Augsburg: Beer for breakfast and other people’s art

I started my sixth day in Augsburg with beer for breakfast. Happily I wasn’t partaking in morning drinking alone as a way of surviving fish-tank living. This was our introduction to a traditional Bavarian breakfast. Since I’d spent half the night up knitting pigs I was up for some revenge on pigkind. So booze and sausages in the morning sounded like a plan. Bring on the Weißwurst!

The elements of the Bavarian breakfast are simple. Everything is white, apart from the sweet mustard (Weisswurstsenf) and pretzel (Brezen) which are yellowy brown. And the beer which is kind of yellow too, despite being called Weißbeer. Look, the sausages are really rather white so they make up for the lack of whiteness in the other elements. And apparently the sausages shouldn’t be allowed to hear the sound of the church bells noon chime. So it’s good thing they don’t have ears.

Lack of ears on the sausages is also good from the point of view of someone who is eating them. Ears for breakfast is far less exciting than beer for breakfast.

Beer for breakfast! I heart Bavaria!

An earless sausage gets comfy in the mustard

We also got to meet Peter and his students Jia and Andrea from Augsburg University’s eMag who shockingly survived both an interview with me and a photo with Plarchie to write these fab articles about the project and my odd knitted art.

Plans for today? Other people’s art. It was time to see where Augsburgians (is that even a word?) grew their artists. To the Hochschule!

Hochschule Augsburg or the city’s University of Applied Sciences is where many of the eerily talented lab binaer lads learned to make their marvellous magic. We were curious to see what an educational facility that inspired them to later place six artists in a city centre fish tank was like. Happily Professor Robert Rose, Hans-Christian Grimm (who is responsible for stalking and tempting all six of us into the fish tank in the first place and has the most fairytalest name ever) and lab binaer’s Benjamin were keen to give the beered-up artists and my trusty camera the grand tour.

There was amazing art all over the place from hallways to toilet doors. Not since Hogwarts have I had such school envy. Sigh. I will shut up and show you in pictures…

A hummingbird pig sips from a giant flower in the grassy courtyard

A monster mobile grrrring in the wind

A draw full of font in the typesetting room

Happiness in the hallway

Holy wondrous wall stencil, Batman!

Hey, isn't that some kind of novel handmade fabric graffiti...?

Clever sew and sew

Emergency iExit?

Even angels have to answer the call of nature

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I'm pretty sure that's some kind of yarn-based stuff attached to something unexpected...

Boring 747 follows us from its White Room birthplace. How mysteroius.

My lack of German translates this as "Your shoes are about to be stolen by pirates!"

Is that The Scream in a sweater vest?

Hello Knitting! My suspicions are happily confirmed.

Another pig. My non-existent German translates this as "How'd you like my new piercing?"

As well as shoving unexpected art into every corner of the place, they also make movies here. Oh such cool movies. Wanna see?

This was a video we were shown while we were visiting. It was made by a student named Christian Schlaeffer. It was his first fully animated short film. His first!?!?!

And I heart this one is by Matthias Lein and Stefan Lahr. Matthias worked on the defined by project as one of lab binaer‘s freelance monkeys, and he managed to make us laugh so much on our last night in Augsburg that Kaja Marie steamed up her glasses with tears of laughter. Impressive on both counts.

It was inspiring stuff to see art squeezing its way out of the classrooms and creeping into the hallways. I utterly utterly loved the place.

And while we’re on the subject of other people’s art I wanted to show you a little bit of lab binaer in the pretty city of Augsburg that has stolen my heart.

This is lab binaer’s Delete. It stands outside the New Public Library of Augsburg and tempts passing people to destructive deeds.

"Come a little closer," said the art installation to the passer by

I guess it’s lab binaer’s own way of defining their city.

Who put that there? Those pesky graffiti stickerers!

Inside the glass column is a ‘snap shot’ of the whole of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. You can see part of it on the display.

A little bit of wiki

Outside the glass column is a single button with one word on it:

"Press me! Press me! PRESS ME!"

lab binaer wants to know one thing “Will the pedestrians act responsibly with the heritage of previous generations or will they seize every opportunity to delete the stored knowledge over the next years?”

Well, will they?

Kaja Marie! The shame!

Resistance is futile, I tell you!

I’ll let the LB boys explain:

Two more days to go and so much more to see. I really was starting to fall in love with Augsburg. Maybe it was the breakfast beer goggles…

4 thoughts on “Augsburg: Beer for breakfast and other people’s art

  1. Queen Laureen

    Beer for breakfast…Augsburg ROCKS! Plenty of sausages…a good thing, but every day…I don’t know if I could eat them every day! Have enjoyed the visual of the many talented creators, thank you for sharing!
    🙂

  2. Peter James

    Love your witty, observant remarks and very creative understanding of the German language. Are we involved in knitworking by communicating like this?