Do you see more the closer you get? Or does less and less become visible? What I once easily understood from a distance as a workers' region, the coal and steel centre of Germany and the Revier, becomes 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 intangible. And yet it is always worth trying. 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.

Mischa Leinkauf and his former partner Matthias Wermke 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. With his art, Leinkauf tries to take up new points of view, to open up new lines of sight and thus to gain an overview in the unclear - or the other way round: to show the unclear in the supposedly clear. The artist and his team spent days planning locations, permissions and ways to climb various high points of the Ruhr region in order to spy contrasts, to use strong contraction by zooming in to make the old familiar twist in a different way. Using the technique of narrowing, the series of images developed for 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.

Concept / Realisation / Action Mischa Leinkauf
Dramaturgy and text Aljoscha Begrich
Aerial Photography / Postproduction Johannes Förster
Precious Eye Pola Sieverding
Height safety Holger Nawrocki, Markus Wich
Production management Simon Mellnich

Thanks to Thorsten Kosellek, Ulrike Franke & Michael Loeken, Aino & Rosi Laberenz, Yuki Jungesblut, Axel Braun, Scherin Rajakumaran, Christa Marek, Max Raschke (UpUp-Berlin), Benjamin Frick (Schwebewerk-Berlin), Klaus Mettig & Katharina Sieverding

Created as part of the corporate design of the Ruhrtriennale 2021-23:
Art Direction María José Aquilanti & Ann Christin Sievers