Berlin, January 2003: Christoph Schlingensief 's theatre performance Atta-Atta: Art has Broken Out! premieres in the Volksbuhne. A motley group of ‘artists’, including Schlingensief, record themselves on video as they make an impassioned appeal for the Oberhausen short film festival committee to accept their submission. The scene, which references Schlingensief 's beginnings in experimental film, appears to parody the beliefs its protagonists hold with regard to the radical potential of their own filmmaking visions. The next section of the performance sees Schlingensief as a wild ‘action’ painter, charging at canvases in his studio as his parents look on dubiously from the sofa in the TV room next door. The mise-en-scene – with the parents still visible in their small living room stage left – then opens out onto a camping site with tents, a setting which could be variously interpreted as a cheap vacation site, a place of temporary habitation, a vulnerable site exposed to the elements or possibly to an attack, a terrorist training site, or a mobile military encampment. In this semiotically ambiguous location, Schlingensief situates a group of artists and eccentrics.

In the course of the performance, the camp's assorted commune of oddballs enact strange ritualistic processions, witness the irrational litanies declaimed by members of their group and mimic the performances of well-known artists. Joseph Beuys with his hare, Hermann Nitsch's orgiastic experiments and Marina Abramovic's physically challenging works, familiar to the contemporary audience in terms of their photographic documentation, are clearly referenced in the piece. A giant inflatable tube of black paint invades the campsite and is wrestled to the ground by Schlingensief and the inhabitants who succeed in deflating its presumably malevolent intentions. The site manager announces over the intercom: ‘Everyone should leave the campsite toilet as they would wish to find it’.