a narrative for the whole journey, or at least gave the idea that there might be a narrative rather than a set of disconnected events.

We were working in 42 rooms, if I remember it correctly. The smallest had a floor area of about a square metre - and was therefore only about as wide as the sheet metal door that opened into it - while the largest was going on for 300 square metres. Between those extremes we had all sorts of sizes and shapes, all sorts of surfaces and lighting conditions.

As the opening approached, there was still very little evidence of an actual show. There had been a lot of talk, and a lot of promises, but very little existed. In the three days before the opening, however, people appeared from everywhere with the things they'd been making at home or at the Royal College, and quietly installed them. It was a very exciting and nerve-wracking time. Every time you walked round the labyrinth, there was a new delight. Suddenly the whole thing came together, and was rather glorious.