INDUSTRIAL: Silk Roads 3000

The exhibition focuses on logistics, supply chains and global commodity flows. The starting point is the so-called ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, an intercontinental infrastructure project that China has been rolling out worldwide since 2013. It is also known as the ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative or the ‘New Silk Road’. Duisburg and the Ruhr region are located at one end of it. In the nineteenth century, the Ruhr region was regarded by many as the ‘heart of the world’. As one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution, it generated immense wealth for some and extreme poverty for others. The region helped shape the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and produced countless technological innovations that still influence our daily lives today. However, beginning in the 1970s, the Ruhr experienced a dramatic decline. The collapse of the coal and steel industries led to a severe economic crisis, from which the region has been struggling to recover. The locations of heavy industry have gradually been occupied by cultural and creative industries.

Today, the Ruhr area depends largely on global investment and international trade. Logistics has become the defining concept of this transformation. When viewed on a geopolitical map, the Ruhr now appears as one of the westernmost endpoints of the new Silk Roads.

In this global economy, many of the goods consumed in Europe are manufactured in Asia. They travel long distances by train, truck and ship, crossing multiple national borders before reaching their destinations. This movement of goods constitutes a largely invisible network of cargo and containers operating along routes known variably as the New Silk Road, the Belt and Road Initiative or Silk Road 2.0. But this romantic terminology can be misleading, as it conceals a much more prosaic industrial and geopolitical reality, in which Dortmund, Duisburg and Gelsenkirchen play a significant role as logistics hubs.

In 2015, Peter Frankopan published The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, followed in 2018 by The New Silk Roads: The Present and the Future of the World. These books have critically reshaped our understanding of global history and geopolitics by challenging long-standing Eurocentric narratives in Western education and shifting the focus to Central Asia and the Caucasus. Frankopan highlights the Orientalist connotations of the term ‘Silk Road’, showing that historical trade involved much more than just silk, as oil, grain and furs, but also enslaved people and scientific knowledge travelled the same routes. In light of the deepening interdependence of regions and nations in a globalised world, he proposes to relocate the ‘heart of the world’ to the space between Europe and China, through which the seemingly endless flows of raw materials and manufactured goods transit.

Presenting 23 artists from 16 countries, this exhibition explores the global production and transportation of goods. Crucially, it emphasises that things are made by people and that all industries – whether ‘heavy’, cultural or creative – are tied to labour, which in turn is often characterised by alienation and exploitation. Along today’s Silk Roads, stretching from China to Duisburg and the rest of Europe, it is ultimately human labour that sustains the global economy.

But to follow the flows of goods on these routes is also to follow the people who make them possible. Every commodity we consume has involved gestures, labour and sometimes alienation. INDUSTRIAL: Silk Roads 3000 asks a simple yet essential question: Who makes and transports what we consume?