White Element 008 / Before / After

White Element 008 / Before / After

0 x 0 cm, © 2008, not for sale
Three-dimensional | Installation

Weimar Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Germany.
White Element 008 (before / after) / 
White ribbon soft paper on tree.  
2008

This artwork is a reminder of me being in this camp and it make's me able to show you this spot trough an art installation by a mall intervention. The installation once was in real time out there, but after some rain and sun the white soft paper ribbon will disappear. 

Buchenwald Concentration Camp, 1937–1945
In July 1937, the SS has the forest cleared on the Ettersberg near Weimar and builds a new concentration camp in its place. The purpose of the camp is to combat political opponents, persecute Jews, Sinti and Roma, and permanently ostracize “strangers to the community” – among them homosexuals, homeless persons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and ex-convicts.

After the war begins, people are deported to Buchenwald from all over Europe. Altogether more than 250,000 persons are ultimately imprisoned in the concentration camp.

By the end of the war, Buchenwald is the largest concentration camp in the German Reich. More than 56,000 die there as the result of torture, medical experiments and consumption. The “Little Camp” nevertheless becomes the “hell of Buchenwald”. The enfeebled inmates continue to die by the thousands right up until the camp’s liberation.