lignite?

Close meeting only for music and culture? Fortunately, the term culture is one that I can interpret widely. Freud, for example, regarded as a culture simply everything that was not explicitly nature.

From this point of view, the last three articles fit quite well into the picture of the magazine, because it is about both, about our cultural approach to nature, today and in the future. I would like to recommend the lignite trio to you as the current spotlight on a topic that has shaped my whole life, and not just my professional in numerous reports.

I grew up between two lignite power plants, both of which were vents and cooling towers from the old cemetery on an Upper Außemhill hill, as Günter Grass already noted. Legendary through his description, I believe in "Katz und Maus", the cemetery view of the night lights of the Niederaußem power plant has become legendary.

The older Fortuna power station was particularly visible from the square under the old oak at the end of the expansive natural stone staircase. A look at the cooling towers from a slightly elevated perspective, by the way, which emitted a lot of water vapor until the end, and vents from which flue gases were still completely unfiltered. So unfiltered that my mother saw a grey topping on the freshly washed white laundry, depending on how the wind stood.

But the power plant gave me a sight that revealed a moving industrial aesthetic with cinematic-looking backdrop effects, especially on clear full moon nights, and always provided an eventful passage on the other days. It offered locals an abbreviation for the road bike, the Vespa and later the Beetle, which first led over the small bridge across the coal railway in the middle of the factory over industrial roads, and after a turn on the country road to Quadrath.

In the 1980s, all that I was talking about, the power station including the road with the development of the Bergheim open-cast mine was demolished, as was the fortuna mining village, which was built at the beginning of the 20th century. A demolition that, by the way, shaped my entry into photography. It is a circumstance that is reflected in my appreciation of the works of Hubert Perschke.

The style, the typical building and garden architecture cultivated in Fortuna, can still be found in the Oberaußemer quarter at the foot of the hilly abbot's bush, along the Fortunastraße and Abts-Acker-Straße.

Enjoy reading,

Your Oliver Tripp

Oh by the way, all those musicians, composers, sculptors, organizers whose material like good wine is stored in my archive for publication, I ask for your understanding. In the unfamiliar role of the sole editor, reporter, photographer, layouter, etc., I can hardly keep up with any claim to topicality. I hope that one or the other story is sufficiently sustainable and sub-current.