All the collaborative work produced by this artistic duo since 2001 is united by a common theme: an engagement with social crises, threats and collective anxieties and their representation in the media.
At the end of the 1950s, Johann Tillmann Billen, entrepreneur from Wolfsburg, met the architect Mies van Rohe in Chicago. A meeting of great importance, because shortly afterwards Billen built a new administration building for his company Naturstein Billen in Wolfsburg at the foot of the Berlin Bridge. There are unmistakable architectural quotations in the building, reminiscent of Mies van der Rohe's most famous building, the “Barcelona Pavilion” from 1928 - an icon of classic modernism. The Billen building has been a listed building since 2013. It is exactly such buildings that photographers Wiebke Elzel and Jana Müller are looking for their “Archive Elzel / Müller”. In doing so, they try to wrest locations from oblivion that are in danger of disappearing. These include, for example, cinema and theater halls, healing facilities, factories and sometimes even entire villages. They document these places in search of traces of their former use.