Gelitin

Our aim for the Venice Biennale was total osmosis. That’s the title for the work, die totale osmose, which means the infiltration of molecules of gelatin through walls, through tiny apertures and wide-open doors, into spaces, feelings, and memories. The effects can be startling, or hardly noticeable. It makes things visible that you never knew were there. It makes people invisible. It arouses feelings and desires you never knew you had. The whole Biennale was our showroom, but the backyard of the 114 pavilion was our laboratory. We worked according to the principle of “just add water,” using only a tiny amount of gelatin—our discovery—hose, and a wheelbarrow. What you can see in the picture is a channel of water from the canal that entered the pavilion through the back door and filtered out through the side entrance. Fresh water came over the wall and created a lake, which soon attracted plants, frogs, fish, turtles and streams of people tiptoeing through the mud and balancing on the duckboards. Small quantities of gelatin, which stuck to some of the most elegant international footwear, walked through countless exhibitions, arrived at the wildest parties, and slipped back into the slimiest canals. Do not be surprised if people you know are not sure if they have seen it. Do not think they are crazy if they say they saw a living sloth in the Giardini. Do not ask us if we know exactly where it is now.

—Wolfgang Gantner, Ali Janka, Florian Reither, Tobias Urban

The Golden Shower Gate Bridge and how it sprang into construction: with low-hanging balls, high heels, fancy open vaginas, and floppy dicks splayed above the dining tables. Our legs were not long enough to push up between the two walls alone, so we were forced to use reinforced wood structures to screw and screw over the eaters' heads and bolt our nuts and nut the bolts. The structure was seemingly sound enough to keep the trust of the eaters below but sufficiently unsafe and shaky/hazardous/slippery for us to feel exhilarated. We sweat big pearls, not knowing if some of the construction workforce would make a poodle slip and then a dead-dove dive from the growing Golden Shower Bridge onto one of the dinner tables. Or the wood slipping out of our thin, unsound fingers and crashing onto the half-eaten boar's head down below. As we reached the peak of the bridge and the peak of us and the peak of trust, we, of course, understood the urethral sphincter as a crowd-controlled entity. Trust built up during construction, and finally all of that trust got to let go.