B1|A40 THE BEAUTY OF THE GRAND ROAD

her meditation on concepts such as identity and a sense of belonging in
the ephemeral and oscillating space along the motorway, finally finding
the appropriate site at the Heißener Hof, a place distinctly similar to the
farm where she grew up.
Life on the road was also approached after a fashion in Volker Lang’s
work. On the one hand, his 8 ½ Circus Space reflected on the circus as
a dying format which used to convey the fantastic to the industrialized
cities. Offsetting the characteristics of a life on the road, the work was
intricately bound to the specific location, as the open circus tent offered
unusual perspectives and, as a sculpture, invited the local residents to
stage their own practices on the platform inside. The analogy between
everyday culture and high culture made the installation on an open field
in Mülheim an interface between a culture of identity and that of the other,
mirrored also in the heterogeneous neighborhood in the surroundings
of the Eichbaum metro station.
HOME ON THE MOTORWAY Several works concerned themselves with
those residents whose home is confronted with the motorway and the
difficult conditions of a compulsory life amidst the flow of traffic. At
Essen-Frillendorf, people are living in terraced houses only some few
meters beyond the motorway lanes. To some it seems inconceivable how
anybody could adapt to such a situation, whether in a traditional or a newly-built
neighborhood. In his work Fixed Star, Manuel Franke displayed
strategies used by the local residents to customize their own individual
house in order to visualize the indispensability of the personal in the
midst of an exceedingly public space. The fact that his work entered into
a dialogue with the adjacent facade, which is invariably used to proclaim
the neighbors’ enthusiasm for football once another world cup comes
around (thus also in 2014), seemed to fit in seamlessly with the artist’s
own purposes. By subtly contrasting the settled way of life with life on
the road, Franke’s quasi-sculptural work was transmuted into a sophisticated
discourse between place and space, moment and continuity.
A bit further on up the road, Leni Hoffmann’s work utilized the situation
of a village bisected by the motorway in order to address a socio-spatial
subject in a similarly sculptural manner. Her intervention, which dramatized
both ends of a bland concrete bridge spanning the motorway as a
bracket connecting the separated districts, made tangible the conspicuous
caesura of the social environment imposed by the expansion of the
B1 into a motorway.
Yet along the A40 one can find not only places like Frillendorf, where the
drastic aspects of the motorway expansion become glaringly obvious,
but also idyllic districts. In Dortmund-Schönau, John Miller’s work A False
Mirror addressed a radically different situation. At the spot where the
Schnettker bridge crosses the picturesque Emscher and Rüppingsbach
valley, he chose the designated center of the exclusive residential area
to erect two advertising columns, whose slightly anachronistic character
as a non-digital advertising medium seems to mirror the atmosphere
of their surroundings. On those pillars, the sleepy district, suffused with
the deceptive calm of bourgeois contentment, was confronted with two
fantasies of faraway places: the idyll of paradisiacal solitude was mirrored
in the stereotypical depiction of a palm-studded island on the one
hand and the image of a cluster of detached family homes of a first-generation
gated community on the other. Both the houses of this form of
settlement and the island idyll were treated as emblematic visions of an
excessively individualized society; at the same time, the actual site was
characterized as an exemplary instance of self-representation.
NEW LANDSCAPES A crucial aspect of the motorway is bound up in its
impact on the perception, existence and configuration of a landscape as
a habitat. Since the time when the first American parkway engendered a
comprehensive transformation of the perspective on a landscape 13 , recreating
it as a large-scale travel prospect and an image of domesticated
nature, it has become obvious that motorways trigger manifold social
and economic changes both in cityscapes and landscapes. The question
whether the concept of landscape as one distinct, complex habitat, as an
interface between man, culture and nature is a sustainable proposition
or whether we are merely confronted with its perennial reconstruction,
was comprehensively discussed by the exhibition at various places and
in various formats.
In his work Redevelopment Michael Fehr pinpointed the hidden qualities
of a landscape such as the Kaiserberg motorway junction area from a
historical perspective. While it might appear as a piece of “virtually untouched
nature” on the surface, below the ground this landscape functions
as a point of intersection of various energy sources such as oil, gas,
electricity and water. It thus made sense for Fehr to present the fruits of
his research in the guise of a sculptural information panel on the meadows
of the Dörnerhof farm, large tracts of which had fallen victim to the
progressive expansion of the motorway junction.
Christian Odzuck’s work Polytopos Dortmund* positioned itself in conscious
relation not only to the close-by Schnettker bridge but also to
the surrounding landscape. His stark construction systematized the
observer’s perspective on the large-scale surroundings, juxtaposing
the environment with scaled schematized shapes in the guise of
landscaped embankments, oscillating between large-scale sculpture,
miniature model and physical location. The work also served as both an
auditorium and an object of investigation for the students of the planning
department at the TU Dortmund, offering itself as an interface for
the reflection on current landscape concepts. The participants of the
project Ruhrbanität initiated by Christa Reicher and Ilka Mecklenbrauck
approached the specifics of the landscape of the Ruhr region by means
of extensive research, whose purposes and results were publicly discussed
at the site of Odzuck’s work.
Another aspect discussed in the exhibition was the interrelation of ecology
and economy in a region whose landscapes have for a long time been
exploited as a mere energy reservoir. One of the most impressive installations
focusing on this subject was provided by the group Performance
Electrics headed by its founder Pablo Wendel; its wind power station,
built exclusively from recycled road materials, was located in a nook of
the motorway junction at the outskirts of Dortmund, inviting passersby
in a humorous manner to think about serious subjects such as the
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