Intervention & Genesis of the Idea

I began with "Interventions" in private and public spaces before I knew what that is. My older sister Mira was very pedantic and had arranged her environment in a rectangular manner, and everyone should respect that. I brought some chaos into this order in which I rearranged things as well as happenings. My first public intervention was at the age of 10. My father banished me from Germany to Resnik near Belgrade where i should live with relatives and go to school. The uncle was a boisterous drunk who bullyed everyone. My oldest cousin harassed me even though he was not even gay. It was unbearable and I made up my mind to escape. During the day I brought chickens, frogs and once a male turkey to school and let them run around in the school building, I re arranged the shelves in the supermarket or walked slowly with full shopping basket past the baffled cashier and wished her a nice day. At night, I redirected the road traffic with cones and flowerpots from the neighborhood. Or I simulated the nightwalker and went into my uncle and aunt’s bedroom opened the closet and urinated while they indignantly tried to stop me. After half a year, the spook was over and my father brought me back to Germany. Basically, I was an introverted guy, playing guitar, listening to live music and reading fiction and non-fiction books.  My living environment gave little, most people i knew spent their time in front of the telly or played football. I built a fantastic world of music, vinyl covers, posters that I arranged and a dream of the big wide world. Actually nothing special but for me that was vital.

Shortly before my twelfth birthday, I had my first intervention in Hagen, I wanted to buy The Cream's 'Live Cream 3' album in the department store record department, previously I wanted to listen to the album via headphones, which was common at the time when buying records. The seller did not want to allow it and after a word exchange he did not want to sell me the record either - I was expelled from the house. Then I bought a dozen eggs that began to smell bad after two weeks on the basement heating. I threw the rotten eggs against the sidewall of the department store and the staff parking lot. This action caused a lot of excitement in the city although the visual effect was rather poor. The startled chickens and turkey from previous actions were far more fun. Shortly afterwards, I had a dispute with my physics teacher, which demanded action. For his house facade, I took tampons with catchup as throwing projectiles. These two interventions made me think. I had caused quite a stir, but I had to go to Dortmund to buy the Cream Live 3 album and my physics teacher remained a choleric tyrant. So I decided to deal with pressure differently. Discussions, however, only led to my second exile, when I was just sixteen years old.

When I turned to the arts, I understood that there were people who represented similar actions as art, and Belgrade was at the time governed by the Dictator Tito and his party. - A playground for interventions and other vandalistic actions, it was a valve against oppression. I was still too inexperienced to understand these actions as art, for my taste most of them were awkward graffiti or banal vandalism. I found no longer satisfaction in bandaging Socialist-Realism bronzes and symbols with toilet paper. Over time, I developed a taste for juxtapositions and memorable rearrangements in public space without vandalizim. Such as my actions with the sculpture 'LOVE' by Robert Indiana in New York, which I set in context without touching it. I did the same in Berlin with the Reichstag or the MUDAM Flash Mob Intervention with Serge Moulin and Laudrine Sautiere. It is natural for me to include positions in my work, even in commissioned works, even if they are out of context, but I see these actions as one of many varieties, rather than my main work.