100 families from 100 different nations give an account of their lives in the Ruhr region (Ruhrpott) of Germany, outlining their perspectives for a new era. The personal experiences and stories of these immigrants offer us a new perception of the area and its cultural and industrial transformations. The intimate insights into different lives, individual living conditions, and the manifold motivations to live in a city in this region help draw a new map of western German, the "New Pott," which has become a new home for millions of people.
For this rather original artistic project, Düsseldorf artist Mischa Kuball interviewed 100 immigrants from different generations over more than a year. The intensity of these encounters is reflected in the publication's collection of interviews, portraits, and private snapshots of the interlocutors. The analytical comments by cultural scientist Harald Welzer address the social and political questions of social integration and the future of a multinational population in Germany, and dispel the common clichés about the Ruhrpott region.
Conceptual artist Mischa Kuball (born 1959 in Düsseldorf, where he lives
and works) has been working in the public and institutional sphere since
1977. He uses light as a medium to explore architectural
spaces as well as social and political discourses and reflects on a whole
variety of aspects from sociocultural structures to architectural
interventions as well as emphasizing or reinterpreting their monumental
nature and context in architectural history. Public and private space
merge into an indistinguishable whole in politically motivated
participation projects, providing a platform for communication between the
audience, the artist, the work itself and public
space. Since 2007 Mischa Kuball has been a Professor for public art
at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, and associate professor for media
art at Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM, Karlsruhe. Since 2015 he has been a
member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and
the Arts, Düsseldorf. In 2016 he was honoured with the German Light Award.
