RuhrTriennale
DeutschEnglish

Ruhrcollection Part 1: The inflatable society

Performance:
20. August
Start:
4:00 pm

Centre-stage of the opening celebrations:
Ruhrcollection-Events in the Inflatable Architecture on the hill opposite the Jahrhunderthalle, on the open-air steps and in the electromagnetic room

It will arrive in the Ruhr District in August, its whole totality gracing the Triennale critically and frenetically even before the official opening – the inflatable society. A secret agency will select twelve members of the potential RuhrTriennale audience well in advance and request their cooperation under pain of something or other. An artist from the area will even collect something. Genuine guests will be in action on the day itself, and particularly in the evening: a preacher from New York will preach on all relevant topics; radio activists from Hamburg will use electromagnetic waves to choreograph a ballet for the entire, large, attendant society. A well-known local aesthetics professor will be leading tours through art and reality, through the Ruhr district and the Romantic movement. Much relieved and late at night, we will all let the air out together.

From the welcoming speech by the Ruhrcollectors' chairman on the subject of the first Ruhrcollection: "Today, Romanticism is a survival strategy.It sharpens your view on reality, thus making the future conceivable again for many. Residual Romanticism is my new favourite concept. Today, the notion of the German Federal Republic, like the Ruhr District, can really only be recognized in terms of a romantic look back. Solidarity is a romantic utopia of our society; the little that remains of genuinely public space is but a romantic remainder. But of what exactly? Yet this is precisely the point from which things will develop – soon the Ruhr District will be a flourishing region.

The Ruhr District is the future of the republic. Opel's Agreement for the Future is at the same time the Agreement for the Future of Germany. Thanks to the fact existing employment has been secured up to 2010, jobs in Bochum will be among the last nationwide. What the Ruhr District has already gone through still awaits the rest of the country. Culture will not just replace industry but will in the medium-term replace employment as such and in the long run all of society. As early as 2007, the municipal theatres will take over the last remaining employment offices and soon afterwards the RuhrTriennale will take charge of Christmas. Then as now, let us remember the cautionary words of our late founding member: "The great thing about culture is that you can go on blowing it up until everything else bursts".