Long-term artwork »ONE MILLION – Das Boot« by Solitude alumna Uli Aigner presented in the German Bundestag

The long-term artwork ONE MILLION – Das Boot by former Solitude fellow Uli Aigner is being presented in the German Bundestag!

To mark the 75th anniversary of the Basic Law, the Art Council of the German Bundestag invited nineteen artists to explore the fundamental rights, enshrined in the German Basic Law. The exhibition Us. 19 fundamental rights. 19 artistic positions. One dialogue space, opened in May 2025. Former Solitude fellow Uli Aigner chose to focus on Article 13 – the inviolability of the home.

Since 2014, Uli Aigner has been working on ONE MILLION, a long-term artwork that spans sculpture, performance, archival practice, and digital futures. It begins with the simple gesture of hand-turning a porcelain vessel, which is then radically multiplied and expanded into a temporally, spatially, and digitally extended structure. The project aims to create one million unique pieces over 300 years, each numbered and designated for someone or something.

Once a vessel finds an owner, its location is recorded on a digital world map, virtually connecting the vessels and their owners. This creates a virtual table community, enabling traceability, documentation, and a networked connection among all participants.

For her work on Article 13 of the German Constitution (inviolability of the home), Uli Aigner chose the table as the central symbol of every household. In this context, she gifted homeless people their own digitally recorded vessels, making them part of the community as well.

The large-scale installation features over a thousand hand-thrown porcelain vessels, many broken or damaged, yet still integral to the system. The signs of wear reflect the fragility of human existence and symbolize the harm caused by social exclusion.

The work addresses the interplay of protection, participation, and exclusion, both in physical and digital spaces. Social and digital realms must be considered together to ensure that no one is left behind—neither offline nor online.

The project combines handcraft, digital technologies, AI, data archives, and global networking. The hand-working body—with its fatigue, repetition, and errors—is at the center. The attempt to create one million vessels by hand becomes an existential, poetic gesture, reminiscent of Sisyphus or Dürer’s Melancholia.

Here, craftsmanship is understood not as a regression but as a resistance against disembodiment, while digitalization is embraced as an opportunity for connection, responsibility, and networking. The work questions the scope of individual agency in the digital age and explores how body, technology, memory, and future can be thought of in relation to one another.