Art instead of coal: for decades, the Nord combined heat and power plant in Chemnitz was the biggest CO2 guzzler in the region. Lignite was burned here for district heating and electricity. This has been over since the beginning of 2024. In the Capital of Culture year, the plant is now an impressive backdrop for an art festival that revitalizes abandoned sites with contemporary art every year. The festival organizers obviously hit a nerve with their current show in the disused power station: around 8,500 visitors came in the first week.
In the place where vast amounts of climate-damaging CO2 were once blown into the air, international artists are exploring the interactions between humans and nature. To this end, Hito Steyerl has set up an LED wall made of beer crates with bottles and living plants in one of the former water tanks. Image and sound content is generated from the plants' bioelectric signals. Katharina Sauermann has captured the pollutant particulate matter in her pictures, creating atmospheric landscapes that document environmental pollution and make it tangible to the senses.
Imposing cooling tower as a sound space
Japanese artist Rikuo Ueda turns nature itself into an artist: he has built an apparatus on a steel frame that is set in motion by the wind and paints canvases. Next door, musicians Valeria Zane and Victor Nebbiolo di Castri use the former cooling tower of the power station as a sound space for their installation "Aural Dissipation". Based on the sound of a harp, various states of water are interpreted sonically.
The artist Lara Almarcegui from the Netherlands has piled up old chunks of asphalt from roads to create a monumental sculpture about resource consumption and land sealing, while the German-Romanian artist duo Matthias Böhler and Christian Orendt address the extinction of species with a tent camp. In the walk-in tents, extinct animals such as the Honshu wolf and the Yangtze River dolphin appear ghostly on a veil of mist.
Festival in the Capital of Culture year in a new dimension
This year's "Begehungen" will show installations, photographs, drawings and sculptures by more than 30 artists and artist groups under the title "Everything is Interaction". Specific references to the Central German region will also be made. For example, a video installation shows historical photographs by Tina Bara, which she took in 1988 at the Buna chemical combine in what is now Saxony-Anhalt. Ana Alenso from Venezuela uses two hammer drills from the former uranium mining industry in the Ore Mountains for her work "Pech und Blende" (Pitch and Glare) and draws a connection to the global hunger for raw materials and geopolitical conflicts.
Every year since 2003, the "Begehungen" have transformed vacant properties into temporary galleries for contemporary art. Previous venues have included a former prison, a derelict swimming pool, an old railroad station and an abandoned palace palace. This year, the area extends over three large halls and other technical facilities on the power station site. This means that the festival is significantly larger than before, as Chemnitz 2025, as European Capital of Culture, is of particular interest to the cultural world. The art show runs until August 17.
Copyright 2025, dpa (www.dpa.de). All rights reserved
