Artists Statement

Installation/Performance 2010

In 2000 the Kokerei Kaiserstuhl (an industrial coke plant in Dortmund) was no longer profitable, despite being the most advanced of its kind. It was consequently sold and disassembled over several months by 300 Chinese workers. In pieces, it was then shipped to Shandong and rebuilt,
advancing China’s heavy industry into the 21st Century. The project “Yacht Kaiserstuhl” takes this enormous transfer of material and information and turns it around. In China, a yacht was constructed from steel and rice straw, the latter taken from fields near the new Shandong coke plant. After the yacht was built, it was dismantled, packed in crates and put on the next container ship bound for Germany, the reverse route that the coke plant had previously taken. Situated on arrival in downtown Dortmund, the yacht returns as a revenant of the vanished factory. Both the method of transportation and material used for building the yacht refer to the history of the coke plant. In contrast, the (yacht) form alludes to the expectations of a post-industrial society evoked by the structural changes in the Ruhr area. In Dortmund, these expectations manifest most clearly in the ongoing construction of Lake PHOENIX – an artificial lake at the site of an abandoned steel plant that will eventually host a marina.

• Echo Ho (cn) & Lasse Scherffig (de), Academy of Media Arts Cologne  (KHM)

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