Panoramas
Nowhere else in the world looks like the Ruhr. The landscapes in the region have been made by men and marked with the scars of mining and industrial exploitation. Towns and cities were not shaped by feudal legacies, but by hardheaded functional thinking, war damage and the consequent process of rapid post-war reconstruction.
For some years now, the landscapes in the Ruhr have been continually changing. Disused industrial areas have been turned into landscape parks, spoil tips transformed into green oases, and pioneering works of art and architecture have turned the signs of an industrial past into spectacular messages of change.
Shaft Signs
Photo / Graphics: RUH R.2010
The coal mining industry has left many traces, but they are scarcely visible today. The shafts have been filled in – some of them with just a steel cover containing the name of the former colliery. What was once the centre of life and work for hundreds of thousands of people has now vanished once more beneath the surface.
During the European Capital of Culture year 2010, many of the 900 listed shafts will again be made visible. Then hundreds of gigantic balloons will be simultaneously launched into the heavens to a height of 80 metres throughout the whole of the metropolitan area, to fly there for a maximum of two weeks. They will mark the sites where the colliers were engaged in back-breaking work underground during the last 100 years. Shaft Signs will be sending out an artistic and emotional signal in and on behalf of the Ruhr. All 53 local authorities, both large and small, will be taking part in the presentation that is intended to draw people’s attention to our common history, give a new outline to the former silhouettes which once marked the Ruhr’s industrial landscape, and point the way forward to new horizons and the vision of the Ruhr Metropolis. History societies and other clubs, towns, parishes, mining offices, historians and private individuals will be invited to act as patrons for the balloons.
www.ruhr2010.de/schachtzeichen
