Printed pigeon … Friend by artist Gülbin Ünlü at Thomaskirche. Photograph: Ivan Erofeev View image in fullscreen Printed pigeon … Friend by artist Gülbin Ünlü at Thomaskirche. Photograph: Ivan Erofeev Architecture A Ruhr treat: can a giant pigeon and a pink basketball revive Germany’s depressed industrial heartland? The Manifesta biennale is taking over a dozen tiny churches in German towns ravaged by division and decline – and filling them with ball games, bouncy castles and a radical community spirit
Prefer the Guardian on Google A fter Germany’s Ruhr conurbation – the third-largest urban area in western Europe – was pummelled during the second world war, planners came up with an ingenious idea. About 80% of the sprawl – which incorporates big cities such as Essen and Duisburg, and dozens of smaller towns like Bochum and Gelsenkirchen – had been destroyed. And so, for the reconstruction, a newly formed Diocese of the Ruhr built literally hundreds of closely packed Pantoffelkirchen or “slipper churches”, so named because they were close enough to housing developments for churchgoers to walk to mass in their slippers.
Today, Pantoffelkirchen are declining sharply. Estimates of the amount of disused or derelict churches are as high as 300, and 100 have been sold off in the last year alone. Until October, 12 of them are home to Manifesta, the travelling art biennale. They stand as centrepieces of communities that have been ravaged this time not by war, but by deindustrialisation, mass unemployment and environmental decline.
Manifesta 16 Ruhr is not the Venice Biennale. Think more a Capital of Culture event held in the West Midlands – which the Ruhr closely resembles, as the stricken driver of national growth. Instead of exhibits in, say, Birmingham and Coventry, you’d be expected to travel to Bilston, Smethwick, Stourbridge. This is much easier to do in the Ruhr, where trams are ubiquitous and even tiny Bochum has a U-Bahn – though you’ll also find these networks have been neglected since they were built in the 1970s. At first, the cities and towns appear greener, sleeker and better connected than their British cousins, but this is a little deceptive. The A40 autobahn slices much of it into poorer and more affluent enclaves, seldom walkable one to the other.
View image in fullscreen Surreal ...a basketball court where a miss triggers a blast of the church organ. Photograph: Rainer Schlautmann Much of the Ruhr is today poorer than east Germany, after decades of deindustrialisation and the dismantlement of the welfare state. Gelsenkirchen has the highest vote for the far-right AfD in western Germany, and the highest rate of unemployment. So Manifesta goes into some very charged territory by taking over and trying to re-imagine the social infrastructure of what can seem a dying place, with divided communities and a dysfunctional economy. It avoids big, sexy industrial spaces, focusing instead on tiny derelict churches in suburbs and housing estates. “I’ll be honest: I don’t care about churches, I care about neighbourhoods,” says Catalan architect and Manifesta curator Josep Bohigas. “[The churches] were built for people who are no longer there.” The festival tries to use these apparently useless, if often beautiful, structures to bridge this gap between the past and the future.
The churches were built for people who are no longer there It doesn’t all work. Some of the bigger empty churches contain some big empty art – an inflatable blue…