On the Emscher island near the Gelsenkirchen Locks, just a short distance from the cycle path next to the Emscher one unexpectedly encounters a huge rock formation. As one approaches, a quiet music becomes audible that seems to be emanating from inside the mountain. Embedded on sand, the mountain has a strange appearance, as if a glacial boulder had somehow found its way to this spot. In fact it is an artistic work by Olaf Nicolai and Douglas Gordon, created for the 2010 Emscherkunst exhibition.
Olaf Nicolai built a faithful reproduction of a rock formation in the Joshua Tree National Park near Los Angeles und installed it on the highest spot of the so-called Wild Island between the Emscher river and the Rhine-Herne Canal. The artificial mountain itself sits on top of an artificial mound, namely a waste tip made of the soil excavated during the construction of the nearby locks and the Rhine-Herne Canal. This aside, nature here has been left to its own devices. Visible in the background is the vast industrial scenery of the Ruhr Oel refineries.
This »unnatural natural phenomenon«, as Nicolai describes the work, consists of a steel frame coated in shot concrete, which at first sight looks deceptively similar to a massive natural rock formation. But the mountain is hollow, and on the inside harbours a sound system which during the summer months plays a looped, 23-minute composition by the Scottish band Mogwai, »Music for a Forgotten Future (The Singing Mountain)« that was commissioned by Douglas Gordon.