André Heller was a major Austrian pop star in the 1970s, releasing a dozen hit albums, several books, and avant-garde films. Driven by his wide-ranging curiosity and a desire to traverse artistic mediums, he turned to making art and artistic spectacles: circuses, parades, variety shows, fireworks displays, and poetic gardens—often involving audiences of millions.

Alongside being Luna Luna’s visionary and spokesperson, he embraced a wide range of mediums—film, installation, music, theater, sculpture, and writing, each emphasizing celebration, absurdity, and pleasure, often with a political purpose of claiming public space for collective joy. A recent collaborative project, World State Machine, dispenses information about climate change, while his installation Heroes of Peace incorporates holograms of individuals aligned against war, including John Lennon and Nelson Mandela.

Heller imagined Luna Luna as a “total artwork” that combined visual art, music, theater, design, circus arts, and performance, and explained that the park aimed to recover public space for art and imagination. Opposed to doing so with public money—he saw government power and control as compromising—he instead partnered with the German magazine Neue Revue. While his influence was felt throughout the park, he contributed two features in particular. Dream Station was an inflatable, spiked balloon sculpture derived from one of his Sky Signs (1986–90) and served as a café. Wedding Chapel comprised a stage flanked by large scale caricatures of a bride and groom, in which visitors could “marry” whatever or whomever they wished—an open invitation that allowed for same-sex couples to marry, a political act in the 1980s. Heller also created carnival cutouts of celebrities that visitors could pose with for pictures.