| Christoph Lingg SHUT DOWN |
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Industrial Ruins in Eastern Europe and the Far East
11/30/2007 – 01/07/2008
Attention: prolonged until 01/27/2008
Abandoned mines, foundries and coking plants – rusty drilling derricks and deserted production halls – empty lockers – dead telephone lines – defunct gas taps: industrial ruins, shut down and left to decay. They radiate the belief in progress of times past; they speak to our sense of being and passing away.
Whether in Poland, Romania or former East Germany – or in Russia, China or Mongolia – all of these sites appear to have one thing in common: behind the physical presence of the ruins lie historical facts and stories that reflect the fate and identity of entire regions and their inhabitants. Three cameos, which serve as representatives of many others.
Walim or Wüstewaltersdorf in Lower Saxony. An old industrial region, famous for its linen and the uprisings of its weavers, who repeatedly went to the barricades to protest hunger and exploitation. The spread of mechanical looms in the 19th century ushered in a new era in Saxony. Factories sprang up, pompous in their dimensions and ambitious in their technology. And today, not so many years after the fall of the Iron Curtain? Empty walls that are slowly collapsing. A man walks along the walls, collecting bricks in a plastic sack. Nothing goes to waste.
Copşa Mică near Sibiu. Between 1936 and 1993 carbon black was produced here. Every year great quantities of soot were emitted into the atmosphere from smokestacks. Copşa Mică turned into a black village, where houses were covered with an oily film. After the plant was shut down, the small cottages were painted bright colours and cows were put out to graze on the meadows. But the idyll is deceptive: lead and cadmium from a nearby factory that produces copper and copper alloys are still polluting the groundwater. The ground itself is contaminated to a depth of three metres and the rivers are biologically dead. The children are undersized and adults suffer from lung diseases. It is illegal to sell agricultural products from Copşa Mică. The ground has become worthless, the poverty aching.
Călan in Transylvania was once famous for its steel. An industrial concern dating back to the 19th century developed here, employing up to 8,000 people when times were good. A gradual decline began in 1980. Today a large part of the plant has been shut down. Guards patrol the overgrown premises with truncheons and watchdogs to prevent theft. Around 40% of the population are unemployed and without prospects. Those who are daring sneak through the barbed wire in search of rusty pieces of iron, which can be sold for a few lei.
They sit like warning memorials, enthroned in the landscape, these stripped-down industrial shipwrecks. Many have been partially shut down; a few have been put to other industrial uses. In some, the homeless and artists have taken up residence, while others have become the pet projects of monument conservators and have been transformed into museums. Efforts have been made to dismantle and sell still others. This is what happened with ThyssenKrupp’s Westphalian Foundry in Dortmund: the Chinese Jiangsu Shagang Group snapped it up. It took two years to dismantle the foundry, whose components were transported by lorry and ship to Shanghai and reassembled in 2003. An expensive undertaking that only pays off when plants are in top condition. But who wants broken-down factories from Kazakhstan, Albania or Azerbaijan?
Many of the ruins still linger as ghost towns in which jackdaws and magpies make their nests and vines creep over rusty iron bars. Only now, when people have abandoned them, apparently dismissing them as useless, have the walls developed a life of their own. They only belong to themselves now. The aesthetics and individuality of these former work cathedrals do not give up easily. With iron resolve they defend themselves against their own demise. In their inertia they have developed a new form of self-confidence, almost of grandeur. As the remains of technical temples, they have triumphed over people: they have adapted to the strategies of dictators and their entourages; they have outlived revolutions and political upheavals. Countless workers, engineers and managers who toiled away in them are dead and buried. Only the ruins remain.
In a few years many of these structures will have disappeared – torn down, carted away or simply collapsed. What will be left then? A few walls, some rubble and iron skeletons – an elegiac memento mori. They compel us to reflect on the essence of things, on our own mortality. “My occupation: ruins builder. My mission: ruins architect. My sin: ruins voyeur. Don’t ask me about forgotten places”, wrote the Romanian poet Mircea Cărtărescu. “Gather around me, open my skull and look at my brain: before your very eyes it will crumble like plaster. And its dust will be mixed indistinguishably with the dust of the ruins among which I have lived my entire life, as a lover of a harem of ruins.”
Susanne Schaber
[ Translated from the German by Elaine Bradley ]
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