For the second time, an entrepreneur has had a transportable tower built in the sculpture garden of his Unterammergau art gallery, which probably even towers over the local church tower. But the municipal council does not want to know anything about a permit in the long term.
For a flying construction, 70 tons is a proud weight. But that’s not what the Bavarian Building Code is all about. This defines temporary constructions simply as “structures that are suitable and intended to be set up and dismantled repeatedly at different locations.” On the one hand, that sounds very prosaic for a work of art, but on the other hand it fits well with the idea that Hildegard Rasthofer and Christian Neumaier are pursuing with their “Sighting”. Under this title, you have had 13 cubes made of CorTen steel stacked to form a tower more than 30 meters high, five times in total. There were only two of these sightings, numbered consecutively in Latin, in Unterammergau on the premises of the entrepreneur, hotelier and art collector Christian Zott, who bought the work. If it had been up to Zott, his sculpture garden would have been the end of the line for sighting III in 2020, and now instead for number V. But in Unterammergau, among other things, it is up to the municipal council, and it says again and again: The Bau must fly.
Because such a temporary building has to move on after three or – with a one-time extension from the district office – after six months at the latest. Otherwise, even a walk-in spatial and sound work of art, whose surface develops an auratic patina of reddish rust, becomes a simple black building. As early as 2020, Zott had clearly exceeded the six months from the opening of his Unterammergau art gallery, the councilors rejected a late building application as well as a change in the development plan, which did not provide for such a church tower-high building. The people of Unterammergau discussed issues of taste in no uncertain terms, but Zott withdrew a citizens’ petition after official doubts about the admissibility, and the viewing went on to the Flossenbürg concentration camp memorial.
Just in time for the Passion Play in Oberammergau, however, Zott had the sighting set up again in Unterammergau with the flying number V, which was also well over six months ago. A new application to legalize the work as real estate has just been rejected by the municipal council with a large majority. So Sighting VI must be happening somewhere else. Zott has declared that he no longer wants to make a third attempt with sighting VII.