A Ruhr treat: can a giant pigeon and a pink basketball revive Germany’s depressed industrial heartland?
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- Manifesta 16 Ruhr has occupied 12 abandoned Pantoffelkirchen ('slipper churches') across the Ruhr conurbation through October, with curator Josep Bohigas saying he cares about 'neighbourhoods, not churches' because 'they were built for people who are no longer there.'
- Gürsoy Doğtaş, an art historian whose parents were Turkish 'guest workers,' curated two Gelsenkirchen churches renamed for migrant labor figures — including the Ferdane Satır Tea Garden, honoring one of seven Turkish workers murdered in a 1984 fascist arson attack in Duisburg.
- Thomaskirche in Gelsenkirchen features 'Friend,' a massive printed pigeon by artist Gülbin Ünlü, and is devoted to textiles, feminised factory labor, and the German-engineered Baghdad Railway, with public weaving workshops in the church hall.
- Gelsenkirchen holds western Germany's highest unemployment rate and the strongest AfD vote, and is now poorer than east Germany after decades of deindustrialisation, according to the source.
- St Ludgerus, a tiny 1960s slipper church in Bochum, has been converted into a basketball court by Catalan artists Cabosanroque, where missing the net triggers a blast from the church organ.
- An estimated 300 churches in the Ruhr are disused or derelict, with 100 sold off in the past year alone, and the postwar building boom was supported by industrial families Thyssen and Krupp using Catholic 'guest workers' from southern Europe, Greece, and Turkey.
- The Ruhr closely resembles the West Midlands as 'the stricken driver of national growth,' per the source, with autobahn A40 slicing it into poorer and more affluent enclaves that are seldom walkable to one another.
Why it matters: An estimated 300 Ruhr churches are disused or derelict, with 100 sold off in the past year — so Manifesta's 12-venue intervention is a small, temporary reprieve in a region where places like Gelsenkirchen already hold western Germany's highest unemployment and AfD vote. The biennale's most resonant projects, by Turkish-German artists, treat the churches as memorials to the guest workers who built the postwar Ruhr economy.
