KITEV & EPIC UP perspective of a Cameraman

EXTERIOR

A cameraman’s eye is always looking for what is beautiful in a given place. This is easy in large industrial spaces. They have a geometric grandeur which is poetic. The logic of utility becomes visible as beauty: in recurrence, symmetry, proportion - as with the golden ratio or fractals. Simply put, beauty in truth rather than perfection. Such compositions, mathematics made manifest, evoke a sense of internal order that resonates instinctively with human perception, just as visual composition or musical harmony does. Of course, this is a filmmaker’s dream. Vast choreographies of steel and shadow, depth and breadth (literal and figurative), where light, texture, and scale compose themselves without asking to be art, and yet. . .

INTERIOR

Tuesday 28th October, second day in Oberhausen. I’m here to film the Steering Committee meeting for Epic-Up, a project focused on migrant integration and inclusion at the local level. I’m not otherwise involved in Epic-Up. So, in a sense, I was the ideal ‘outsider’, coming in cold and learning in situ, discovering it in real time. Stepping into the Leerstand, I was stuck by the warmth of it. Colour of ochre and dusted light, giving the room a soft glow. The hum of cooking sounds, too; the scent of vegetables bubbling in a pot. I looked around. Coats draped over chairs and laughter carrying easily - the various partners from across Europe. I didn’t know anyone here, but they all knew each other — hugs and smiles, the easy embrace of old friends. I didn’t expect that. I’d been to many analogous meetings and they rarely had such familiar ease. This was more like a reunion than a ‘meeting’. I was the only stranger, then. Sensing this perhaps, Annette, Oberhausen resident and EPIC-Up mainstay (international relations dept.) came straight up to me, smiling in that disarming Ruhrpott way, helping me with my camera gear despite my vigorous (not-that-vigorous) protests, showing me around, introducing me to everyone, and, within only minutes of me entering the door, making me not a stranger.

That evening, the Leerstand kitchen was hosted by the Refugees’ Kitchen, ‘a mobile kitchen, developed through a collaboration between artists and refugees’, where members cook ‘traditional dishes from each of their regions’, offering ‘small appetisers of political information’ illuminating the ‘theme of flight with subjective histories, as well as with political backgrounds’. The cultural significations of food are rich, evoking tradition, geography, craft, and continuity - a way of carrying home across borders; and, here, an added ingredient: confrontation. The Kitchen, as their website asserts, ‘confronts those uninterested in (global) politics, with the theme of flight’. This fascinated me, the directness of it - ‘confrontation’; intuitively but inexplicably, it seemed apt. At this point, the four cooks were in full swing, prepping the dinner to be served that evening (kindly provided by kitev). A rhythm of hands, steam, chopping, and frying, the controlled busyness of a working kitchen. I scrambled to assemble my camera. I asked permission of the kitchen crew, and they returned warm, welcoming smiles. For at least ten minutes, they graciously put up with me shoving a camera in their faces - in what was a small kitchen - politely swerving and weaving to accommodate my clunky presence. The food of course looked superb, not just as food but as an aesthetic item, as art.

Shortly after, Apostolos Tsalastras, Head of the Finances and Culture Department and Treasurer of the Municipality of Oberhausen, gave an introductory welcome to the thirty or so guests. He underlined a key limiting factor, that Oberhausen is poor’. Indeed, it’s one of the financially weakest municipalities in North Rhine-Westphalia. Because it was dependent on coal and steel, when those industries collapsed in the late 20th century, Oberhausen took a big hit - financially and demographically. New people and new ideas were needed. Telescopic creativity was in order. So… in such a case, what to do? Well, someone observed, we do have quite a lot of empty industrial buildings that happen to be absolutely gigantic, prime for repurposing as arts and culture spaces. From concept to creation, in Oberhausen, reinvention began not with money, but with imagination - a theme which was to become increasingly important over the days to come.
With introductory speeches done, we were off to tour one such reimagined space: the old Water Tower, now kitev’s HQ. Going into the shoot, my knowledge of kitev was fragmented. I knew they were an artists' collective, architecturally savvy, oriented toward social innovation. Impressively, it was they who converted the water tower in the first place - and what a job they’ve done! From outside, the building is a solid polygon of red brick and steel, simple, brutal. Inside, a different story. The central staircase winds upward through open levels, each floor a somewhat gallery space, exhibiting works from earlier residency projects, photo prints on the walls, depicting the conversion journey of the space, which is colourful and very playful. A sofa upholstered entirely with old jeans. A seat made of empty plastic bottles. Most surprising for me was how homely it was. The vast and chic kitchen (the artist’s touch, here), huge wooden dining tables, and toys scattered in a corner - reminders that children are part of the space too. The Tower is actually still in use by artists and visitors who stay overnight. There’s warmth here, and purpose. A place for people to land, rest, make, talk, rebuild. Every corner has been adapted, every object reused: a perfect emblem for regeneration and finding new purpose.

