“I am very moved and impressed. Of course, I ‘knew’ about it beforehand, but the sensual experience and the idea of alternatives make this exhibition special for me and a highlight of the KLP. Big THANK YOU! “Leo, entry in the exhibition guest book
The exhibition “Gold without shine?” Celebrated its premiere during the Kulturellen Landpartie 2018 (KLP) on the political point KW6, which was organized by the Hofgemeinschaft von Klein Witzeetze 6. The KLP is an annual event in Wendland, approx. 150km south of Hamburg, which runs from Pentecost to Ascension and this year for the 29th time from May 10th. took place until May 21, 2018. It is considered the largest self-organized cultural festival in Northern Germany.
The exhibition “Gold without glory?” was the largest and most elaborate exhibition of KW6 to date. A total of seven different playback devices (LCD displays, beamer projections and iPads) illustrated the relevance of the topic for German consumers and introduced them to the mining conditions of the East African gold mining regions of Masara, Kenya and Busia, Uganda.
The visitors were led through a bright, white room with glass, illuminated and high-quality showcases. The large monitor brought a connection to each individual visitor, cell phones and wedding rings were introduced as a focus. Here the video cut looked almost like advertising, accompanied by nice easy-list-tight music that was played separately, real shiny gold in the showcases, beautiful rings. But anyone who watched the three minutes of film material recognized the seriousness of the situation, and that this is about more than beautiful jewelry in the showcases: the gold flowed from the melt in the studio into the bowl, the image changed abruptly and leaves Mercury flow.
From the opening room an open door led into the tunnel. Especially on the two weekends we actually had queues of visitors who wanted to dare to descend into the gold mine. Into the dark, into the cold, into the unknown. With a flashlight in hand, most of them paused at the first installation, where a miner from below looked straight into their eyes from the replica mine shaft. Through the monitor, the visitors experienced how the Hamburg goldsmith Jan Spille crawled along the narrow corridors, a journey on which they accompanied him for about 20-30 minutes from now on.
“Impressive exhibition, thank you! I wish the consumers of the shopping streets of this world could see and EXPERIENCE them. ”Kind regards, Astrid, entry in the exhibition’s guest book
The 20-meter-long, dark tunnel offered branches in which the visitor could deal intensively with the actual dangers underground. Through an installation with two life-size dolls, we depicted a burial and death from carbon monoxide poisoning – two of the most common types of death that occur almost every week in regions we know of. The puppets were portrayed like the workers in the video material – without safety equipment, barefoot, only equipped with a headlamp, hammer and chisel. An iPad was used to provide further information through quotes from Jan Spille underground, a Kenyan doctor and a Kenyan teacher who both work in the Masara gold region and give their views on things in the interview.