The artist duo Scheibe & Güntzel in Monheim: "Our performances create images"

In our project series PRESERVED, which we have been realizing in various locations in Europe since 2009, we primarily deal with the question of how the people of a specific region have fed themselves from the surrounding nature over the centuries and what of this knowledge is still tangible. This raises the question of how this interaction is still discernible in the landscape, which crops have played a role in the development and identity of the place, and what significance they may still hold today. Such questions provide a lot of insight into a city and its history. As a result, we have established conceptual plantings at eight locations in the public space of the city that depict which crops were important for Monheim in the past.

The examination of culinary traditions, cultivation methods, the utilization and processing of food, and the significance attributed to these things provides a great deal of insight into how the cultural identity of a place has developed and what experiences and events have taken place there. This shapes most regions for a long time, even though in today's times people are much more mobile than in the past and do not necessarily remain in the place where they were born for various reasons. For example, in 2019, during a scholarship at DA, Kunsthaus Kloster Gravenhorst in Hörstel, we dealt with the significance of kale for Westphalia. For this, we conducted extensive academic research beforehand, in collaboration with the Commission for Everyday Culture Research for Westphalia, and simultaneously examined the historical development of the various regions of Westphalia. During the course of the project, we spoke with well over a thousand people and asked them about their relationship with kale.

We noticed that the relationship with kale was much more emotional than with other vegetable plants. We are now convinced that this has something to do with the fact that kale, due to its remarkable hardiness, saved both humans and animals from starvation in difficult times in the past. Kale is cold-resistant, stays fresh in the garden and in the field during winter without needing to be stored, the leaves continue to grow back, it provides essential nutrients, and additionally feeds livestock with the wilted leaves. Such factors shape the perception of a vegetable, even if the knowledge of this is no longer as present today.

For us, it was very enlightening to see how quickly the city has developed over the last few decades, but also how present the connection to the Roman settlement history is to this day, which can actually still be read in the local flora. In our research, we identified eight plants that, in our opinion, represent the development of the city. These include plants that were presumably brought over by the Romans, such as black mustard and oregano, but also plants that were significant to local history, like the sugar beet, which was processed into beet syrup in a kraut factory, a place that is still vividly remembered by the people of Monheim. The popular "Kappes" (white cabbage) and broad beans were, of course, essential and were eventually complemented by flax and leaf mustard, as well as summer rye, which was notably cultivated here for a long time and was only very late displaced by wheat.

The city has had a brewing tradition since the 13th century and later became known beyond its borders through the range of the 'Monheimer Brewery Peters & Bambeck'. However, the brewing site was closed in 2004, yet the pride in it remains unbroken to this day. We learned that there are now young brewers who are reviving the tradition, and we ourselves decided to brew beer in our project against the background of this history. It is quite possible that it won't be long until Monheim is once again associated with this specialty.

In the title, we referred to the Rhine, which has significantly shaped the identity of the city, both as a settlement location, as well as a supplier of fertile alluvial land and as a transportation route. From today's perspective, it is also about the changes in the climate crisis, about water management, about plastic that is washed up, about flooding, and thus also about the shift in our identity.

With this action, we wanted to set a monument to the Rhenish Coldblood, which has played an elemental role in the development of the entire Rhineland, and at the same time point out that the area was heavily agricultural until not so long ago. The residential area is the so-called "Berliner Viertel", the former "Neue Heimat". In the 1960s, satellite cities were constructed there in a very short time on land that had previously been used for agriculture, which was supposed to alleviate the housing shortage in Düsseldorf. For a long time, the district did not organically grow together with the city and today almost symbolically represents how abruptly the population in Monheim grew again and again. The horse that we were allowed to ride was provided to us by the breeding family Reuter from Haus Bürgel and is named Eberhard. The Rhenish Coldblood is endangered and is on the Red List of endangered native livestock breeds in Germany.


Overall positive. Even when Eberhard was unloaded in a side street, many interested people stood around us wanting to know what was happening, and during the action itself, we could be experienced by people in the midst of shopping, as well as while they were sitting outside cafés. Through a performance of this kind, one primarily creates an image that one offers to people and with which they can engage. During our performances, we fundamentally appear as art figures; Jan-Philip Scheibe always wears a dark suit and I always wear a dress. In this case a red one, which was already very striking in color by itself. Essentially, this kind of intervention breaks the expectation of our socially coded behavior in public space and thus is able to generate attention. That worked very well.