The transition from the process to the result is the poster on which I fold the dollars and the diary with photographs and possibly one phrase per day.

Photos from exhibitions, including the envelopes in which the money was sent, are part of the outcome.

There are still many open questions. With the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Buffalo (2021), I started to draw a small cow’s head every day. For this I used blood lye salts, which is not visible at first and somehow gets iron oxides from the environment and slowly turns blue.

While sitting at home during the Corona pandemic, I decided to fold 500 US one-dollar bills and transform them into a bag – a bag that has the potential to be reversed into money as long as the American Dollar is accepted as a legal currency. The project takes into consideration that the dollar is the leading world currency.

I sent out the following open call:
My idea is that people from different places in the world can participate in Corona Dollar Creazione. Are you willing to help me create the piece?
Send me 1$ banknotes by post (max. five) and you are in and your banknotes are part of the bag.
If you wish, you may also write two or three lines, make a small sketch, or take a photo. These can be conveyed in an envelope by a real postman to my home in Sofia and will find a place inside my bag. It can then be filled with ideas and emotions from the times we are going through with Covid 19.
You may also send me a short message via e-mail. Then I will know that I am to be expecting something, what reaches me and what gets lost on its journey.
That would be great. And let me know if you would like to be updated on the status of the project.

Ottjoerg A.C., Apt. 4, Ulitsa Tulovo 1, 1504 Sofia Center, Bulgaria

Money works for you!
Money is a medium. That´s fine.
An input of energy is needed for its production and movement. It cannot act, it cannot work by itself. It may just boost exploitation for your gain.

Nicely printed money, cash, is limited due to its material circumstances. Cash is dirty. It carries a
biotope of up to 3,000 species of bacteria and viruses.

Touching cash has always been a threat; people can get sick from the dirt but now, more than ever, people are afraid of getting sick, of making other people sick, or of being killed by the breath of friends, colleagues, or even daughters and sons. Covid is the new black star.

For years, money has become more and more 0 or 1 bits and bytes. For years, there has been a strong lobby in favour of a cashless society. For years, more and more of our communication has been packed into bytes. In the past weeks while in lockdown, private words once reserved only for intimate meetings with friends got transformed into 0 or 1 and were channelled through the cold glass of screens. Numbers now flicker under those screens announcing the amount of dollars or euros needed by the economy and featuring such high figures that they cannot be grasped.

2019, in Columbia, I saw people on the streets weaving Venezuelan bolivianos (banknotes) into beautiful bags. From the first moment, I was fascinated and bought one. The next day, I ordered more. Suddenly I realized that cash can work for me. In this form, it is both information and material. Money as a medium becomes a means for transporting my glasses, my driving license, name cards, and wallet.

An international phenomenon with a strong local flavour.
Scratched signs on windows from public transport services are turned into prints.

Existentmale addresses the phenomenon of the use of public transport windows as communicative displays of scratched tags.
The plan is to represent seven European and seven non-European metropolises from 14 countries.
After the release of the windowpanes by the respective local public transport companies, they are used in their unchanged state as original etching plates.
From cities where scratching is an integral part of the cityscape, three respective windows are included in the project.
Cities in which scratching was almost or completely absent at the time of acquisition are included in the project with one window each.
Existentmale will thus comprise between 40 and 60 windows.

Projects:  [o] Existentmale | [o] Preußen schwarz-weiss | [o] Protelics | [o] Deskxistence | [o] Marca rural  | [o] Marca urbana  | [o] Encarnação  | [o] Epofakt/ Merkartifix  | [o] Imagine (there is no Rhino) 

[o] Events with no project production | [o] Multiple Projects production

• 2010 solo Exhibition at Gu Yuan Museum 
• 2007 Guest Professor at the Beijing Normal University
• 2006 Lecture at the Beijing Normal University
• Works in the permanent Collection of Gu Yuan Museum

 Part of Deskxistence / Autobiographical Route

2007 Artist in Residence
2007 Individual exhibition Existentmale Zhongshan Museum of fine Arts, courtesy German Gerneral-Consulat Canton

• Unscratched windowpanes of subway trains are part of the “Existentmale” project
• 2005 Individual exhibition Existentmale. He Shan Gallery and Goethe Institut of Shanghai

• 2011 after the Tsunami in the Japanese Sea, desks of a destroyed school became part
  of ́the Deskxistence project”

• 2011 Invited Professor by the China Artist Assosiation to a syposion on Chinese contemporary paintings for a lecture concerning “Global Realism”