A prop-opera: the attempt to account for the world with a hundred chosen objects. Conceived for the three-hundredth anniversary of the Vienna academy and shown in the Hofburg, the Semper Depot and the academy itself in the autumn of 1992, the piece sets an inventory against a story — a list that claims completeness and a narration that cannot help being partial — and asks what happens when the two are made to work together. Each object is at once a thing, an entry in a catalogue and a character on a stage, and the volume is the form in which the whole assembly can be held.