After four years, the municipality of Heerlen has found a place for the artwork ‘The Dance of Lies and Jan’, which honors the mining past of the place.
The location is “near the place where the Lange Jan and Lange Lies chimneys smoked during the mining industry”, the municipality announced on Friday.
‘Permanent memory’
It artwork created by the French Jean-Michel Crapanzano will be placed on municipal land, on the CBS-weg at the intersection with the Kloosterweg. In the work of corten steel and plastic, the two chimneys fuse together in a ‘DNA strand’. “It refers to the mining past and the future of the city that is always in motion,” the municipality said. The artwork contains a beam of light that shines during weekends and holidays.
Alderman Jordy Clemens says he is looking forward to the realization of the artwork. “It is a lasting reminder of the mining past that shaped our city. De Lange Jan and Lies dominated the skyline of Heerlen for years.”
Dance of Lies and Jan
During the Year of the Mines (2015), two beams of light symbolized the missing chimneys of Lange Lies and Lange Jan. After that, the need arose for a permanent work of art as a tribute to the mining past and the miners. In 1976 the chimneys on the site of the Oranje-Nassau mine were pulled down.
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It is unclear why a place for the artwork was not found earlier.