Director's Choice: From Dust Lung to Ceremonial Cup

... is a human inventory of industrialisation and its damage to health. During coal mining work, tiny particles of stone made their way into miners’ lungs and settled there forever.

This led to lifelong respiratory distress and extremely shortened a miner's life compared to the population average. It was not until 1929 that silicosis disease, or pneumoconiosis, was entered in the list of occupational diseases.

... is the first fully sculpted representation of a historical figure and not of a saint. It was created five years after the murder of the Bishop at Gevelsberg in the southern Ruhr Area.

The Gothic statue survived in the memorial chapel there in the attic and was rediscovered in the 19th century in the course of historicism as a memorial to this event of imperial historical significance.

... owned by the Dortmund patrician family von Berswordt from the 1st half of the 16th century shows the importance of the city of Dortmund and its merchants in the Hanseatic League.

At a time when the Fugger city of Augsburg afforded a council silver, a single merchant family in Dortmund had the means for a gilded goblet showing the head of the family in late medieval armour on the lid.

... from Horst Palace in Gelsenkirchen, dating from 1566, comes from a period that is not at all associated with the industrial city of Gelsenkirchen.

Horst Palace was built in the 16th century in the so-called Emscherbruch on the border between the Rhineland and Westphalia and is one of the most important palace complexes of the Dutch Renaissance, which was also jokingly called the Emscher Renaissance in reference to the Weser Renaissance.

... from the early 5th century BC comes from Sicily and is the showpiece of the Ruhr Museum’s archaeological collections, which include Egyptian and Roman antiquities as well as prehistoric findings and antiquities from Greater Greece. A special focus – due to the region – is on metal objects, especially from Luristan, which were of particular interest to the industrial patrons and collectors of the Ruhr Area, which was dominated by iron and steel.

... dates back to the Carboniferous era, when more than 300 million years ago under tropical conditions, solar energy was bound in plants in the form of photosynthesis and subsequently stored as fossil energy in the course of the Earth’s history.

In this respect, this plant fossil represents the origin and foundation of our modern industrial world.

... from 1864 is a highlight in the Ruhr Museum’s extensive photography collection of over 4 million photographs as well as a milestone in the history of photography.

The panorama was used for the Krupp company's self-portrayal at the world exhibitions. The huge factory facilities were not painted, as was customary at the time, and instead were imposingly depicted by the new technical imaging medium of the industrial age, photography.

The composite shots were only possible from a bird’s eye view of the factory towers and with long exposure times during posed work processes on Sundays and public holidays.

... of the former Carl Funke colliery in Essen clearly shows the structure of mining in the period of high industrialisation around 1900. 

The workforces of the collieries comprise thousands, whose underground production was not based on machines but on manual labour, so that miners were not listed with their names at the beginning and the end of their shifts but were only perceived as anonymous numbers.

... of soil samples from the investigation of contaminated sites at the former zinc smelter in Essen-Borbeck shows the full drama of the environmental destruction caused by industry in the Ruhr Area.

The several hundred preserving jars contain a cocktail of different chemically contaminated soils, which already provide a hint of their toxic contents in their aesthetic presentation.

... to thank for the so-called true-angle map projection, which he recorded, among other things, in his “Atlas Minor”. This projection made precise navigation on the world’s oceans possible.

... Mercator had come to Duisburg from his Belgian hometown of Leuven in 1552 as a religious refugee of the Counter-Reformation in anticipation of the first Protestant university in the later Ruhr Area, but it was only opened after his death in 1655.
Mercator's “Atlas Minor” symbolises the reflection on the global world from the provinces of the Rhineland in the age of the Renaissance.