When cleaning up, there are sometimes surprises. But archivists at the documenta archiv are not known to be easily ruffled. Not even by a cryptically labeled cardboard box filled with brown heaps.

Just such a cardboard box - unusually heavy and bearing the misleading inscription "Star Wars" - recently came to light in the attic. The contents: cement fragments and shards of glazed tiles of questionable design. A short time later, the evidence was spread out on the table and put together by the staff of the file archive in charge of the investigation. The search for suspects could begin.  

The fingerprints on the dusty material remains could no longer be forensically evaluated, but a look into the archive quickly shed light on the matter. The traces lead to Jan Hoet's documenta 9 and a suspicious artist from Belgium named Wim Delvoye.

In 1992, the latter had used the motto of the exhibition "From the body to the body to the bodies" as an opportunity to play with a blank tile mosaic in the entrance area of the recently inaugurated documenta Halle: Half floor of Delft tiles, half walk-on floor sculpture (think Carl Andre), a tile mirror decorated with arabesques welcomed visitors at that time and probably made many an unprepared person spin with surprise. For the decorative, if not magnificent ornament turned out to be an arrangement of - well - variously shaped fakery on closer inspection. Nothing is as it seems. Or, to put it another way, everything is as it seems.

After the exhibition ended, Delvoye's temporary intervention "Mosaic" (1990/1992) was removed from the exhibition space and some of the fragments were stored away.

A few years later, Wim Delvoye once again developed his examination of the theme of "digestion" in terms of art technology. Under the work title "Cloaca", a machine developed in collaboration with scientists imitates the process of food intake and enzymatic processing under laboratory conditions. Here, too, the result is brown heaps - confusingly similar to the original - that pass through the tract with constant regularity and come off the stack via a conveyor belt. Shrink-wrapped in plastic, they are finally delivered to the art market...

And once again, a case is solved.