The Student Who Got Stuck in a Giant Vagina

Most museum mishaps end with a broken artwork. This one ended with a call to the fire department. In June 2014, an American exchange student at the University of Tübingen accepted a reportedly simple dare: climb inside a monumental sculpture resembling female genitalia for a photograph. The work, 'Pi-Chacan' by Peruvian artist Fernando de la Jara, had stood outside the university's Institute of Microbiology and Virology for more than a decade. Getting in proved much easier than getting out.

The student became wedged inside the six-foot stone sculpture, prompting an unusual rescue in which twenty-two firefighters spent about thirty minutes carefully freeing him without damaging the nearly $200,000 artwork. Rescue squad leader Markus Mozer reported that 'forceps delivery was not necessary,' joking that the crew managed to pull the student free by hand. Neither the student nor the sculpture suffered lasting harm, though photographs of the rescue raced around the world. Sometimes the hardest part of appreciating art is knowing when not to climb inside it.