Spy art

Shredded Spy Agency Documents Become Readymade Art

When the Berlin Wall fell, East Germany’s darkly efficient secret intelligence service, the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheitsdienst, or State Security Service), fell along with it. Modeled after the Soviet Union’s Ministry of State Security (MGB), the Stasi was staffed with 90,000 agents who generated around one billion bureaucratic reports while spying on fellow citizens. Even before the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi were hard at work shredding what eventually amounted to 45 million documents (about 5% of the total secret cache) before activists occupied the Stasi headquarters and halted the destruction. Some of these documents—paper, microfilm and audio tape—were destroyed with a wet shredder, and combined with oil and water, resulting in cellulose lumps that look like stones.