A landscape made for me, art is for my sake? Report from the Emscher Park Radweg, Part II

US-poet/author Katherine Thorpe continues her excursions into the post-industrial landscapes of the Ruhr area, exploring the new route along the Emscher by bike.

"I wonder how art allows perception of the Emscher—in the very midst of construction—now? As if habitation begins with sight, and can exist alongside nature, a kind of vision, the ability to have a perception, to make an image, a depiction. Which is false, which is alien?
Or to signal: this exists? To cut into the region (separate this from this)? Or to make it whole again—connect, to bridge?" - this is how Thorpe ended the first part of her records.

III.

It is a hard task if undertaken at all, even for someone here with the sole purpose of seeing the art, prepared with guides and maps.

So I wonder if the Emscher Island Path is not really about the art at all—the art is often not even signed or labeled and actually off of the path or just barely visible from the path itself—hard to find, not for the faint of heart, too painful in the sunlight, surrounded—and when I found the things I was too frustrated and hot, I must admit, to spend much time—and often there was nowhere to sit, to contemplate and see.

They strike me more as an offering to the land itself maybe. Between earth and art, instead of human beings.

And the landscape becomes the object in the foreground (here there are many benches, under trees).

--and even the garbage piles on the other side are interesting, the machine in the middle of the canal taking dirt and mud out, the Schleuses, the people on bikes (tourists?) watching the schleuses from the often newly-made bridges, the teens and twenty-something’s sunbathing under highway bridges, on overgrown grass, the benches on a field of gravel, mud—to look at: at the Emscher, the dirt. But I am a foreigner, I feel out of place here, and not just because I am American: all I can do is stare and photograph.

or look at my map (the path could always end. It is a miracle perhaps when it does not end, everything is). There could always be a fence

but no    or not yet

or yes and then no and then

here again and ask for directions and through a parking lot to woods and to some water with people boating and a bridge and then—yes, another marker.

*

Important to remember that it is a region also about movement. Yet not about really going anywhere for good, just from there to here, from here to there, a transformation, shift in form, from coal to coke, to iron, steel. Took place in the Ruhr: infrastructure, train tracks and waterways for moving materials from collieries, coke plants, steel and iron works, factories.

Repetitive but not in a circle. Back and forth (and not for people either, these tracks). And in, or after, the structural shift: We also, I also, in my trips to Essen, to Duisburg, to Bochum, Oberhausen, Altenessen, my bike paths, only to come back by roughly the same route but on the S-Bahn, am repeating my own track. (The Hellweg, the S1 is my favorite track). It is a simple replacement perhaps: replacing myself. Replacing the old coal tracks.

Please understand. We go nowhere but on a track. Are we transformed from the past? Or are we simply repeating (in slower motion).

on our path, we tourists and fellow citizens, we youth of tomorrow, we couples, older, wearing hats, biking leisurely beside each other: we are the exhibit (the experiment).

Yet in a place not made for us (yet). Yet made only for us (for who else? (animals? plants?)). 

What is it worth to be the subject of a region? What does it mean?

It is exhausting to create? To breathe? But maybe this is okay. (Who says it should be easy to remake something?)