The Embassy of the Republic of Niger in Rome is located in an unassuming ten-storey apartment building in a neighbourhood between the Vatican and the Olympic Stadium. Its nondescript appearance belies the monumental consequences of the robbery that took place there in January 2001, when several pieces of Embassy stationery and official stamps and seals were stolen from the building. It is widely believed that letters that turned up shortly after the break-in – appearing to document Saddam Hussein’s attempt to purchase yellowcake (an enriched form of uranium used in nuclear weapons) from Niger – were printed on these stolen papers. Though numerous intelligence officials and experts dismissed the documents as forgeries, President George W. Bush nevertheless cited them as a cause to go to war in Iraq.

For his photo series Embassy, Thomas Demand gained access to the place where the events leading to this “smoking gun” supposedly occurred. Together with Arno Brandlhuber he later reconstructed the site as a 1:1 paper sculpture to take the photographic proof of these spaces of remembrance. In the same collaborative form, Thomas Demand and Arno Brandlhuber developed the first exhibition of Embassy as a spatial installation at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini presented by Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2007. The translation back into a physical exhibition set-up was neither a mere 1:1 reconstruction—as the paper sculpture produced before—nor a conventional white cube form of an exhibition. To indicate the spatial configuration of the actual embassy space, the walls were placed so as to align the spectator’s eye with Demand’s camera angle during his working process. The backdrop creates a cinematographic moment, in which the two-dimensionality of the images come into tension with the three-dimensionality of the rooms of the embassy in Rome. Beyond, the exhibition architecture refers to the scale of the models, which Thomas Demand usually destroys after taking the photographs. Guided by Brandlhuber’s architectural arrangement and Demand’s sequence of images, the visitor enters a construction, a manipulation of an unknown piece of recent history.