A Ruhr treat: can a giant pigeon and a pink basketball revive Germany’s depressed industrial heartland?

The Manifesta biennale is taking over a dozen tiny churches in German towns ravaged by division and decline – and filling them with ball games, bouncy castles and a radical community spirit

After Germany’s Ruhr conurbation – the third-largest urban area in western Europe – was pummelled during the second world war, planners came up with an ingenious idea. About 80% of the sprawl – which incorporates big cities such as Essen and Duisburg, and dozens of smaller towns like Bochum and Gelsenkirchen – had been destroyed. And so, for the reconstruction, a newly formed Diocese of the Ruhr built literally hundreds of closely packed Pantoffelkirchen or “slipper churches”, so named because they were close enough to housing developments for churchgoers to walk to mass in their slippers.

Today, Pantoffelkirchen are declining sharply. Estimates of the amount of disused or derelict churches are as high as 300, and 100 have been sold off in the last year alone. Until October, 12 of them are home to Manifesta, the travelling art biennale. They stand as centrepieces of communities that have been ravaged this time not by war, but by deindustrialisation, mass unemployment and environmental decline.

Manifesta 16 Ruhr is not the Venice Biennale. Think more a Capital of Culture event held in the West Midlands – which the Ruhr closely resembles, as the stricken driver of national growth. Instead of exhibits in, say, Birmingham and Coventry, you’d be expected to travel to Bilston, Smethwick, Stourbridge. This is much easier to do in the Ruhr, where trams are ubiquitous and even tiny Bochum has a U-Bahn – though you’ll also find these networks have been neglected since they were built in the 1970s. At first, the cities and towns appear greener, sleeker and better connected than their British cousins, but this is a little deceptive. The A40 autobahn slices much of it into poorer and more affluent enclaves, seldom walkable one to the other.

Much of the Ruhr is today poorer than east Germany, after decades of deindustrialisation and the dismantlement of the welfare state. Gelsenkirchen has the highest vote for the far-right AfD in western Germany, and the highest rate of unemployment. So Manifesta goes into some very charged territory by taking over and trying to re-imagine the social infrastructure of what can seem a dying place, with divided communities and a dysfunctional economy. It avoids big, sexy industrial spaces, focusing instead on tiny derelict churches in suburbs and housing estates. “I’ll be honest: I don’t care about churches, I care about neighbourhoods,” says Catalan architect and Manifesta curator Josep Bohigas. “[The churches] were built for people who are no longer there.” The festival tries to use these apparently useless, if often beautiful, structures to bridge this gap between the past and the future.

It doesn’t all work. Some of the bigger empty churches contain some big empty art – an inflatable blue bubble containing a beach, comes to mind, mounted in the 19th century neo-gothic St Josef, Gelsenkirchen. Essen’s gothic St Gertrud, deconsecrated and now used by the local School of Fine Arts, is a distant cousin of Coventry Cathedral; the surviving ruins were patched up and joined on to a modern church in the 50s. Now, their polychrome expressionist-Byzantine murals face upturned pews, turned into abstract sculptures by Nasan Tur, an unsubtle gesture.

The flagship is the Kulturkirche Liebfrauen, Duisburg, of 1958, which was turned into an arts centre in 2011: a flamboyant modernist building with the pulsating drama of Liverpool’s Catholic cathedral. Some installations here struggle to compete with the gorgeous murals and reliefs, made originally for the Vatican Pavilion at Expo 58, between luminescent walls of Plexiglas. But a fascinating two-screen film by Elizabeth Price works as an introduction to the biennale’s ideas, juxtaposing memories of second world war bombing with a history of those modernist Catholic churches built in postwar Britain for Irish immigrants.

Mostly, these churches were architecturally radical. One, Christ-König in Bochum, is a brick roar of Fritz Lang melodrama built in the last year of the Weimar Republic – but 10 of the churches are postwar. Hedwig Fijen, director of Manifesta Ruhr, describes them as places where architects and congregations tried “to imagine a different kind of society”, after “years of war, genocide and destruction”. But they did so within the confines of the old world. The new churches were keenly supported by the local industrial families, Thyssen and Krupp, beneficiaries of nazism who preferred their workers devout. The immigration of “guest workers” was encouraged; many of the miners and factory workers who rebuilt the conurbation and powered the “economic miracle” were from Catholic southern Europe, alongside Greece and, especially, Turkey.

