The AIDS Memorial

The Aids Memorial

The AIDS Memorial

is a very personal tribute to the victims of AIDS, Agricola de Cologne was initiating on occasion of 1 December 2001 (Unesco World AIDS Day). It is dedicated to all friends and relatives who died of AIDS, and beyond that specifically all artists who died of AIDS, and generally to all people on Earth being HIV infected, suffering of AIDS and died of AIDS.

Agricola de Cologne grew up as a part of the generation who was living for the first time in history in sexual freedom. Most of the student fellows in Munich and Amsterdam (1971-1978) were gay or lesbian, but in 2001 Agricola de Cologne stated for the first time – and was tremendously shocked, that none of these people was still living but died of AIDS meanwhile, and as one of only a few he had survived. He was the survivor of a lost generation.

At first, AIDS was widely underestimated, than the shock of being infected was tremendous, but when many people finally realized the deadly desease wasn’t that deadly, at all, because via a special medical treatment the outbreak of the desease could be put off, they reacted defiantly, and continued their former life, in any case all of the affected could not prevent the outbreak and died.



AIDS was first clinically reported on June 5, 1981, with five cases in the United States. The initial cases were a cluster of injecting drug users and homosexual men with no known cause of impaired immunity who showed symptoms of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a rare opportunistic infection that was known to occur in people with very compromised immune systems.[223] Soon thereafter, an unexpected number of homosexual men developed a previously rare skin cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS). Many more cases of PCP and KS emerged, alerting U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a CDC task force was formed to monitor the outbreak.

In the early days, the CDC did not have an official name for the disease, often referring to it by way of the diseases that were associated with it, for example, lymphadenopathy, the disease after which the discoverers of HIV originally named the virus. They also used Kaposi’s sarcoma and opportunistic infections, the name by which a task force had been set up in 1981. At one point, the CDC coined the phrase “the 4H disease”, since the syndrome seemed to affect heroin users, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. In the general press, the term “GRID”, which stood for gay-related immune deficiency, had been coined. However, after determining that AIDS was not isolated to the gay community, it was realized that the term GRID was misleading and the term AIDS was introduced at a meeting in July 1982. By September 1982 the CDC started referring to the disease as AIDS.

Many artists participating in the AIDS Memorial were contributing a tribute to an artist who died of AIDS.
Participating artists:

Robert Atkins, Antonio Sassu, Michael von Karkowsky, Agricola de Cologne, Eldar Karhalev, Fatima Lasay, John Abrams, Peter Wright, Joey Gilman, Joe de Hoyos, David B. Abbott, Max Greenberg, James Greenwood, Digital Sisters Indeed , Jayce Salloum, Martin Nossen, Jack Pierson, Rick Miller, Bobby Nelson, Jochen Klein, Arnold Kall, Attila Lukacz , Jack Hart, Masami Teraoka, Jim Hodges, Angela McCullough, Peter Hujar, Niels Pfahl, Vincenzo Scarpi, Nicolas Nixon, Nikolaus Utermoeler, Niels Pfahl, Roger Lips, Ferdi Kroll, Elisabeth Olson , Mara Nortrup, Loel Poor, Todd Perl, Hunter Reynolds , Todd Perl, David Woynorowicz , Mary Berridge, Juan Luis Belem, Andreas Fux, Michael Treiber, Marc Morrisroe, Bill Jacobson, Robert Giard Photo Gallery, Maria van Royen, Dean Lance, Danijela, Fid Chinoy, Zsolt Keserue, Mike Haskett, Birgitta Jonsdottir, Gavin Hayward, Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca, Domenico Olivero, Seth Lew, Malale Maswanya, Greg Alayon, Catherine March, Karl Grimes, Beate Zurwehme, kevin parks hauser, Owen Plotkin, Stephen Mead

To be extended and relaunched on 1 December 2019 – WORLD AIDS DAY