Until the devastating destruction of the city centre during World War II, Dresden’s baroque cityscape was characterised by local sandstone. In the course of its reconstruction, the use of this building material became almost obligatory again — not only for the historical buildings around the famous Frauenkirche, but also for both the modern and historicising facades of contemporary buildings. Thus, the material not only represents regional identity, but also a nostalgic longing for the lost past and the quest for appropriate ways to deal with Dresden's wartime history.

Ersatzmonument emerged as a collaborative project by Sebastian Acker, Elisabeth Rosenthal, and Magdalena Fabianczyk during a shared artist residency at the C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts in Dresden. The site-sensitive work quite literally balances the weight of the subject: A fake sandstone boulder, intricately painted and crafted from styrofoam, rests on one side of a symmetrical industrial rack suspended from the gallery ceiling. A sheet of the same material serves as a projection screen on the opposite side.

The projected video depicts a seemingly endless sandstone facade, along which the camera moves. Only occasional glitches reveal that what we are looking at is, in fact, a printed advertising banner that veiled the famous Dresden Zwinger during its general renovation. A narrating voice connects the material's physical and digital representations with its various regional associations.