We ascend to the fourth floor and, in one of the workspaces, Stefan (One of the kitev founders), stands beside a metre-tall plastic letter ‘E’. This ‘E’, he explains, comes from a giant lighted sign which, if we look out the window, is visible just across the other side of Willy-Brandt-Platz, on a tall office building - a sign saying ‘Oberhausen’. For a time, though, it read ‘Ob-rhausen’. Because the ‘E’ was broken - and this was ‘for years’, continued Stefan; and, ‘for years, everybody said Obrrr-hausen’. Which, if one were looking for a metaphor of urban decline, is dismayingly fitting. ‘So, what did we do? kitev, along with some of the migrants, decided to replace the broken letter. And we made a new one. And for a while it was brighter than all the other letters’. So, I thought, delighted to have caught this gem of an anecdote on camera, ‘Ob-eeeeeeeeeer-hausen’.
Next up, Keti, a Cultural Project Manager from kitev, tells us, very jovially, with a skip in her step, ‘we’re going into the water tower’ - as in, the actual structure itself, the old tank where the water was stored… inside it. Okay, I thought, that is new. I’ll need a faster lens… Going into the tank feels like stepping into the inside of an instrument: vast, hollow, resonant. The air changes first: cooler, heavier. Without lights, it’s almost total darkness, a dense, brown-grey void. We had to light the space with our phones. It was both eerie and intimate. We took the team picture here, as it happened. All smiles. The concept is ironic and cheering that this ultra-functional vessel of industry is now void of water and full of (somewhat nervous) laughter. To me, running around filming at all angles possible, the structure recalled a dark industrial cathedral - the vast domed shape, the acoustics - a building to awe: raw, vertical, and resonant. I shared this thought with Deniz, a musician and artist from kitev. She tells me that she once transformed the space into a sonic installation, layering the acoustics with recordings of water: drips, streams, rainfall. Every droplet amplified, every echo folded back on itself. I could only imagine what that must have been like. Immersive. And poignant. As if the building was remembering what it was. Moreover, there was a sense of continuity in transformation here. In essence, the Wasserturm embodied Oberhausen’s transformation: a structure built to fuel motion now sustains meaning. Ruhr locals don’t hide their industrial past, they confront it; indeed, they aestheticise it.
We went down to dinner. A buffet of stuffed vine leaves, falafel, spiced carrots, rice with lentils and chickpeas, spring rolls, salads bright with lemon and parsley, and trays of pastries and cakes dusted with sugar. A veritable feast, it looked and smelled delicious. And I couldn’t eat any of it. But that was okay. I wasn’t there to eat. I got the portrait lens 50mm out and set to swerving in and out of the diners and the kitchen and the servers and the tables, trying to capture the flow and buzz of the evening, everyone energised, the multilingual banter, and people absolutely beaming. At that dinner, with such rich emotional textures on display, I got some of the best footage I ever filmed. Eventually, someone told me I had to stop filming and must eat — and I was easily persuaded. I packed away the gear and filled a plate with everything that would fit. I sat next to Stefan, opened a beer, and told him how moved I was by the story of the ‘E’, and how remarkable the Refugees’ Kitchen was. He smiled - kind, affable, radiating warmth. It was clear from our conversation that he carried these ideas (integration, community, art) not as work, but as conviction.

I believe you never truly understand social projects until you see them first hand, in action, on the ground. EPIC-Up promotes ‘participatory approaches for the development of user-centred integration strategies’ which I understand in principle. Yet, in practice, what does that really mean? There’s a moment in every filming project when the scattered threads — the sights, voices, and fragments you’ve gathered — suddenly come together. Everything you’ve been immersed in crystallises in a flash of clarity, and you think: yes, that’s it — that’s the heart of it; finally, I understand. On this occasion, the cohering moment was to see that integration had a paradoxical but necessary element of confrontation. This isn’t just about mastering administrative systems or reaching language proficiency, though these matter. It’s about creating a shared store of meaning - a common framework of reference and expression. Regeneration follows the same logic: it’s not about restoring what was lost but creating new meaning from what remains. The people here aren’t rebuilding the past; they’re redefining purpose. Spaces become platforms, projects become connections, and art becomes the bridge - giving shape to change and turning activity into belonging. Art exists in a sacred space, beyond borders, where the union of people forms a common soul. Home, anyway, was never just bricks or soil. It was the meaning projected thereon. Redefinition, so understood, demands confrontation. One cannot revise what has not been seen. Such comes naturally to the Ruhrpott, to engage directly; to see, unadorned. That idea ran through everything I saw. In the city, in the people, in the Refugees’ Kitchen, in the landscape itself, a quiet insistence on authenticity over ornament. Where the picturesque soothes, Oberhausen confronts. Industrial architecture works well as a space for art and culture precisely because it fuses the pragmatic with the poetic. Its physical generosity allows experimentation; its history gives weight; its communal origins make it accessible. In places like Oberhausen, these conversions do more than preserve buildings — they preserve a spirit of making, translated from the language of production to that of imagination.
This brings me back to the ‘E’, which on its own means little, even in the city sign, it’s purely functional. But through the collaboration between kitev and the migrants, that single letter was invested with meaning far beyond its phonetic value. Meaning isn’t inherent; it’s made, and community is meaning. We invest things with value through attention, care, and work: a repaired letter, a reused space, a shared meal. In that sense, regeneration is the act of giving significance back to what had none or had lost it. I told the story of the ‘E’ to a good friend of mine, passing on the message, passing on the meaning. She touchingly observed that ‘the piece that once was broken now shines brighter than the rest’. Which, if one were looking for a metaphor of urban regeneration, is as good as one might hope for.

- Written by Chris Murnaghan

Photos: Svitlana Iziumska