Emscher Folly

The sculpture Emscher Folly is located in an
open space between the Duisburg Alte Emscher wastewater treatment plant, the
Bruckhausen steelworks by the Alter Emscher river and the Alsumer Berg slag
heap. Nearby is where the Emscher originally flowed into the Rhine.

Here, artist Nicole Wermers has welded dozens of
bicycles onto a steel structure to create a triangular sculptural form. Her
installation transfers an image familiar from urban contexts to an inhospitable
locale defined by industrial production – a scenario also referenced in the
work’s title, »Folly«. Folly is the name given to a type of decorative

architecture in eighteenth-century European garden and landscape design.
Follies are ornamental, often eccentric edifices that suggest a function, but
are in general without purpose. At the same time, Wermers’s sculpture refers to
the artificiality of a landscape that has been extensively shaped by human activity
such as the Emscher region. Stripped of their intended purpose, the design of
the bikes is all the more striking. Their being permanently welded to the steel
tube base creates an aesthetic of sudden standstill and dramatic compaction.

In much of her work the London-based artist explores
moments and zones of transition in public space. The focus of her sculptural
and photographic works lies particularly on architectural threshold situations,
but also on their materiality, such as different kinds of floor surfacing.
Equally significant are gestures and sculptural codes that we have learned to intuitively
understand and whose requirements we generally fulfil. For Nicole Wermers, the
moment of locking a bicycle to a public bicycle stand is one such moment: bike
racks are symbols of our present-day mobile imperative, while at the same time prescribing
a structuring order. The Emscher Folly conserves this polarity, thereby
taking it to absurd lengths.