Rites of origin and of fertility lie at the point of departure for this simple yet bewitched and bewildered proposal which leads towards establishing parallel worlds of objects and their relationships and setting up alternative storylines along the dominant (not only) museological discourses. As an alien colony, a family of Super Eggs, based upon a prototype, an elliptical Super Egg, designed by Danish scientist and poet, Piet Hein (1905-1996), according to a mathematical formula by Gabriel Lamé, lands within the expanded knowledge-fields of the Joanneum’s cross-scientific departments that, together with their collections, constitute the museological substance and the institutional apparatus of the Universalmuseum. Neither round nor rectangular, yet fixed and definite, the super-ellipse is an in-between construct – a physical and mental compromise for humankind, imprisoned in form and pattern. One of its most successful applications is the roundabout in the square Sergels Torg in Stockholm, the ground zero of the Super Egg…
Starling & Superflex’s e.g. consists of nine narratives, featuring nine stainless-steel Super Eggs of various sizes and weights (from 30mm of 200g to 600mm of 750kg), unfolded through a time-span of the aniversary year within the Universalmuseum Joanneum’s spatial and discursive contexts - from the Planetary Room of Eggenberg Castle (itself designed around an astrological template) through the Kunsthaus’ exhibitions, Measuring the World (as an estranged counter-partner to Pistoletto’s Metrocubo d’Infinito) and Antje Majewski’s The Gimel World. How to Make Objects Talk? (coincidently coupled with the phantasmagoric Standard Egg of Polish Conceptual Artist, Pawel Freisler), the Super Egg’s voyage continues across scientific departments of natural history and archeology (inhabiting storerooms and archives or laid amongst Styrian archeological treasures in display vitrines) and through the vast collections of the world’s largest armory and the image bank of the multimedia collections (contemplating its loneliness on a deserted attic or on a shelf of an empty depot, respectively), down to the most intimate location: a hand of the Sculpture Park director, carried on a daily basis as a lucky token or an anti-stress device...
Brechtian at its core, Starling & Superflex’s e.g. speaks a meta-voice, generating (chance) encounters, articulating (unconscious) relations and triggering (possible) sub-narratives along the instiution’s official trajectories of programming and structure. Distancing and alienation enhance interaction and unexpected connectivity. Possessing a transformative power, if not alchemical qualities, as a hybrid of a companion or a substitute, a friend or an enemy, a parasite, the Super Egg sets up a hall of mirrors for the museological object to be critically (self)reflected and thought anew. It becomes an agent of the universal and the heterogenous, a vehicle to grasp the world – „a ticket to another planet“... Here, on its shiny, polished surface, the microscopic and minute confront the unlimited and the infinite, opening up a territory of the universal, where aesthetics and science collide, where magic and meaning converse, where Columbus meets Borges meets Kepler meets Tesla meets Freisler meets Lennon (aka the Eggman) meets...
