The Durga Puja festival has been a revelation to me. An unbelievable fact: I am invited to realise this enormous sculpture, with the help of hundreds of workers, and only for 8 days!

And for these 8 days, my sculpture will be a temple, and the sculptures housed in it will become goddesses and gods. And after that, all will disappear again in the river as if it had been a vision. I became a part of these rituals and religious ceremonies. Such an event is unthinkable in any other city, in any other religion.

To me, it has all been new and fascinating. For 26 years I have been building rooms starting with the so-called “Haus u r”, Unterheydener Street 12. Here, duplication is the way of proceeding; once again, immediately in front of, immediately beneath, immediately in; something that is already there or at least plausible there. To me, duplication affirms that what already exists – not by declaration or reference, but by form, in a rather complex procedure. The existing or potentially existing is not invented afresh, but reconstructed from the ground up. The duplication of the existing legitimises the work in the simplest way. I am interested in this idle-running action.

Since I started travelling, I have taken this house with me. Up to now, I have come to Kolkata three times. This year, I have brought along a true to scale model of Unterheydener Street where the house stands. To me, the important thing was to see what happens when the model is built in Kolkata, by technicians and artists, passes through the transformation during the religious festival, and then comes back to Rheydt. The technicians in a remote West Bengal village explained to me that the street would not fit in the selected location. Therefore, the street was tilted by 90 degrees, and a basement room beneath it became visible.

From a structural engineer’s point of view, the construction is demanding: It is completely made of bamboo, 30 metres high, and only joint by coir ropes. A German building inspectorate would not have issued a building permission for it, I am sure. But the Indians wanted to realise the demanding design. I relied on the abilities of the artisans; I had little influence in the ways of the realisation. And how should I have been able to explain to them the use of bamboo or clay from the Ganges? There have been problems, of course – the proportions were altered, the measures not complied with, other materials were used, etc. But this has all been a part of the project, and all people involved have done their best. How the small elements, such as street lanterns, walls, the fence and the little Hindu temple, could be fixed on the street has up to now remained a miracle to me.

The responsive of the Indian public has been overwhelming. In 8 days, there had been nearly 2 million visitors, long reports were published in the Times of India, and live broadcasts were shown in the television nationwide. In that time, culture outshone the economy. I have been especially pleased with receiving the visitors award, which shows that all people involved have celebrated the “It’s all Rheydt” entry as homage to their festival.

To me, the project’s climax has been the moment when we committed the sculptures of the goddess to the river. The following day, we pulled everything out again to ship it in overseas containers. The whole mud and pulled-out building materials are now on their way to Rheydt. They are part of a transformation process that has not ended yet.

Translation from German by Christian Rochow