Dortmund: A winter diary

By Paul Scraton:

In the bowels of Dortmund station I look at a map of the city and try to get a sense of this place I’ve arrived in for the first time. The orientation points are limited by a lack of natural landmarks, like a river or a coastline, and my own ignorance. There’s a harbour, a river port through which much of the coal and steel that made this city once moved. There’s a ring road where the city walls once stood, surrounding what the historic old town that was very much destroyed by the bombing raids of the Second World War. And there is the Westfalenstadion, now named for a financial services company, home to a football club who have taken the name of Dortmund around the world and whose stickers in distinctive black and yellow occupy every lamppost, bus shelter and abandoned shop front in the city.

Our hotel is in the Nordstadt, divided from the city centre by the railway lines that function in the way that rivers do in other cities. Instead of bridges, there are long and dark tunnels underneath the tracks, giving each side a distinct feeling of being over here compared to over there. I am in the city for a panel discussion on the subject of borders at the Dortmunder U, an impressive arts space that occupies the giant brick building that was once a brewery. It is on the other side of the tracks from the hotel, and it feels fitting somehow that we have to cross beneath the tunnel to reach it, the lonely walk beneath the tracks as a reminder that borders and boundaries can take different forms in different places.

But we have some time before we need to make that journey, and so we walk out from the hotel in search of the harbour. From the docks at Dortmund it is a 269-kilometre journey along the Dortmund-Ems Canal to reach the North Sea. Unlike many canals, obsolete soon after they were built thanks to the coming of the railway, the Dortmund-Ems waterway was dug out of the western German soil in the 1890s precisely to alleviate the demand on the railway network, such was the freight transportation needs of the industrial city and the surrounding area. It helped turn the Port of Dortmund into one of the largest inland ports in Europe, with eleven kilometres of piers and one which, despite a decline since a peak in the 1970s, continues to move some three million tonnes of goods a year.

As we follow streets between the docks, past abandoned warehouses and coach parks for vehicles with number plates from Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo, it reminds me of Liverpool and Rostock, of Gdansk and Belfast, with that similar feel of port areas that still have enough cranes and shipping containers to suggest that work is being done but a distinct lack of people. And in the spaces where once they might have worked, other businesses have moved in. A bicycle parts wholesalers. A club venue with a view over the water and no neighbours to disturb. A portacabin and patch of wasteland behind a high fence, a place to park your caravan or camper van over the winter. Cranes move, high above on the other side of the street at the Container Terminal. The port functions. 

From beside the Container Terminal the road rises up, past the ornate old harbour administration building, to lead us back towards the Nordstadt and our hotel. From the bridge we can see across the port and over towards the city centre, the huge U atop the former brewery clearly visible. We have started to find our orientation points. 

The next morning, we move once more beneath the railway tracks to walk through the pedestrian area of the city centre, almost entirely rebuilt during the West German economic miracle to replace the medieval core that had been blown to pieces during the bombing raids. With its mix of mid- to late-twentieth century shop fronts it reminds me not only of other city centres I’ve passed through in this part of the world, but also those of my childhood, of parts of Manchester or Liverpool visited on Saturday afternoon shopping trips. Can you choose twin cities based on a feeling? Despite a light drizzle, the streets are busy, with shoppers and those who, judging by their hats, scarves and shirts that peak out from beneath heavy winter jackets, are getting ready for tonight’s game. I can’t help but feel that the fans of Liverpool FC and the two Manchester clubs who, in recent years, have come to Dortmund to support their team, would also have also found much to remind them of home. 

Back at the Dortmunder U we take an elevator to the very top floor and step out onto a roof terrace beneath the giant letter that is visible from across the city and look down on the ring road and the city centre and its collection of glass and steel office blocks that speak to the new industries that have replaced the old. There’s no interest here in managed decline. I can see the television tower and the railway tracks, and the cranes of the harbour. Over there, in the gloom, the groundskeeper will be putting the final touches to his Champions League stage set. I have been in the city for less than twenty-four hours, and I’m still ignorant of Dortmund, of what the city is and what it means to the people that live here. But I also know that when I return to the station and look at the map, I’ll already have a better sense of what I’m looking at than I did yesterday.

It’s a start. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

The Other Side? – Borderlands in Contemporary Irish Art

Kathy Prendergast, BLACK MAP SERIES (Bulgaria), 2010, ink on printed map, 94.4 x 131.7 cm (Detail)

By Anne Mager:

Anne Mager is a curator and arts manager living in Ireland and Germany, and the curator of "The Other Side - Borderlands in Contemporary Irish Art", which runs at the Dortmunder U until March 2020. We are extremely pleased and proud to be able to publish her introductory speech from the exhibition opening in December:

Until recently, I felt that I was able to count myself among a lucky generation that in childhood and adolescence saw the disappearance of more and more borders: not only the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989, but also fewer and fewer border controls that were interrupting vacation trips by family car to Belgium, France, Spain and other countries in the eighties and early nineties. In retrospect, and from the perspective of December 2019, it seems almost naive that, like many others, I naturally assumed that this was the direction in which Europe will continue to steer; that the removal of borders, customs duties and the further dissolution of the internal barriers of the EU is something positive and that newly opened borders should remain open. How sobering, no, how shocking it is to finally understand, a week after the disastrous UK elections, that many people do not share the same sentiment.

