Critics

The Art of Letting Things Happen
On Hannes Egger’s wandergast Project

Ludwig Seyfarth

What is a city? What is the countryside? What are the mountains? What is the sea? What is public? What is private? Hannes Egger likes to ask questions where the answers may seem simple, but are, in fact, not. He’s not interested in clear-cut categories; or, if he is, more in those moments where the categories don’t quite fit, or where their boundaries
blur and flow into one another. Like “city” and “countryside,” for example, and those places where the two can’t really be separated. And where could that be better observed than in Siegerland?
Geographically, Siegerland sits in the middle of Germany, but from the perspective of major centers and regions, it feels somewhat peripheral. Siegen, with its roughly 100,000 inhabitants, is the largest city here, surrounded by smaller towns and municipalities—so much so that even Wikipedia describes it as a metropolitan area, though much of the region
consists of densely wooded countryside. What appears rural at first glance is not necessarily characterized by livestock farming or agriculture. Ore mining has shaped the region since pre-Christian times, and mining remains central to Siegerland’s identity. Numerous small and large companies, especially in the steel industry, are based here.
None of this “information,” however, explicitly feeds into Egger’s artistic work. Yet a region in which “city” and “countryside” are as categorically ambiguous as in his native South Tyrol has clearly inspired him to make that reflection a guiding principle of his wandergast project.
To begin with, he brought something with him, although “something” is a bit of an understatement, as it was quite a considerable quantity of tableware, taken from the household of his father-in-law. After a fire destroyed much of his
belongings, friends and neighbors helped by contributing whatever crockery they could spare. As a result, his dishes were no longer matching sets but a highly diverse and eclectic collection of plates, cups, pitchers, teapots, and more. Egger brought this collection to Siegerland and offered it to locals – people he met randomly in the street as well
as individuals he was introduced to through contacts at the university – in exchange for dishes they themselves owned. Every single piece of this mismatched collection had a story: its origin, its owners … These objects contain multitudes of stories worth sharing—stories of the past or of the places they come from. But those stories need to be told.

