Christina KUBISH & Eckehard GÜTHER
“Unter Grund”

The Ruhr Area lives from and with water. It needs drinking water, water for industrial facilities and water for transportation. Water veins pulse invisibly with groundwater, connecting rivers through subsurface tunnels that also force their way into disused mines. This mine water has to be drained continuously or pumped out from underground (one speaks of unending tasks) to prevent the collapse of old shafts, subsidence damage, and the contamination of drinking water. Without constant pumping of the groundwater the Ruhr Area would transform into a vast marshy landscape.
Fabian Lasarzik, “The discomfort from the underground”. Christina Kubisch’s site-specific sound installations are based on retrieving parallel worlds. She often responds to structures and atmospheres of places and their unheralded vibrancy which she turns into concrete perception and imagination by the recipient. For the 26-channel installation “under ground” carried out on Zeche Zollverein Christina Kubisch examined above ground and subterranean streams which are little noticed, but play a decisive role: water which has to be developed from abandoned and not backfilled shafts and mounted into a complex canal and river system.
“Unter Grund“ was presented 2014 in the context of the festival NOW/ Parallele Welten as a 26-channel sound installation at the Zollverein world heritage site. The composition on the CD under the same name consists of recordings that were made in the Ruhr Area in machine rooms above and under ground, pumping stations, waterworks, ponds, shaft sumps, cages, spillways et cetera. Some of the recordings were taken directly from Shaft XII of the former Zollverein Coal Mine. The sound recordings were mainly made with hydrophones and contact microphones.