TammTamm – Artists Informing Politicians (2005/20006)  is an artistic campaign and installation initiated by  Cornelia Sollfrank, created as a form of protest that involved several hundred actors. At the same time, the protest was based on private conversations between one politician and one artist in each case. In this way, a massive political confrontation over a controversial museum project and 30 million euros of public funding was broken down to an encounter between two people. Eventually, the action developed its political impact by gathering the reports on the individual encounters on a joint website, which allowed to create attention and support also beyond the local.

AN offspring based on the original artwork was presented at Disruption Network Lab’s conference ARTIVISM: The Art of Subverting Power at Kunstquartier Bethanien – exhibited as the original video documentation of the artwork and listed on a site-specific poster the names of all the artists participating.

Furthermore, DNL invited Cornelia Sollfrank to give a keynote Unmasking Power as Art: Sharing Tactics & Practice
With Mike Bonanno & Jeff Walburn / The Yes Men on the following topics: How can artists use their special expertise to
draw attention to political grievances and contribute to their redress? And what does it do to art when artists get politically
involved?

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