When I was 7 years old I went with my mother to a ceramics
class at the very first Kulturladen in Germany, KURO. I thought for my sand box
play I needed military equipment in the form of tanks. The course leader
acknowledged that with astonishment but a few weeks later I could pick up the
fired vehicles and use them in our war games in my family’s garden.
Approximately eight years later when puberty hit my still childish brain, I
stopped using my mother’s folding bike to replay national speedway competitions,
as Egon Müller, with my street colleagues. Instead, I glued different cardboard
boxes onto the back of the bike to imitate the body of a heavy motorcycle.
During my first semester in January 1991, the Iraq war started and students
went on strike. After the strike was over I understood university works without
going to seminars. Two years into my studies I participated in an “art recall”
at my former high school, where I installed fireworks with matches in the
school toilet. Meanwhile my art teacher Karl Kellner painted with a group of
pupils the asphalt football field green like it would be made of grass. That
made the classroom in the main building glow like aquariums, when the sun would
hit the new green. After watching our peers learn how to play theater for five
and a half years, we decided we’d better do it ourselves in 1998. Only when
Pier Luigi Tazzi would visit us in London would we have toilet paper. But then
Nicolas Schafhausen visited the flat I shared with Stefan Kalmar and I got a
solo show at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Oh, that’s why I did the dishes for one
year: "When you as carpenter need to install a shelf at a customer’s house you
need to go there. But if you are a laptop, you don’t need a shelf."
