Manifesta 16 Ruhr: This is not a church

For more than three decades, Manifesta has traveled across Europe as a nomadic biennial. Each edition temporarily settles in a different city or region, responding to the social, cultural, and spatial issues that define the location. When the Ruhr Area invited Manifesta to develop its sixteenth edition, the focus was not on an exhibition theme, but rather on a societal transformation quietly unfolding across Germany and much of Europe: the gradual disappearance of churches as central institutions in neighborhood life. This bundle includes the 384-page catalog as well as the accompanying publication "Urban Vision", which examines the relationship between churches and their surrounding neighborhoods across 144 pages, while also proposing a framework for rethinking churches as neighborhood infrastructures for the twenty-first century. The catalogue presents all twelve venues, documents the interventions and situates the locations and projects within their historical, transformative and urban contexts.