Achim Heinrich

Art Detective is a cross-disciplinary group comprising on artists, Pam Skelton, England, and Tina Clausmeyer, Netherlands, environmental health researcher Achim Heinrich, Germany and sociologist and historian Heinz Mestrup, Germany, that sets out to discover what has become of the Stasi meeting places known as KW's.
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A key member of our project team, Achim Heinrich, attracted the attention of the Stasi because of his active role as an ecologist in a local environmental group in the 1980's in Erfurt.To Stasi methodology, this was critically observed as ‘underground activity', which had the immediate potential to easily form an oppositional working group that discredited the environmental politics of the GDR.Achim Heinrich was therefore suspected to having carried out political dissident activities.As with all individuals under Stasi surveillance and suspicion, a substantial file was built up on him, which after German unification he was able to access at the Central Office for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former GDR, in Berlin.Since then he has been researching - as a case study - into the working methods of Stasi control patterns and repressive state structures, particularly in relationship to the environmental group, in which he was an activist.Drawing on his research, knowledge and experiences of the city in which he lived and worked, and in cooperation and support with the archive of the outpost Erfurt, we have recently accessed the files that locate all the KW's operational in the last decade of the regime (1980 - 1989) and are finally in a position to navigate the city in relation to its history.