This year marks the tenth anniversary of Documenta 13 and with it our art campaign Ai Eiei: It consisted of having us photographed with an egg hanging out of our trousers in front of exhibits from the world-famous Kassel exhibition, thus challenging today's concept of art.

To exaggerate the action, we wrote an article a few years later about whether that was art or not.

Timo Frasch

Political correspondent in Munich.

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The reactions were controversial, especially within the editorial team, but that's the way it has to be with art.

After all, people who are powerful today, who were not quite as powerful back then, were publicly impressed, such as the current editor-in-chief of the "Bild" newspaper.

The article, which appeared half a year before Documenta 14, was also linked to the hope that there, in Kassel, there might be room for such an action that aimed directly at the heart of the exhibition.

But the makers never gave a corresponding signal.

Later research showed that the history of the Documenta is full of unsolicited applications - even from well-known artists.

That's how we came up with the idea of ​​trying something like this as an artist who wasn't quite so well-known, with a new project.

Something with Corona

It quickly became clear that it had to have something to do with the corona pandemic.

Something like that probably works in art like the journalism prizes.

The things that move thematically in the mainstream are always awarded prizes.

So: 2015/16 something about the refugee crisis.

Something about the pandemic at the moment.

We've been collecting rapid tests at home for a long time, en masse, with a vague notion that we might need them one day.

The fact that they are actually suitable for artistic processing is shown by the example of the American singer Katy Perry, who uses quick tests decorated with bling as earrings.

But that's ultimately craftsmanship, not what we want.

Our eye fell on another of our earlier installations: a kind of skyline, made of erected white stones, which the Mediterranean Sea has carved into rectangles over thousands of years and which, as far as we know, only exists on a beach in Sicily.

Now how about replacing every other white brick with a white quick test?

the message

Said and done.

It looked good - but what did we mean by that?

Lately it has become fashionable for artists to review their own works.

Well then: The combination of stone, formed by nature, and plastic, made by man, alludes to the fact that nature and culture are becoming increasingly inseparable because man is encroaching more and more on nature - ideal conditions for the transmission of the Virus.

As is so often the case, the solution to one problem (tests for better control of the pandemic) immediately raises a new one (plastic waste).