I moved to Ireland a little over three years ago, to the small town of Dundalk located exactly halfway between Belfast and Dublin, two capitals in two countries on the small island of Ireland and only two hours by car or train from each other. The border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland runs exactly halfway across this route, just a few kilometers north of Dundalk. Anyone crossing this border today is often surprised by what cannot be seen: there are no border guards, no security checks or large warning signs and no passport controls on the train either.

In many places one is not really sure where the border runs at all. The head of the regional Arts Council once told me that he crosses the border around seven times when he drives his daughter to her weekly ballet class. Of course, this was not always the case and until the nineties this section of the border, idyllically situated in the Cooley Mountains and in the middle of a fjord, the Carlingford Lough, was under strict military surveillance. Numerous attacks took place here and anyone who's car broke down in the border strip in the 1980s was at risk of having it being blown up by British security forces, according to the official security rules in place back then.

The Irish border opened with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The de facto arrangement to date: the border is still legally there, but in fact it does not hinder any traffic in both directions. It is not there and yet it exists. And even three years after the first Brexit negotiations, there is still no way of knowing exactly what will happen to what exists de jure and which is de facto hardly noticeable. But it is also a fact that a new EU external border will soon run here.

This will mean much more than inconvenience due to passport controls and more complicated customs regulations – which may also affect the transportation of this exhibition back to Dublin, London and Newry.

The conflict and also the peace in Northern Ireland are not only a complex but also a very shaky affair, and the shadows of the past have buried themselves deeply in cities like Derry and Belfast. As co-director of a Belfast exhibition space and as an somewhat outsider, I am always amazed at the contradiction between this "not there and yet existing": of course there is peace and it doesn't really matter in everyday life whether you are Protestant or Catholic. And still, the so-called Peace Walls, which are higher than the Berlin Wall ever was, are still standing, separating Catholic and Protestant districts and neighbourhoods. Finding my way around the city when I started working here, it was not uncommon for Google Maps to guide me through streets at night where I suddenly found myself in front of the locked gates of these walls that had been open all day. On official forms, funding applications and surveys, you are always asked to which community and confession you yourself or e.g. the exhibition visitors belong, just to make sure that this sensitive balance can be maintained. It is a fragile peace, in many places the conflict is still bubbling to the surface and the violent past has confusing and often contradictory social consequences, which I – like many others – still try to understand.

But what other form of expression is better suited to deal with complexity and contradictions than art? In my curatorial work and in this exhibition in particular, it is very important to me to use artistic positions not as an illustration of a topic or concept, but rather as an opportunity to approach the complex, the confusing, the unseen and overlooked, and at best to change perspectives.

The first position you will encounter in the exhibition is that of Enda Bowe. In Love’s Fire Song, he photographed young people on both sides of the Peace Walls before and during the symbolic, politically charged annual bonfires. The artist deliberately refrained from depicting political symbols or overly clear classification criteria. Rather, his work is about the ordinary and everyday, about what connects us, but also about how we shape future generations.

The question of how to deal with conflict and terror across generations also plays a major role in Willie Doherty's works. As in many of his other works, the setting for the video installation “Remains” shown here is his hometown Derry, also a border town, which has gained a sad reputation as the site of the Blood Sunday massacre 1972. Willie investigates the relationship between landscape and memory across generations and, unfortunately based on true facts, tells the story of a father who is supposed to bring his son and nephew to a site where both are to undergo kneekapping, a punishment method of the Provisional IRA, which is still in use today and which the narrator, the father, had already suffered before.

Sean Hillen brings together the horrors of the so-called Troubles, different levels of time and reality, Irish landscape and pop culture motifs in a completely different narrative and with a completely different, very analogue technique. In his delicate collages, he combines his own documentary images of the conflict with utopian imagery, often in a bizarre and yet irritatingly humorous way.

Kathy Prendergast's cartographic works are also miraculously utopian and poetic. Something wondrous happens when she paints over every-day street maps with black ink for her Black Maps series: she shows in a very reduced but all the more vivid way what happens when we overcome borders. Through artistic elimination and transformation, she succeeds in overcoming power structures and clarifying the subjectivity of maps and subtly questions topics such as identity and location.

This exhibition takes the Irish border as a starting point to reflect on political conflicts and social separation. It was therefore all the more important to open up the view beyond national borders. And that is exactly what Jesse Jones does in her video work "The Other North" from 2013, in which she connects the traumas of Northern Irish and South Koreans in an haunting way. It is a very special honour for me to show this work which connects two divided countries here in Germany, in the thirtieth year of reunification.

Dragana Jurisic’s book and photo project YU: The Lost Country also takes us beyond national borders. The Serbian-Croatian photographer, who lives in Dublin, went on a photographic search for traces of her homeland, a country that no longer exists, and reminds us of how fragile European peace can be.

It is precisely this change of perspective, this view of the supposedly "other" that the exhibition "The Other Side" would like to invite you to. To show that there are more similarities than differences both on a political and on an individual, personal level. I would like to end with a quote from John Hume, who received the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the Irish peace process. Enda Bowe kindly brought the opening sentence of the following quote to the exhibition:

“Difference is the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth, and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace: respect for diversity.”

Exhibition website