The photographs are from a visit to the UNESCO World Heritage ‘Zollverein’, an enormous former coal mining industrial site in Germany partially adapted into a museum and the rest reformed into a park.
This series, inspired by Bernd & Hilla Becher’s work of ‘The Water Towers 1972-2009’, should be seen as an attempt to be an extension to their collection. The pictures are more of a critique of the monumentalisation or the museumification of the past. It is a stroll through the late 19th-century industrial labyrinth to glorify what was once a state-of-the-art mining complex, now an unfathomable creature decomposing in the wild, or at least staged to appear.
It is impossible to perceive this totality, not just through naked eyes but through any digital lens. Every part of a ‘whole’ seen in the pictures extends beyond the frame. Today, the maze-like Folly presents itself as a never-ending installation showcasing century-old machinery, mine-workers overalls, Fossils, minerals, etc., an act of cultural regeneration.
