“It happened an hour ago, Way down in this tunnel of coal, The gas caught a fire from somebody’s lamp, And my buddies are choking in smoke” are the opening lines of The Dying Miner, a song by American folk legend Woody Guthrie. The story of the poor miner unfolds over many stanzas and ends – as its title already suggests–tragically. The mural painting in Bochum by artist and illustrator Stefan Marx (*1979) combines the history of the Ruhr Area with the fate of miners in the USA, as once sung about by Guthrie. The idea of cityscapes covered by coal dust and densely populated still typifies the image many people have of the Ruhr Area today. Marx’s murals, with their white writing on a black background, are in some ways reminiscent of the dust-soiled windows and the black façades of buildings in the past, bearing immortal lines – as if written by fingers in soot. The last mines in the Ruhr Area were closed in 2018. That brought an era of working conditions, barely conceivable for a European country today, to which, Marx’s quote in Bochum could be read as a wistful swan song and final romantic salute: “Dear sisters and brothers goodbye, Dear mother and father goodbye. […] I love you lots more than you know.
- Festival
The work I love you lots more than you know was shown as part of the exhibition Ruhr Ding: Territories and was on view in Bochum from May 4 to June 30, 2019.
