Place of Remembrance

In commemoration of the victims of forced labour at I.G. Farben, the artwork stands as a place of remembrance for Bayer AG at their headquarters in Leverkusen. The massive steel plates in the frame of the artwork point to the directions of the former factory sites, and hold a CNC-milled complex wooden assembly of gradually decomposing wood.

The data sculpture was programmed with an artistic translation of personal notes, corporate records and historical data from the Bayer company archive that documents the fates of the around 16,000 forced labourers.

Not as a static memorial, but as an organic sculpture, it calls for an examination of the company's history during the Nazi period. While the polished stainless-steel surfaces will remain unchanged, the use of untreated woods and seeds, sown in and around the sculpture, will lead to the sculpture transforming over time.

The installation is accompanied by a web-app which decodes the meaning of the archive data and documents the transformation process of the sculpture, recorded by a time-lapse camera.