Manifesta 16 will take place in four cities across the Ruhr Area – Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen and Bochum. Former and under-used church buildings will be transformed into cultural and community hub, where Manifesta 16 will present events, workshops, exhibitions and site-specific artistic commissions and installations.

The artistic programme has been developed by an inter-disciplinary artistic team, composed of eight Creative Mediators: Josep Bohigas, Gürsoy Doğtaş and three intergenerational tandems — Henry Meyric-Hughes & Michael Kurtz, René Block & Leonie Herweg, and Krzystof Kosciuczuk & Anda Rottenberg.

Read about their approach below!

Over a thousand churches were erected across the Ruhr Area after World War Two, replacing those destroyed by Allied bombs as well as serving new migrant communities. Some mid-century churches represented an attempt to articulate the ideals of post-fascist society. Architects rejected monumentalism and lowered the altar, prizing democracy over divine authority. 

These radical buildings are still unavoidably haunted by history. Liebfrauenkirche in Duisburg, for example, contains statues from a war-destroyed predecessor. And the walls of Gethsemane-Kirche in Bochum, are made from Trümmerziegel or ‘rubble bricks’ salvaged by local people in the 1940s. Rubble was the most widely available material in mid-century Germany. Millions of cubic metres were cleared in the Ruhr Area alone, partly by the famous Trümmerfrauen or ‘rubble women’. Bricks that could not be re-used were often crushed into aggregate for concrete, so even the ultimate material of the post-war future was composed from the fabric of Europe’s violent past. 

After decades of secularisation, churches in the Ruhr Area are now closing on a weekly basis, often then purchased by profit-hungry developers or left slowly to decay. These landmarks, once central to neighbourhood life for many, have become symbols of our diminished public realm: of social atomisation and the loss of collective experience. Manifesta 16 Ruhr takes place in and around a selection of the churches and responds to their situation. It asks: what can we do with these buildings? What is their meaning? How might they be preserved as social spaces? Can they contribute to the formation of a more just society? 

The artistic team’s approach to these questions is encapsulated in the image of the rubble bricks: fragments of an old world that were used to build anew. In the resourceful spirit of the Trümmerfrauen, artists reconfigure discarded material – superfluous benches, smashed windows, silent organ pipes – to articulate new ideas. Like the walls of Gethsemane-Kirche, our visions for the future of collective experience are built from remnants of the past. Our hopes for transformation are tempered by the need to remember, actions motivated by a duty to address historic injustices. This dual temporality, looking back and forward at once, structures the biennial. 

On the one hand, the churches are turned into sites for sharing stories of the past, together presenting a kaleidoscopic history of the Ruhr Area and its people. On the other hand, participatory projects and architectural interventions redefine the buildings. Historical narratives rub up against contemporary life at every turn. This is the overarching argument of Manifesta 16 Ruhr. Social progress is dependent on active engagement with the past, on an understanding of how history has shaped the present. The creation of new public spaces and the preservation of historical consciousness are two sides of the same coin. 

The artistic team’s Trümmerziegel approach is expressed by the tongue-in-cheek title, ‘This is not a church’, which dwells in negativity just as it signals potential for change. If this is not a church, the phrase begs the question, what is it? Loss is entwined with possibility, the presence of the past with the prospect of a different future. 

This is a condensed version of the conceptual essay, written by Michael Kurtz on behalf of the Manifesta 16 Ruhr Creative Mediators