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Athe town of Ruhr in Germany – the third largest city in Western Europe – was heavily affected by the Second World War, planners came up with a smart idea. About 80% of the spread – which includes big cities like Essen and Duisburg, as well as smaller towns like Bochum and Gelsenkirchen – was destroyed. Therefore, during the reconstruction, the new Diocese of the Ruhr built hundreds of overcrowded ones. Pantoffelkirchen or “slope churches”, they are named as such because they were very close to the buildings built for churchgoers to walk on their slippers.
Today, Pantoffelkirchen it’s getting less and less. Estimates of the number of unused or abandoned churches are 300, and 100 were sold last year alone. Until October, 12 of them are home to Manifesta, a traveling art biennale. They are like the foundation of the regions that are ravaged today not by war, but by industrial decline, unemployment and environmental degradation.
Manifesta 16 Ruhr is not the Venice Biennale. Think more of the Capital of Culture event held in the West Midlands – which the Ruhr has a lot in common with, as a driver of national growth. Instead of showing, say, Birmingham and Coventry, you’d expect to go to Bilston, Smethwick, Stourbridge. This is easy to do in the Ruhr, where trams are everywhere and little Bochum has the U-Bahn – although you’ll also find that this network has been neglected since it was built in the 1970s. At first glance, the cities and towns seem greener, cleaner and more connected than their British counterparts, but this is a bit deceiving. The A40 autobahn cuts through a lot of poor and wealthy areas, which are impassable.
Much of the Ruhr today is poorer than eastern Germany, after decades of unemployment and government disbandment. Gelsenkirchen has the highest voter turnout for the AfD in far western Germany, and the highest unemployment rate. So Manifesta goes to another level of control by taking and trying to rehabilitate the ruins of society that can be seen as dead places, and villages divided by a dysfunctional economy. It shuns the big, industrial brothels, focusing instead on small churches scattered in villages and suburbs. “I’ll be honest: I don’t care about churches, I care about communities,” says Catalan architect and Manifesta curator Josep Bohigas. “(Churches) were built for people who are not there.” The festival tries to use buildings that seem useless, if often beautiful, to bridge this gap between the past and the future.
It doesn’t work in all cases. Some large empty churches have empty art – blue foam with a beach, which comes to mind, which was established in the 19th century neo-gothic St Josef, Gelsenkirchen. Essen’s gothic St Gertrud, renovated and now used by the local School of Fine Arts, is a distant cousin of Coventry Cathedral; the remaining ruins were connected to the modern church in the 50s. Now, their polychrome expressionist-Byzantine paintings are faced with folds, which have been transformed into Nasan Tur’s sculptures, an abstract form.
The main landmark is the Kulturkirche Liebfrauen, Duisburg, from 1958, which was converted into an arts center in 2011: a modern-looking building with an interesting role as a Catholic church in Liverpool. Some installations here struggle to compete with the beautiful paintings and drawings, which were created in the Vatican Pavilion at Expo 58, between the bright Plexiglas walls. But Elizabeth Price’s impressive two-part film serves as a preface to the biennale’s ideas, linking memories of the bombings of World War II with the history of modern Catholic churches built in post-war Britain for Irish immigrants.
In most cases, these churches were structurally stable. One, Christ-König in Bochum, is a brick echo of the Fritz Lang melodrama that was built in the last year of the Weimar Republic – but 10 of these churches are post-war. Hedwig Fijen, the leader of Manifesta Ruhr, describes them as places where architects and churches try to “imagine another kind of people”, after “years of war, genocide and destruction”. But he did this in the old world. The new churches were heavily supported by the local industrial families, Thyssen and Krupp, who profited from the Nazis who loved their volunteer workers. Immigration of “foreign workers” was encouraged; Many of the miners and industrialists who rebuilt the area and fueled the “economic miracle” were from the Catholic south. Europetogether with Greece and, especially, Turkey.
Their story is told here in the sliding churches, the bright and beautiful paintings that have caused great interest to the curators and artists. The first one I saw, St Marien, Essen, was very different from the churches in the city center. Built in 1963, with glass facades designed by Manfred Ott, it is complex, red brick and slightly damaged, located in a multicultural neighborhood facing a shopping park where factories once existed. The church has been in use for many years and the artwork plays with the theme of the bomb site, all the fragments and detritus. You realize just how much steeped church architecture there is when you move from there to Essen’s Protestant Markuskirche, from 1961, with its beautiful stained glass wall. It is also strongly integrated with its community, near a kindergarten and a care home. The main “art” here is the wooden furniture and play area by the Portuguese Pele Collective; When I hang out, it feels more like a school party than an art exhibition.
The most powerful, satisfying works are less beautiful. Both are supported by Gürsoy Doğtaş, a historian whose parents were Turkish “guest workers”. His group also named two churches in Gelsenkirchen: St Bonifatius, as Ferdane Satır Tea Garden, after one of the seven Turkish workers who were killed by the fascists in the fire in Duisburg in 1984; and Thomaskirche, after Hava Güleç, a local factory worker considered a pillar of society. St Bonifatius (1963) is in the solid, red brick tradition, and stands in a town with a main road. It has become an art museum for working tourists.
In the Thomaskirche, the crystalline area, which is overlooked by Friend, a large pigeon printed by the artist Gülbin Ünlü, includes Judith Raum’s film about the Baghdad Railway in Germany, which works as a historical record: German industrialists give valid comments about tired Ottoman workers who do not ask to start a strike and do not pay; Below, pictures show the hardships of the Turkish workers, and the beatings, in Germany after 70 years. Thomaskirche is dedicated to textiles, women’s factory work in the area of the old mills – there is a public weaving workshop in the church hall. Interestingly, Gelsenkirchen’s churches are full of art in employees, not doing the work for them. Many started as guest workers – Abuzer Güler, whose Anatolian figure hangs on industrial frames in the Thomaskirche, or Hanefi Yeter, whose When the Earth Burns, a Diego Rivera-like apocalyptic Ruhr allegory of 1984, hung in St Bonifatius.
But the early beginnings of the Ruhr, in the late 1900s and early 1900s were heavily influenced by the Poles. In the disused Getsemane church in Bochum – one of several “emergency churches” designed by the Weimar modernist Otto Bartning, built from rubbish by the community in 1947 – the Polish curator Krzysztof Kosciuczuk brings together an extraordinary work, playing a game on migration. Standing outside the church, in the dormitories of modest and divided buildings, a bouncy house resembling a church bell: designed by the Belarusian artist Marina Naprushkina, at first it seems like a silly, friendly gesture, until you read the legend, in large letters: “We will not return!”
All this, obviously, is temporary. One project in the 1960s slipper church, the small Bochum St Ludgerus, has been converted into a basketball court. This is not new – in Gelsenkirchen, St Josef had one for a while – but what this one, made by the Catalan experts Cabosanroque does, is encouraging the lack of success. If you miss the net, a huge explosion from the church organ is triggered. You can sit in the “courtyards” of the church seats and see amazing events happening, while local youth and biennale-hoppers, lit by stained glass, try to miss their goals. It is interesting precisely because of its unique surrealism and dissonance.
Today’s small-scale churches are based on unity: their modern culture is based on the beliefs that their working-class congregations shared. In the absence of a uniform agreement, this experiment, attraction and spatial experiment shows that diversity can create a place that is extraordinary – if given money and time, which is often lacking in places like the Ruhr.
