Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz
Horst Hoheisel (b. 1944, Poznan, Poland) & Andreas Knitz (b. 1963, Ravensburg, Germany) have worked together since 1994 on many memorial projects known as counter-monuments or negative monuments. They are searching for new contemporary forms of commemoration of the victims of mass murder and dictatorships, mainly in Germany, but also in South America, Armenia, Cambodia and elsewhere. Instead of repairing the irreparable, their goal is to make the absence of murdered people visible and felt.
The most notable of their projects is the memorial in Buchenwald – a steel plate on the ground of the former concentration camp that always retains the temperature of a human body, day and night, in summer and in winter. Hoheisel also made the most radical proposal to the 1995 competition for the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Rather than suggesting another edifice to fill a void and allow everyone to forget it, he proposed instead, to create a void – to destroy a monument to German power, the Brandenburg Gate.