On November 6, 2002 our dear friend Michel Majerus died in a plane crash. This project - Sozialpalast - was the last piece we have been working on together. I still remember him calling when I was in Amsterdam about to enter a restaurant with a couple of friends. Michel was first only laughing into the phone and when finally calmed down explained what he was planning for the piece and with this to do to the Brandenburg Gate. He just met with my wife Monika, who has taken the picture of the Palas for the piece, while preparing his show at Friedrich Petzel and they both were thrilled about the idea to have the picture of the Palas (a massive council house in the centre of Schoeneberg) taken and project it somehow onto the Brandenburg Gate. Michel then explained it to me extensively for about an hour. We spoke after that a couple of times and sent files back and forth for weeks until it was ready for production …… he could not attend the opening. Read here an abstract of the text by Daniel Birnbaum published in Frieze Magazine Issue 72 January-February 2003. Michel Majerus ICONS 1967-2002 by Daniel Birnbaum

…Then came a fax from Bewag, the Berlin electricity company, inviting me to submit a proposal for a project for the Brandenburg Gate. I called Majerus, who was on his bike. ‘Interesting’, he said, and then the line went dead. A few days later he called back, again on the bike. He had just passed a building in Berlin’s western district of Schöneberg: the Sozialpalast, one of the city’s most controversial landmarks. It stands on the site of the infamous Sportpalast, where in 1943 Joseph Goebbels declared ‘Total War’. For many years right-wing politicians have criticized this piece of 1970s social housing and everything it stands for: 25 different nationalities are represented in the complex, and around 40% of its inhabitants are unemployed. The CDU, the German Conservative party, would like to see the building demolished. ‘I’ve got an idea’, said Majerus, and a few days later his friend Chris Rehberger, a graphic designer, sent me an outline of the plan: a replica of the façade of the hated building covering the whole eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate. In the meantime Bayrle had also come up with an idea for the other side of the Gate: an image of interwowen Autobahns, with cars apparently climbing up the side. German artists from two different generations were thus planning to poke fun at one of the country’s most celebrated monuments, while highlighting socio-political realities in a way that would undermine the very idea behind such grand architectural gestures. Were these two projects really to be executed during the three weeks leading up to the gate’s ceremonial reopening on 3 October, the Day of German Unity? Well, no one stopped us, so indeed they were. …

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/obituarymichelmajerus19672002/