42 Ansichten zu Warten auf den Fluss

In the summer of 2016, Barbara Köhler moved to Castrop-Rauxel for two months as a kind of jewelry remittance: into the habitable sculpture "Waiting for the River" by the Rotterdam artist group "Observatorium," to wait for the Emscher, which has not flowed for years. From her waiting, observing, and contemplating emerged 43 nineteen-line poems, a book that speaks of deindustrialization and renaturation, of local wasteland and a dead river, its history and stories, of realities and utopias, of landscapes and technology, a geography continually reshaped by humans. Conversations with other visitors and the creators of the sculpture left foreign-language traces in the text, allowing it to become a movement between languages, between false friends and truly helpful misunderstandings. Between crude description and poetic reflection, boundaries become fluid, allowing for the unexpected to occur. "42 Views on Waiting for the River" is a light-footed yet dense text about waiting, flowing, time, death – and of course also about the Ruhr area, about the possible and impossible ways people engage with nature.