What sort of role can the means at art’s disposal play in an encounter with a different culture? For his residency at China’s Nanjing Art University, Bernhard Cella set up an experiment. He took along motifs from his works and shown them to the young artists, then asked them to find their own interpretations. His artist’s book entitled “and.learning english has no use“, which was published in the FOTOHOF>EDITION in 2012, features his own works as well as the photographs they took; a video installation shows them at work. Thus, beyond even the almost insurmountable of language barriers Cella succeeds in triggering insights into the culture of a foreign work environment.