In 2010, the artists Detlef Kiep, Nicole Mentner and Anna Kölle created the art installation "Begegnung" as part of an art competition.
The artwork can be discovered and experienced in a field between Vienenburg in the former West and Osterwieck in the former East at a place where the Green Belt is no longer visible elsewhere.
For explanation, an excerpt from the artists' description
"[...] We were moved by this aspect, that the constraints of one kind in a certain sense created the free space of the other. Two locations, where old boundary stones remind us that this topic has not only been relevant since the division of Germany, were chosen for the artistic intervention.
This resulted in a concept based on a negative-positive principle. A crack runs through a rectangular, 1.82 m high concrete block. It is a section of the boundary line. If you approach this crack in the block, it reveals a view of the field and finally of a fine, linear sign at the edge of the field. The spatially offset positive to the crack, so to speak, or the "green band". The negative form is thus both a separation and a reference to a gap in the sense of the open space described. On this level, the artwork takes up the theme in such a way that its abstract, symbolic formulation conveys symbolic content and catches the eye even from a distance.
Another dimension, in the truest sense of the word, opens up as you get closer. On the block, as well as on the pillar, there are little bronze people, just as you often see them standing in other places. Their hands in their pockets, a child in their arms, a cigarette between their fingers, their gaze directed into the distance without a specific destination. You wait like this or something similar. On the one hand, a kind of anonymous average of the population is gathered there; men, women, old, young, elegantly dressed or in a casual look, on the other hand, each person has their own story. Some of them are known, some of them are not or only as an episode. And as far as it is known, it has something to do with the border. [
We have given the work the title "Encounter". In this encounter, both on a personal and institutional level, probably lies the key to coming to an understanding about the questions of drawing borders, crossing borders, demarcation and limitation (restriction?).
How can this work best be understood?
Both parts, Begegnung Ι and Begegnung ΙΙ work with the human imagination for spatial orientation. And they work against it. Standing directly in front of the sculpture, all the details are apparently very close. The small size of the figures encourages you to want to touch them, to take them in your hand, they make a handy impression...... However, positioned above the average eye level of the viewer, the viewer does not want to reach over the hard concrete edge. The people are not close enough to touch, although it seems that way.
Our intention is to make the effect of rapture, in relation to the temporal distance of humanity and history, directly tangible in a historical and currently significant place."