At KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Cyprien Gaillard turned a monument into something visitors could dismantle together. For The Recovery of Discovery, first shown in 2011, 72,000 Efes beer bottles were transported from Turkey to Germany and stacked in their cardboard cases as a monumental stepped pyramid.
The installation points toward the history of the Pergamon Altar: an ancient monument removed from its original setting and brought to Berlin, where its meaning was repeatedly reshaped by the political movements that claimed it. Gaillard’s pyramid does not reconstruct the altar. It uses the idea of the displaced monument to ask what preservation means when moving an object also changes—and can erase—its context.
Visitors were invited to climb the structure and drink the beer. With each bottle opened and each case disturbed, the carefully built form began to collapse. The work’s destruction was not an accident or an ending added later; it was part of the sculpture’s design, set in motion through public participation.
That slow unmaking brings the installation’s questions down to a bodily scale. The beer’s place of origin initially matters, but consumption gradually blurs the distinction. What remains is a shared, physical encounter with a monument becoming rubble—an image of collective amnesia, and of resistance to the idea that cultural memory can be kept intact simply by putting it on display.
At KW, the pyramid passed from pristine construction to scattered glass and cardboard. Gaillard makes that change visible as both an architectural event and a social one: the audience is not outside the history of the work, but actively involved in its transformation.
Cyprien Gaillard — The Recovery of Discovery, 2011; installation of cardboard, glass, metal and beer, approx. 12 × 8 × 4.25 m. Exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 27 March–22 May 2011. Curated by Susanne Pfeffer. Supported by the Capital Cultural Fund, Berlin. Photography: Uwe Walter, Josephine Walter and anna. k.o.
