With Milk ___ find something everybody can use - AI WEIWEI

Ai Weiwei explores the metabolism of the Pavilion with his intervention. The intervention consists of replacing the water in the large pond with sixty-five tons of milk and the water in the interior pond with fifteen tons of coffee and keeping them outdoors. As Ai Weiwei says, “the building is not static: the content of the two pools is replaced all the time, unnoticed to visitors”. Regular work is done to ensure that the monument appears unchanged, timeless; not forgetting that the entire building stands as a perfect reconstruction. In milk and coffee intervention, the under layer of this monument surfaces and persists in consciousness; it refuses to be flushed away. Upkeeping the condition of milk and coffee is the same as preserving a body, a demanding effort against light, air, warmth… anything encourages growth and change, making instability visible. The publication documents the experiments that the artist carried out prior to the intervention in his studio in Caochangdi. And it records, through Anna Mas’s photographic report, the changes that the milk and coffee in the ponds suffered during the long month that the intervention lasted.