Their story is told here in the slipper churches, sparkling architectural miniatures that have clearly elicited the most thought on the part of the curators and artists. The first I saw, St Marien, Essen, was a harsh contrast with the tidy city-centre churches. Designed in 1963, with explosively exciting stained glass by Manfred Ott, it’s tough, red brick and semi-ruined, located in a working-class multicultural area opposite a retail park where the factories once stood. The church has been disused for many years and the artworks play with a bomb-site theme, all fragments and detritus. You realise the sheer range of architectural expression in the slipper churches when you go from there to Essen’s Protestant Markuskirche, of 1961, with its gorgeous wall of gauzy abstract stained glass. It is also tightly integrated with its community, next to a kindergarten and a care home. The major “artwork” here is a set of wooden seats and play areas by the Portuguese Pele Collective; when I visit, it feels more like a school fete than a ponderous art exhibition.

The most powerful, convincing projects are less cute. Both are curated by Gürsoy Doğtaş, an art historian whose parents were Turkish “guest workers”. His team renamed two churches in Gelsenkirchen: St Bonifatius, as the Ferdane Satır Tea Garden, after one of seven Turkish guest workers murdered by fascists in an arson attack in Duisburg in 1984; and Thomaskirche, after Hava Güleç, a local factory worker considered a pillar of the community. St Bonifatius (1963) is in the hard, red brick expressionist tradition, and stands in a densely urban area along a main road. It has become effectively an art museum of the guest worker experience.

At Thomaskirche, the crystalline space, overlooked by Friend, a massive printed pigeon by artist Gülbin Ünlü, includes Judith Raum’s film about the German-engineered Baghdad Railway, which works as prehistory: German industrialists make approving comments about docile Ottoman workers who don’t strike and don’t ask for pay rises; below, photographs document Turkish guest workers’ struggles, and strikes, in Germany 70 years later. Thomaskirche is mostly devoted to textiles, feminised factory labour in an area of old mills – there are public weaving workshops in the church hall. Impressively, the Gelsenkirchen churches are full of art by workers, rather than work about them. Many began as guest workers – Abuzer Güler, whose expressionist Anatolian scenes are hung on industrial frames in Thomaskirche, or Hanefi Yeter, whose When the Earth Burns, a Diego Rivera-like apocalyptic Ruhr allegory of 1984, hangs in St Bonifatius.

But the Ruhr’s first boom, in the late 19th and early 20th century was significantly powered by Polish labour. In Bochum’s disused Gethsemane church – one of several “emergency churches” designed by the Weimar modernist Otto Bartning, built literally from rubble by the local community in 1947 – the Polish curator Krzysztof Kosciuczuk brings together more ironic, game-playing work on migration. Standing outside the church, in a sleepy area of modest houses and allotments, a bouncy castle in the shape of a church bell: designed by Belarusian artist Marina Naprushkina, it initially looks like a silly, friendly gesture, until you read the legend, in big letters: “We’ll Never Go Back!”

All of this is, obviously, temporary. One work in a 1960s slipper church, Bochum’s tiny, angular St Ludgerus, has been turned into a basketball court. This isn’t new – in Gelsenkirchen, St Josef had one for a time – but what this one, designed by Catalan artists Cabosanroque does, is encourage ineptitude. If you miss the net, a big blast from the church organ is triggered. You can sit in “stands” of church pews and watch a bizarre scene unfold, as local youth and biennale-hoppers, lit by stained glass, try to miss their goals. It’s interesting precisely because of its unrepeatable surrealism and incongruity.

These micro-modernist slipper churches were based on a consensus: their strident modernism was founded on beliefs their working-class congregants all held. In the absence of a similar unity, this montage of protest, whimsy and spatial experiment suggests diversity might just be able to create spaces that are equally extraordinary – if given the money and time, both of which are usually so lacking in places like the Ruhr.