The French fries refill thing, the milk frother and the myth of things
A look back at the first Salon tz-p at the Institut für Alles Mögliche on 7 February 2014
The two artists Julia Neuenhausen and Astrid Menze had announced ‘A multitude of secrets’, secrets in the form of an artistic performance, with material and the formula I-II + Hülle in Fülle – Die Formbooster JA!

Before the eyes of the attentive audience, the two artists emptied the basic material of their performance onto a black semi-circle made for the evening: found, discarded, bought and seemingly random items. Many of these things lacked a concrete conceptualisation; only through paraphrases and contexts of use could some of them be named. However, terminology did not play the most important role for Astrid Menze and Julia Neuenhausen. The detachment of things from their supposedly traditional contexts, their highlighting or even re-contextualisation, which sometimes led to a wonderfully fascinating amazement of strange plastic particles, were rather the impetus for the two artists’ first joint performance. With intimate care and concentration, they glued and stapled the relics of contemporary civilisation spread out on the carpet in front of them to the wall in a semi-circle under Angelina’s eyes on the toolbox, laying traces and tracks to and beyond the objects. At the end of the performance, the two semi-circles of things closed to form a whole.

Visibly satisfied, the two artists sat in the centre of their shrine during the subsequent discussion and gave the enthusiastic audience one or two pieces to feel for themselves. The fascination with playing with things had spread, the audience wanted to join in and used the modelling clay ‘sacrificed’ by Julia Neuenhausen to create more – well? – things yet to be defined, of course…

Dorit Trebeljahr