Neustadt by Julius von Bismarck in collaboration with Marta Dyachenko to be unveiled in Duisburg

“Neustadt” (New City) is an artwork created by Julius von Bismarck in collaboration with Marta Dyachenko and will be officially opened to the public on May 1, 2021. The cooperation partners behind the Emscherkunstweg (Emscher Art Trail) from the arts, river management, and regional planning sectors, respectively—Urbane Künste Ruhr, Emschergenossenschaft, and Regionalverband Ruhr—are delighted—are delighted that this expansive, permanent installation will be added to the Emscherkunstweg. Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen, the Minister of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, is especially pleased about the “poetic comprehensive artwork” and is certain that “Neustadt” will put the Emscherkunstweg on the art map yet again.  

More than two years of planning and research went into the making of “Neustadt.” Von Bismarck, who lives in Berlin, asked Dyachenko, who is an architect and artist, to collaborate with him on the project. After researching the last twenty years of the history of construction, or rather of demolition, in the Ruhr region, they selected 23 no longer existing buildings that they wanted to bring back to life in the form of sculptural models. A stretch of green in the North Duisburg Landscape Park between the Alte Emscher (an arm of  the Emscher River), the Grüner Pfad (Green Path) bike path, and the A 42 autobahn will now be the home of the fictional city of buildings in a scale of 1:25.

“Neustadt” is about city life on the Emscher River in the entire Ruhr area. The types of buildings and intended uses were not selected according to a strict system, but rather according to aesthetic and sculptural criteria with the goal of presenting a cross-section of local urban architecture. This means that a late 19th-century historicist apartment building from Essen can be found standing next to a residential complex from a model housing development in the city of Marl from 1965. Both of these are in the same neighborhood as models of residential prefab buildings testifying to the social history of the 1970s. Another building, the 16-story skyscraper nicknamed the “Weiße Riese” (White Giant) in Kamp-Lintfort, has an especially turbulent history and was finally torn down after standing empty for years to create space for something new. St. Paul’s Church in Duisburg from 1970 and St. Joseph’s Church in the Kupferdreh neighborhood of Essen, which was completed in a neo-gothic style in 1904 and demolished in 2015, had life cycles that stand for how the changes in society are also reflected in religious communities. The Essen School of Adult Education (Volkshochschule), with its unique tiered architecture and aggregate concrete reliefs on its exterior, and the indoor swimming pool in Marl are both reminders of “better times” and raise questions about the preservation of historic buildings that were once icons of modern architecture in the post-war era. Many of the buildings share a long history of “suffering” and gradual demise because those in charge were not able to find a use or to repurpose or renovate them.