In March 2004, the Stellwerk Zollverein announced an international studio scholarship for fine arts worldwide via Internet. The title was "Breaking New Grounds". The Goethe Institute and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) published the announcement. The intention was to realize an intercultural exchange as a site-specific art project.

A total of 123 applicants handed in their application documents. These passed the examination by a main jury consisting of art experts in June. Its members were: Dirk Otto, chairman of the board of the Stellwerk Zollverein e.V. organization, the art collector Ulrich Ströher from Darmstadt, chairman of the Foundation Zollverein, Gerd Schütte, gallery owner in Essen, Prof. Carl Emanuel Wolff, an artist teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden and the art historian Prof. Dr. Joachim Petsch from the Ruhr-University Bochum.

The unanimous decision went to the photographer Laura Ribero from Bogota. She convinced the jury with her project proposal "Nomadic Territory". In October she began her studio scholarship in the renovated Stellwerk (railway control centre) at shaft 4/5/11 (Triple - Z) for a period of three months. It was extended till the end of January. At the end of her stay, Ribero presented the results of her work in the exhibition "Looking for Wonderland" which was shown at Essener Str. 8 in Essen Stoppenberg. The exhibition started on 29th of January and ended on 6th of February 2005.

The scholarship holder - Laura Ribero

Laura Ribero was born in 1978 in Colombia. Since four years she has lived and studied in Spain. In 2003, she investigated an urban area in Barcelona with poor population and a high fluctuation of living for her Master degree. Currently she is working out her thesis about "Art, Territory and Media Culture".

Since the beginning of her professional work as an artist in 1998, Laura Ribero already has exhibited in her native country as well as in Italy and Spain. She has taken part in some well noted exhibitions in Bogotá, for example at the Museum of Contemporary Art or at the National Museum. Her work involves drawing, sculpture, video and new media, but in the first instance photography. Her work is affected by an approach of sociological interest. Primarily, it is emphasizing urbanism, migration and identity. Within her œuvre, two dominant working lines can be seperated which are coming together more closely in the work series resulting from the scholarship: On the one hand clearly composed, almost theatrical role portraits and on the other hand topographic photographies of architecture. Particular stylistic means of her pictures are high-contrast colouring and nearly impressionist appearing light effects, both of which can equally serve as signifiers of meaning.

The exhibition - "Looking for Wonderland"

Carrying out her project in Essen, Laura Ribero concentrated on the city environment, which she found in the near surroundings of her studio. She discovered that the north-south course of the tram no. 107 that she used every day is visualizing an inner-city social decline. The ride from the solid middle-class south to the World Heritage site Zollverein leads directly to the centre of the city district Katernberg where the upheavals of the structural change - which has taken place since the shutdown of the industrial plants in 1986 - have remained really distinctive. Ribero focused on site-specific characteristics of housing and living conditions as well as neglected areas and spaces with the notion of displacement. And she got in touch with the inhabitants, young migrants who she met in the mosque, in the language school and in social institutions. As a result, she realized that:

"It's a little bit like in the story of Alice in Wonderland. People are dreaming of a perfect and new world but they're not able to find the way inside."

Therefore Ribero, searching for motifs, was guided by Lewis Carroll´s popular children´s book "Alice in Wonderland". She created pictures about constructions of identity, portraits of foreign inhabitants in relation to the surrounding architecture and nature. For the photos Ribero arranged her 'models' predominantly in settings, which are modelled after Carroll´s literary pattern in a wider sense. So she came from the documentary perspective to the artistic interpretation. To each photo she added a quotation from the text, which provides the images with a supplementary layer of meaning. The contents of the text and the motifs of the pictures complement, cross-refer and amplify one another, without losing their particular autonomy. Ribero uses the protagonist from Carroll´s tale in order to typify growing up in a climate of estrangement and marginalization, of the polarity of different chances and values: On the one hand there are the ideas which are passed from the first generation of immigrants on their children and on the other there are the offers and challenges of our society. In Ribero´s pictures the childlike amazement of Carroll's Alice about incomprehensible role assignments in confrontation with the fabulous creatures representing the world of the adults, is altering to a continuous feeling of strangeness and astonishment within the socialisation of young migrants in Germany influenced by identificatory disruptions.