«   

   »   

Like the pristine Berlin Wall, an abandoned building too can be an open aperture for a self creating artist to create and occupy. The Reichstag was one such building, and by the end of the Cold War, it still signified the bloody battles at the end of World War II, the tyranny of Hitler, and the fall of German democracy in the 1930s.

But when Christo came up with the idea of wrapping up the building in silver foil in the 1970s, he proposed to release the building from its historic biography and turn it into a work of art – the perfect free-floating market commodity. Christo was originally denied permission, perhaps because such an act would have revealed that even the darkest symbol of Right-wing fascism could be neutralised of its past. When eventually he realised his project in the 1990s, Christo provided a mirror that inverted the image of the Reichstag – an icon of evil turned to good – standing for the people's rejection of a totalitarian People's State.