FORUM KUNST IM BUNDESTAG | MARIE-ELISABETH-LÜDERS-HAUS | BERLIN, GERMANY
ONE MILLION – THE BOAT | FOCUS SHOW
Exhibition period: 25 July - 28 September 2025
Broken Vessels and the Right to a Home in the Digital Revolution
Since 2014, Uli Aigner has been working on her project ONE MILLION—a long-term artwork that operates between sculpture, performance, archive, and digital future. The starting point is a simple, almost archetypal gesture: throwing a porcelain vessel by hand. But this gesture is radically multiplied and transformed into a structure that spans time, space, and media. The goal of this endeavor, begun in 2014, is to create one million individualized porcelain vessels over the course of 300 years—each one unique, freely thrown on the wheel, numbered, and intended for someone or something.
Once a vessel finds its owner, its new location is recorded on a digital world map, virtually connecting the vessels—and with them, the people linked to them (one-million.world/timeline). This digital identity enables not only traceability and documentation but also brings all participants together in a “virtual table community.”
For the commission related to Article 13 of the German Basic Law (see the upper exhibition space), which guarantees the inviolability of the home, Uli Aigner also focused on the table as the center of every home. However, she turned her attention in the opposite direction by giving a vessel—digitally registered—to people experiencing homelessness. They too are seated at the table, part of the community.
The large-scale installation “ONE MILLION BOAT” (ARCHIVE SCULPTURE) presented here showcases over one thousand hand-thrown porcelain vessels by Uli Aigner, many of them broken or damaged, yet still part of the ONE MILLION system. The signs of use, extending even to the destruction of the vessels, speak of the fragility and vulnerability of human existence.
In connection with the Basic Law work on Article 13, they also symbolize the wounds and ruptures caused by social exclusion. They challenge us to reflect on new forms of protection and participation in the digital age.
The ONE MILLION BOAT is a symbol of the tension between visibility and invisibility, protection and exclusion. Social and digital spaces must be conceived together so that no one is lost in our society—neither offline nor online.
ONE MILLION is more than the sum of these objects. It is a communicative system that connects people through analog craftsmanship with digital technologies, artificial intelligence, data archives, and global networking.
At its core is the working body—its fatigue, its repetition, its mistakes. The attempt to create one million vessels with bare hands becomes an existential gesture: absurd, poetic, infinite. Almost like Sisyphus—or like Dürer’s Melancholia: a human who acts, even as they wonder whether the goal might indeed be achievable today, with the aid of digital tools.
ONE MILLION is an artistic infrastructure that explores the scope of individual agency in the digital age. How can we reimagine the body, technology, memory, and future—not against each other, but together?
ONE MILLION is a radical form of material thinking—a project that understands craftsmanship not as a backward step, but as resistance to disembodiment, and at the same time embraces digitization as a technology and mode of communication for the future—not as a threat, but as an expanded stage for future relationships and responsibility.
