The counter-monument 2146 Stones – Monument Against Racism / The Invisible Monument is an intervention carried out in 1993 on the square in Saarbrücken by Jochen Gerz and students from his class at the Hochschule der Künste Saar, in Saarbrücken, Germany. Executed in accordance with Gerz's constant practice of vigilance [1], the work is the result of a period of unrest in German artistic production that questioned the representational art of a post-war generation, as well as the search of those who lived through the events of World War II and the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, amidst a national effort to evade the memories of the Holocaust.
The work, therefore, is the product of a reaction to a period in which culture and the questioning of memory reached their peak in the 1990s (the decade of Gerz's counter-monuments). Given its complexity, understanding the scale of the intervention within the city where it took place is a challenge, as is analyzing its relationship with public opinion, the media, and the government—all of which served as arenas of dispute and active participants in the "making" of the intervention.
