For the Ages

Commissioned for Manifesta 16 Ruhr, For the Ages (2026) was filmed at Pumpwerk Gelsenkirchen, forty meters below ground, and at the German Mining Museum Bochum. The work juxtaposes two hidden legacies of coal mining: the infrastructure that prevents former mining regions from flooding and the sculptures of idealized bodies that once embodied the mythology of labor performed deep underground.

At the heart of the work is the notion of the “eternal tasks” (Ewigkeitsaufgaben): the perpetual pumping and management of groundwater required after the closure of coal mines. Invisible yet indispensable, this infrastructure has become a permanent technical, ecological, and economic responsibility, keeping former mining regions habitable long after mining has ceased.

Goldbach contrasts footage of the underground pumping station with lingering, caressing shots of eroticized miner sculptures, unsettling the heroic iconography of industrial labor through a gaze that renders monumentality intimate and ambiguous. Their depiction of the male body recalls the visual language of classical sculpture and its later appropriation by twentieth-century regimes of power, in which the idealized body became a vehicle for political mythology.

Set to a looping karaoke version of Herbert Grönemeyer’s Bochum (1984), the region’s unofficial anthem, the work collapses these two legacies into a shared visual and sonic landscape.