B1IA40 - The Beauty of the Big Road
"Delicate Arch", Rita McBride, B1|A40 The beauty of the boulevard / Photo: Markus Ambach Projekte/ McBride/MAP
Do you know where a motorway starts and ends? Is anyone aware how the verges and the embankments designed to block out the noise are invigorated, utilised and further developed? How does the motorway work, how do the local inhabitants, visitors and companies live and cope with such a major traffic artery? And who creates the space for the fast lane, the stops, the disembarkation points and the rush-hour congestion?
The A40 is the long, unknown "centre" of the Ruhr Metropolis that each day carries 100,000 visitors to, through and from the region. It is bordered by a million local residents. Horticultural allotments and pedestrian shopping precincts, cultural productions and the shadow economy all make use of this great road as part of their infrastructure and platform.
Now the B1IA40 is to be a motorway reinterpreted: in dialogue with artists, planners such as Atelier van Lieshout, Finger or Thomas Rentmeister and local activists, an exhibition is to be created directly within the existing context, portraying the motorway as the great narrative of the region. At six locations, it will be provided with special areas at which visitors will be able to engage with the major topics surrounding the municipal space that is the A40. At the same time, network projects will portray how the municipal area might be refashioned from a town planning point of view on the basis of these experiences.
New landscapes
Along the A40 in the shadow of its core municipalities has developed an idiosyncratic municipal area which is suddenly developing from a peripheral phenomenon into an urban boulevard of the Ruhr Metropolis. The B1 | A40 leads visitors into these new landscapes which, in turn, provide signposts to the future.
Globally local
The vicinity of local and global neighbourhoods serves to create a vital municipal area in which international transit is intertwined with local events. At service stations, in shopping malls and residential areas, there is a meeting of spirits that otherwise exist in splendid isolation. The road is the great go-between and facilitator of globally local encounters, rendering it the ultimate promoter of European urbanism.
Cultural interchange
Nowhere else do cultures of every colour meld so effortlessly as here. In this difficult location characterised by mobility and noise, religious, ethnic and cultural groups find accessible space for unusual encounters.
Ruhr road movie
All these experiences are directly fused within the on-road exhibition to create the bigger picture, the "RUHR.2010 Road Movie" for which the project is writing the script. Visitors, the municipal neighbours and local people are cast in the role of audience, accomplices, makers, shakers and raconteurs of a region that is reinventing itself along the "great highway". Together, they are creating an innovative and wider interpretation of this urban space, perceiving it as a newly conceived "centre" of the Ruhr Metropolis.
June 12 - August 8, 2010
Curator: Markus Ambach
Various locations in the public-access zone along the A40 (Kaiserberg interchange, Rhein-Ruhr-Zentrum, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Wasserturm Essen, Dückerweg/Vietingstr. Bochum, Dorstener Str., Bochum, Stadtkrone Dortmund)
Admission free
Partners: City of Bochum (representative Duisburg, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Essen, Dortmund), Straßen.NRW, Kunststiftung NRW, Landesinitiative StadtBauKultur NRW, Generalkonsulat der Niederlande, Düsseldorf
More: www.ruhr2010.de/b1-a40