Neustadt on the road
The Emscherkunstweg is getting a new addition: The cooperation partners Urbane Künste Ruhr, Emschergenossenschaft and Regionalverband Ruhr are pleased to announce a new work of art that will be installed in Duisburg in April 2021. Titled Neustadt, Julius von Bismarck has designed a large-scale installation of building sculptures in collaboration with Marta Dyachenko. On April 3, 2021, the work arrived at the Port of Duisburg by barge.
From the studio of artist Julius von Bismarck, the 23 sculptures were transported to Berlin's Borsighafen and loaded onto a pontoon ship the day before the journey. They will now travel across Germany via the Mittelland Canal, the Dortmund-Ems Canal and the Rhine-Herne Canal to Duisburg. The unusual art transport is part of the artistic concept of Neustadt.
Neustadt consists of buildings that have been demolished in the Ruhr region since the turn of the last millennium. On a scale of 1:25, Marta Dyachenko and Julius von Bismarck have brought former homes, schools, fun pools, churches, bunkers and other buildings back to life as sculptural models made of concrete and steel. A fictitious city structure made of demolished buildings is thus created in model format at the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. With their work, von Bismarck and Dyachenko not only raise questions about the development of cities and the evaluation of architecture, but also about sustainability. The ecological issues are reflected in their decision to transport the sculptures by ship. On the one hand, they refer to the importance of waterways for the transport of goods and the associated transformation of the landscape. On the other hand, it simply contradicts our usual time economy to decelerate the transport and extend it to several days. Instead, the artists understand transport as a performative act. They are passengers themselves and document the shipping, their own journey and that of the building sculptures both cinematically and photographically as well as through conversations that are recorded. Last but not least, the performative act creates the image of a floating city that crosses urban and rural areas and twists our perspective: instead of the landscape passing us by because we are moving in a vehicle, a city suddenly floats past us as we walk along the canal.