Joshua Simon, a friend, curator and art critic with whom I’ve collaborated on some of my most daring projects, invited me to conceive the central installation for a three-day event at Vienna Secession to launch an online exhibition entitled SLIME.
Secession is a fabulous exoskeleton, slime quite the opposite.
I focused on the sensation of being caught in something whose grasp escapes you because in its very substance it eludes containment: its surreptitiously shifting contours and scale are such that you might unwittingly find yourself swallowed whole.
The grid elements that structure the main exhibition space in Secession are difficult to ignore and the evolution of the original architectural has consistently amplified the grid quotient to the point that photos of exhibitions in Secession can give the impression that the artwork is a pretext to exhibiting the space itself.
Setting foot there for the first time confirmed this impression.
Projecting Secession into the SLIME scenario allowed me to ignore its mythical veneer and approach it from a utilitarian viewpoint as a potential Amazon warehouse: use these same grid elements to structure my occupation of the space in such a way that would make it swallow itself and disappear.

During my preliminary visit I located furniture and other items in Secession’s storage from which I elaborated the following scenario conceived around spaces with which visitors could interact and inhabit effortlessly, experiencing them as if they were new additions to Secession itself:

Visitors move through the entrance hall past the museum shop, vitrines, ticket counter and glass doors to enter the exhibition space. There, they stumble into a Bookstore Café which doubles as a parcel pickup and depot. Parcel piles run rampant.
The books, culled from Secession’s backlog of unsold editions, are on sale for 0€.  Visitors can enjoy water, bananas, and munchies that look like styrofoam packing materials.
Moving beyond the café’s gold backdrop (made from posters for a Helmo Zobernig exhibition from 1995) lies a warehouse/sorting centre-cum-labyrinth.
A space ordered by columns and cardboard partitions —and parcels, has begun to come undone : boxes and their contents have been manipulated to create spaces for resting, meeting, playing games or plotting coups, The columns carry one’s gaze up to the iconic glass-grid ceiling. The surveillance cameras and routers that adorn the columns’ peaks bring our attention back to contemporary routines of global shipping and the excesses of consumer society. Pareidolic gel dispensers stare blankly from some columns, like wooden Indians telepathically reminding us to please wash our hands thank you.