Nicolas Sanchez L.

Studies on the twilight (Scenes from two rivers)

[2017] The Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region is the largest in Germany with over 11 million inhabitants spread around a web of cities, heavy industrial hubs and two rivers; the Ruhr and the Rhine. And rivers do much more than bear merchandise, as Victor Hugo wrote while in his journey along the whole length of the Rhine in 1842. Where freighters float along, ideas and people also spread. In the recent centuries these rivers carried the early industrialisation, progress, migration and the quest for a better living. The people of its wavy banks, bewildered in dreams, contemplate the same shining sunsets, asking the same questions that the river carries as it flows, sometimes roaring, sometimes murmuring.

Studies on the twilight (Scenes from two rivers), is a portrait of this land crossed by rivers, dotted with cities, linked by bridges, crowned by furnaces and chimneys, inhabited by people who embraced as their own a new kind of landscape where culture and nature merge in a continuos negotiation. These are tableau scenes from Düsseldorf, Wuppertal, Oberhausen, Bochum, Ruhrgebiet, Krefeld, Solingen, Hagen, Kettwig, Hattingen, Essen, Trier, Bottrop, Witten, Leverkusen, Neuss, Dormagen, Aachen, Duisburg, Remscheid, Bonn, Cologne, Koblenz, Mönchengladbach, Mülheim; postcards of the plains and the humans irrigated by these golden ribbons.