TammTamm – Artists informing Politicians
The campaign “Tamm-Tamm – Artists Inform Politicians” took place in Hamburg in 2005/06 and was a protest against the newly planned Maritime Museum. In order to complement the ongoing HafenCity urban development project with a cultural “attraction”, the Hamburg City Parliament had offered the controversial private collector Peter Tamm a large historic building and 30 million euros to transfer his private maritime collection into a museum. The organizers of the protest assumed that the collection did not meet the scientific standards of a public museum and that the notorious right-wing collector would use the premises to celebrate his authoritarianism.
The campaign took the political leaders into responsibility. For each elected member of Hamburg’s parliament, an artist acted as godfather/ godmother and engaged in a personal dialogue with the politicians in order to provide background information on the project. Documentation of each encounter was collected on a website, which proved to be an effective tool against the opportunism of the local media.