Press Release
Neustadt (New City) is a fictive city made up of 1:25-scale models of various buildings in the Ruhr region that were demolished since the 2000s. The permanent installation of altogether 23 sculptures is located on a stretch of green in Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord and is part of the Emscherkunstweg (Emscher Art Trail), a sculpture path along the river Emscher which flows from West to East through the industrial cityscapes of the Ruhr area. Researching the history of construction and demolition in the Ruhr region over the past twenty years, Julius von Bismarck and Marta Dyachenko selected 23 torn down buildings, including residential houses, water parks, churches and schools, to bring them back to life in form of sculptures. The new city of “old buildings” houses a cross-section of local urban architecture ranging from late 19th-century historicist apartment buildings from Essen to a 16-story skyscraper nicknamed the “Weiße Riese” in Kamp-Lintfort. Two public pools, a community school and two churches, one of them built in 1904 in neo-Gothic style and torn down in 2015, are examples of the social change that has taken place within the public engagement for the communities and religious congregations.
