Festivalkatalog der Ruhrtriennale 2022

Do you see more the closer you get? Or is does it get less and less visible? What I once
easily understood from a distance to be a workers’ region, the coal and steel centre of
Germany and the Revier, is getting increasingly difficult for me to recognise the closer
I get. The Ruhr city is disintegrating into distinctly different individual parts; what does
Kettwig have to do with Bottrop? The more time I spend in Bruckhausen and Langendreer,
the less I can connect them. Year after year, the Ruhr region seems more complex,
more confusing and more impalpable. And yet it’s always worth trying to tackle it. To
grasp a region, to ask and see what connects Witten and Hochfeld. Where dramaturges
like me, but also sociologists and spatial planners stumble, perhaps artists can help. For
the magazine, we invited two artists to ask: how can the invisible become visible?
Mischa Leinkauf is an artist from Berlin; Lütfiye Güzel is a poet from Duisburg. In their
first meeting at a snack bar in Essen’s main train station, it quickly became clear that
they both want to have a common language about the things, the world, the fries and the
people around them. Given the openness they bring with them and their love for the Ruhr
region, it is hardly surprising, and yet not self-evident, given that they both come from
different worlds: »They always write about me: working-class child, grew up in Marxloh.
Self-taught!«. »About me they always write: raised white flags on the Brooklyn Bridge and
set off terror alarms in New York.«
What paths led them to this snack bar at the main train station? While Lütfiye Güzel has
lyrically described the realities of the Ruhr region with poignancy, bite and melancholy
over the past 20 years, Mischa Leinkauf and his former partner Matthias Wermke have
tested their behaviour, learned in post-reunification Berlin in the grey area between legal
and illegal, in performative climbing actions on houses and borders in Korea and Mexico.
Perhaps it is this search for the gap, the in-between and the special eye for structure that
unites the two. Leinkauf and Güzel try to take on new points of view, to open up new lines
of sight and thus gain an overview amidst the unclarity – or the other way around: to show
unclarity in the supposed clarity. Leinkauf and his team spent days planning locations,
getting permits, and finding ways to climb different high points of the Ruhr region in order
to spot contrasts, to use strong contraction by zooming in to make old, familiar things
contort in a different way. While Güzel, in her blackouts, crossed out words and sentences,
underlining them to make the new visible in the old. Stroke by stroke, she peeled out
the core of what was to remain.
Crossing out is just like fading out: not showing as much as focusing. With the technique
of narrowing, the series of images developed for the magazine of the Ruhrtriennale 2022
attempts to show what is not visible, to discover it by obscuring it. Less does not become
more here, but something in the first place. Two people who look. Two views of structures,
of the past and of the present. Of the ideas of the city and its remains. Of the ruins of
yesterday and tomorrow.
Aljoscha Begrich
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