The campaign Tamm-Tamm – Artists Informing Politicians originally took place in Hamburg in 2005/06 and was a protest against the newly planned Maritime Museum. The Hamburg City Parliament had offered the controversial private collector Peter Tamm a large historic building and 30 million euros to transfer his private collection into a museum. The organizers of the protest assumed that the notorious right-wing collector would use the premises to celebrate his authoritarianism. The campaign took political leaders to task in a new form that involved hundreds of actors. For each elected member of Hamburg’s parliament, an artist acted as godfather/godmother and conducted a personal conversation to provide the politicians with background information. The action developed political impact by publishing the reports on these individual encounters on a website, which created attention and support also beyond the local. A new work based on the original campaign was presented at Disruption Network Lab’s conference ARTIVISM: The Art of Subverting Power which included the original video documentation and posters with the names of all the artists that participated in the campaign.

Cornelia Sollfrank has accumulated a manifold oeuvre in which she is challenging traditional aesthetic categories by confronting them with the potential of digital networked technology. Based on the assumption that there is no place outside the political, she, for example, extends her concept of material into the social and experiments with new forms of organization as aesthetic practice. True to the motto “the mode is the message,” she strives to create space for the quiet, the minor, the difference – for what happens in the cracks and in-between spaces, for the cement that holds the social together by activating individual agency within a collective structure while never losing sight of the symbolic power of art.

Photo: Tamm-Tamm at Disruption Network Lab’s conference Artivism

Premiere: Artivism Conference 2023 (DE)
Part of Re-Imagine Europe – New Perspectives for Action. Co-funded by the European Union.
This work is available for touring.
Further enquiries: info@disruptionlab.org