The exhibition is a personal and emotional exploration of the Siebengebirge as a place of childhood memories and excursions into a supposedly wild, romantic nature on the one hand and as a man-made construct and cultural landscape on the other. The Siebengebirge is a low mountain range on the right bank of the Rhine near Bonn. It is both a nature reserve and part of the Siebengebirge Nature Park, one of the oldest nature parks in Germany. Numerous myths and legends surround its peaks. I have known the Siebengebirge since I was a child. We were often here at weekends. Growing up in the city, these were excursions into unspoilt nature for me. It was always a somewhat mystical and wild place, with its seven hills that suddenly rise up in the flat Rhenish bay. Only much later, as part of my master's thesis on the former eastern quarry on the Ölberg, did I realise the extent of the human impact in both a physical and idealistic sense. There were once over 40 quarries in the Siebengebirge, some of them of Roman origin. Raw materials were extracted here for almost 2000 years until the quarries were abandoned at the beginning of the 20th century and left to their own devices. Largely reclaimed by nature, they are fascinating places today, 120 years after the end of quarrying activities. In the field of tension between destruction and healing, they have their own contradictory beauty. In an absurd way, they are by-products. Created only by the need for basalt for industrial use elsewhere. An irritating contrast between the brutality of the intervention and the banality of the utilisation. Ironically, however, it is precisely due to these quarrying activities that the Siebengebirge is now one of the oldest nature parks in Germany and the largest nature reserve in North Rhine-Westphalia: when both the summit of the prominent Ölberg and the castle on the famous Drachenfels were in danger of collapsing due to quarrying, the Prussian government bought the Drachenfels in 1836 and immediately stopped the activities. Soon afterwards, the ‘Verschönerungsverein für das Siebengebirge’ was founded and acquired the Ölberg with the help of a lottery to stop the basaltic quarry on its eastern flank. Originally founded as an association for the touristic development of the Siebengebirge, the VVS has been campaigning for its protection since 1899. The exhibition revolves around these dualisms and contradictions between natural place and human construct, between wound and healing, intervention and protection. It questions our own perception of the place of childhood and memory as a place of wild nature on the one hand and the actual anthropogenic reality on the other.