4 - A Discursive Site of Memory for Industry: Landschaftspark, North Duisburg

Summary

Abstract

In the 1990s, the coal and steel mine complex at Meiderich, Duisburg in Germany's Ruhr Valley was regenerated into an ecologically sustainable Landscape Park. In this chapter, I argue that the Landscape Park offers a study in the potential role of art for the creation of an integrative, inclusive social experience of the past for those who were oppressed by that same past, are dislocated in the present, and are otherwise erased from future visions of the region. Through artworks made from the materials of industry, the site creates continuity and dialogue between aesthetics and industry, work, and creativity, as well as the past and present. It also invites sociological integration across generations, between former workers and their families, visitors to and from the region.

Keywords: industrial art; corporeal memory; rewilding; de-monumentalization; Ruhr Valley

In the 1990s, the monumental coal and steel mine complex at Meiderich, North Duisburg in Germany's Ruhr Valley, was regenerated into an ecologically sustainable landscaped park, known as the Landschaftspark. In this chapter, I consider the regenerated park against the background of ongoing challenges to provide social, environmental, and economic solutions for future sustainability across Europe's once thriving industrial regions. I argue that the fusion of art and industry in the Landschaftspark generates living memories at the site. It offers visitors from outside the region an opportunity to discover the history of nineteenth-century industry from multiple perspectives. Simultaneously, it creates opportunities for the participation and integration of locals. At the Landschaftspark, the behemoths of nineteenth-century industry, the mine and mill structures as sublime cathedrals of modernity, are transformed into artworks in an ecologically sustainable landscape. In turn, these artworks can be discovered by visitors who engage them to “rearticulate” the industrial past, and the post-industrial present and future in ever-developing narratives. Andreas Huyssen argues in his discussions on the post-1989 rebuilding of Berlin that the privileging of monumentality as a nineteenth-century affirmation of the nation-state and the “cultural needs of the bourgeoise” must be historicized as such if we are to break free of their allure. The iconic value of architectural monuments must be narrativized rather than visually deified within their physical contexts. The Landschaftspark realizes such a historicization by placing the iconic monuments of industry at the centre of a participatory culture that de-monumentalizes the industrial past.