Phoenix-See Project 2017

Martin Schepers (*1979 in Lengerich/Westphalia) focuses his work – part drawing, part installation – on the lessons that manmade technological giants like nuclear reactors, cargo freighters and mines can teach us about the conditio humana. His inspiration comes primarily from the philosophy of technology as pioneered by Ernst Kapp in 1877, when he coined the term Organ Projection. In it, he describes technological objects as analogous to human organisms – the hammer strengthens the fist, levers and cogwheels interlock like bones and joints, machines require nutrition in order to produce energy.

For quite some time, sociological aspects have been coming to the fore and with them deliberations on ideal cities. Schepers is thus drawn to a place where past and present, like the relationship between humans and technology, has only recently been radically transformed: the Phoenix-See in Dortmund’s Hörde district. Since 2010, the former grounds of the Hermannshütte steelworks are being converted into a mixed residential, commercial and leisure area. Thanks to the Hörder Heimatverein, a club devoted to the preservation of traditional characteristics of Dortmund-Hörde, a giant Thomas-Converter, used in the steelworks Bessemer processes, stands manifest of the times where the skies over Hörde turned red from the steelworks’ heat. Together with the residents of old and new Hörde, a new history of this region emerges. It is an approach of an ethnology of our own culture.

To Martin Scheper’s website