In the years 2021 to 2023 we have commissioned artists to produce picture series examining the region that has inspired the festival’s mission: an artistic revival of its disused industrial buildings that are testament not only to a bygone age but to a way of thinking and a relationship with the world that are also past. Hardly any other region in Germany has experienced such a radical transformation over the last century as the Ruhr. And the arts are what still seeks to understand the human effects of this process.

In his series Ghosts in 2021, the photographer Tobias Zielony attempted to find traces of his grandfather. As a coal miner in Gelsenkirchen, he had been part of the culture which continues to embody the Ruhr region to this day. In 2022, the artist Mischa Leinkauf sought an overview of the changes and layers of time that have inscribed themselves into the landscape of the Ruhr over the years. To do this, he climbed onto the roofs and chimneys of the region’s industrial structures and discovered new visual axes from their spectacular height.

Now, in 2023, we have asked the duo of documentary filmmakers loekenfranke, which have developed a sharp eye for structural change and its consequences that is unrivalled, to capture the current state of the region in their unique visual language. The results are images of almost mythic power.

As if in some distant time, when human beings sought guidance from the skies and read auguries of the will of the gods from the patterns of birds in flight, we can recognise little groups of people of various ages in the pictures, armed with telescopes and binoculars, lost in a natural landscape, their rapt gaze pointing in one single direction. They are expectant. Evidently they trying to make out something in the distance. Human order can be discerned in the background, but it is no longer decisive. Instead their attention is pointed towards something that they wish to establish contact with, towards something that defies easy availability, towards something that – despite everything – is still here. Or maybe has returned?

It is noticeable that the light which the time of year or day has provided, a light that has no permanence, that lasts no longer than that brief moment, that offers a promise that the attempt to make contact with this reclusive entity might perhaps succeed – is a moment removed from the timescale of the working day.

For many years, films by the duo have portrayed processes of social transformation, the metamorphoses of landscapes, the closer relationship between culture and nature, and the role of human beings in all of these.

loekenfranke is currently working on a long-term documentary that watches birdwatchers watching. It is no coincidence that birdwatching is becoming a more popular obsession at the present time while we are experiencing a series of disasters. The literary scholar Tanja van Hoorn explains: »Birds are a conspicuous, self-reflective mirror that transcends the boundaries between nature and culture, as well as an epistemological figure that is called upon in an atmosphere of uncertainty and critical examination of one’s own abilities.«

Birdwatching is an indicator of our awareness that the absence or presence of other species will be decisive for our own survival – and that there are other orders besides those made by humans. The fact that it also cultivates the formation and practice of aesthetic perceptions gives it a tender affinity with the arts.