In his 1936/37 essay The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, Walter Benjamin contrasts “information” with “storytelling.” The tradition of storytelling, Benjamin explains, is based on lived experience passed by word of mouth, embodied in the “resident tiller of the soil” and the “trading seaman”: the one brings “the lore of the past”, the other
“the lore of faraway places”. Both traditions of storytelling once came together in medieval craft guilds, as “every master had been a traveling journeyman before he settled down in his hometown or somewhere else”.
But “experience has fallen in value”, Benjamin says, and with it, storytelling as “an artisanal form of communication”. Storytelling is increasingly being replaced by a new form: information, which “lays claim to prompt verifiability” and strives for inherent clarity and self-evidence. “But while the latter was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, it is
indispensable for information to sound plausible.” Information detaches itself from its source, while “traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel”. Storytellers tend to begin their tales by describing the circumstances under which they themselves came to know the story.
The dishes Hannes Egger brought to Siegerland are, in a way, the bearers of such storytelling. And the fact that these “stories” are exchanged is one of the communicative processes Egger initiates—processes that, in turn, make up the material that he tries to shape—or better yet, frame. One of these frameworks, which Egger developed together with other artists, is the Werkbank Lana art space in South Tyrol. Part of Werkbank Lana’s concept is described as: “To create an event in … context means to host a gathering for the interested public and to promote communication and networking between all the various parties involved.” This includes “culinary happenings”.
Two such happenings became the highlights of Egger’s wandergast project. They were publicly announced, and anyone could register as long as there were seats available. The first dinner took place on October 23, 2024, in an empty shop in downtown Siegen; the second, which I attended, was on January 8, 2025, at the Junkermarkt (Junker Market) in Kreuztal, about 15 kilometers from Siegen. This market, set up by local residents in 2023 in a vacant property, functions like a corner store, selling food and daily essentials. In the surrounding area, there are no other shops, pubs, or places for neighbors to meet and cha —an all-too- common development in many rural regions, where infrastructure and communal spaces are increasingly disappearing. In fact, the Junkermarkt has also become a meeting place for locals.
On the evening of the food performance, the market’s offerings were supplemented with crockery available for exchange. Guests could even pick the plates they wanted to use from the collection. There was eating, drinking, talking—about the city and the countryside, and what both mean today. It was an intense, eventful evening. Photographs or video documentation may give an atmospheric impression but can barely capture what made this event special.
What do the photos of both culinary performances show? We see tables set for dining, plates full of food, guests captured mid-bite or mid-conversation, and the artist himself giving a speech or serving the meal. Standing and gesturing, Egger may appear more dominant in photos than he did during the event itself.
Hannes Egger is not a performer who places himself center stage. His presence is far from the shamanistic demeanor of Joseph Beuys— though Egger’s participatory approach is often compared to Beuys’ concept of social sculpture and his dictum Jeder Mensch ein Künstler (Everyone is an artist). However, the freedom Egger gives his participants within the framework of his events is more akin to the spirit of John Cage, with Cage’s Buddhist-inspired equanimity in letting things simply happen. Following the British art
critic David Sylvester, one could say that Egger continues one of modern art’s best traditions: “One of the strengths of artists in all media in the second half of the twentieth century has been that less intervention is more.”
Sylvester’s observation mainly referred to artists stepping back from authorship, creating the appearance of no deliberate artistic intent. But what shape do Egger’s events take if you haven’t experienced them yourself? If you didn’t know they were artistic events, you might look at the photos and think they came from a family album—birthday or wedding snapshots. The announcement for the dinners included the note: “The events will be photographed,” referring to data privacy rights, not an announcement of artistic documentation. Egger gave no instructions to the photographer about what or how to shoot.
There was no staging, no constructed imagery one could meaningfully compare with traditions like depictions of the Last Supper or peasant weddings, like those painted by Pieter Bruegel.
The absence of staged imagery highlights Egger’s interest in process, in generating communicative exchanges that cannot be frozen in images. The drawings Egger hung on the walls were simple—figures merging or connected, symbolizing belonging in an abstract way. They were open, inviting viewers to mentally complete or extend them—or even draw their own versions on the sheets of paper placed on the tables. Unlike the photos documenting the events, Egger keeps all the papers drawn or written on by the guests stored in an
archive.
There was no explicit invitation to interact with the drawings—unlike Egger’s Public Performance project (Lisbon, 2016), where visitors were encouraged to mimic the poses of drawn figures. Yet here too, it was not about producing a documentable result but about creating experiences. Egger’s events do not generate “information”; they are not reproducible. In order to talk about them, you really have to have been there.
This approach suggests parallels with the work of Tino Sehgal, whose performances—like the chanting and dancing “This is so contemporary” at the German Pavilion during the 2005 Venice Biennale—are temporary and immaterial, often enacted by gallery staff. Thus no written contracts of sale exist for Sehgal’s work; instead, ownership is indicated by notarized oral agreements.
Egger’s work similarly lacks a physical object to be collected or displayed. Yet, unlike Sehgal’s strategic avoidance (and ultimate exploitation) of art-market conventions—or Guillaume Bijl’s ironic installations of everyday places like supermarkets or driving
schools frozen into lifeless museum tableaux —Egger’s work fosters genuine social interaction. Perhaps those earlier immobilizations of everyday life had to come first, before artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija could stage cooking performances in galleries in the 1990s
and such non-art areas of life could become contexts for essential elements of artistic presentation.
As an artist of a completely different generation, Hannes Egger doesn’t require references to traditional venues or modes of art distribution. If his art consists of communicative, social processes, these can happen anywhere, and not necessarily in exhibition spaces. He was invited to wandergast by the Department for Artistic Strategies in Public Space and Cultural Education, arriving like the journeymen of old—always with stories to tell. But in the end, Egger is less a storyteller himself and more someone who listens, who creates situations where many stories are told—and where there’s much to be told afterward. For Hannes Egger, it’s not primarily about “the lore of the past” or “the lore of faraway places”, but about a kind of storytelling that points towards the future. Or to put it another way: Egger’s artistic work consists of initiating communicative, social processes that, in the best case, don’t
require his intervention at all.