One night we stood naked on a lawn in Barcelona Zoo and looked at the tops of the palm trees. We had covered ourselves with scabies gel and were standing with our arms and legs apart, waiting to dry. Our bodies shone. This was the moment just before an irrigation system we knew nothing about switched on: half a second later fountains of water rushed at us through the dark. We also did not know that people were watching from the bushes, people who would steal all our things a few minutes later.

If one person, alone, falls out of the common world, two people together always carry that world with them. We met at the Murano pier at the end of 2014, arriving there from different places. That same night we threw all our things into the lagoon. Dressed in a Chinese shop as a royal family in exile, we flew to Nepal, never to return anywhere again.

We stopped enclosing ourselves in rooms with the world somewhere outside. We find the world inside any room as soon as we begin to speak and think. We stopped living in one place, not because one place was too little. Quite the opposite: wherever we live, we feel ourselves in the same place. We work anywhere — in a forest, in a city, in a field, in rooms, in boats and on the night road; wherever we can talk to each other.

We rented an office in an empty administrative building in Dresden. The director, a Pegida voter and Putin admirer, rented us a room on condition that we did not live there. We moved in with our parrot and soon occupied the whole floor. One day we made a list of everything in our room and understood that it meant something. We called the work Common Body. Since then we have recorded the condition of this body by making new lists of our things wherever we happen to be.

That same summer we were stuck in Barcelona without money. We also had to cure ourselves of scabies. At night in the zoo we undressed, applied medicinal gel to each other and waited for it to soak into the skin. The summer was hot. When the lawn irrigation suddenly switched on, we and all our things were soaked at once. We hung everything to dry on the trees around a brightly lit dance arena and climbed onto it. We had a large roll of paper and began drawing on it with ink and palm leaves. Had we already been robbed? Of course we had.

It turns out that our most precise and delicate statements about what we observe appear as the most insignificant pieces of evidence. The events of that night still set the scale of our work. We are still stretched between an extended object and an event in the space of the dance floor, absorbed in the game while someone carries away our things behind our backs. This luggage, the burden with which we tend to identify ourselves, serves only to stretch and tighten our personality, producing a particular sound like a string. Having once taken the world apart down to simple presence, we keep trying to find it and assemble it again as a whole, without losing the feeling of suspension in a whistling draught.

This limited group of things becomes our constant companion, forming something like a common body that we observe with interest. The mysterious ontology of things as our common body becomes the content of all our works. We turn things into art objects and then return them to everyday use. Their artistic life is instantaneous and solemn; they do not become products. They return to their source bearing an imprint — a flickering trace of Nonknowledge.