March 13, 2006
A former synagogue near the German city of Cologne has been temporarily turned into a "gas chamber". In a controversial move, the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra hooked up the exhaust pipes of six cars to tubes that pumped the poisonous gas into the building, in a work he called "245 Cubic Meters". Visitors lined up to enter the building for a few minutes accompanied by a firefighter and wearing a protective mask to shield them from the deadly concentration of carbon monoxide inside. Sierra, who was not present for the opening, said in a written statement that the shocking project was aimed to stop complacency in the face of the Nazis' mass extermination of the Jews in death camp gas chambers. He plans to stage it every Sunday until the end of April. The secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Stephan Kramer, said the work offended the victims of the Shoah rather than its perpetrators.