Deindustrialisation and Popular Music. Giacomo Bottà
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Civil War that
it is we [the workers] who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. . . . That world is growing in this minute. (Van Paassen 1936)
In his utopian abandonment, Durruti understands ruins as a necessity, for the new revolutionary world to rise from them, even if it means destroying what the workers have materially built themselves. Ruins are projected, therefore, into the future, as a signal of the oncoming demise of the bourgeoisie.
Ruins had interested aesthetic and philosophical thought for centuries before Durruti but always in connection to the past. Enlightenment and later Romanticism saw in them an architectural memento mori and a symbol of the irreversibility of time, to be ruminated upon through the lenses of nostalgia (Huyssen 2006). For Georg Simmel (1907), the architectural ruin represented the revenge of nature over the human spirit. Simmel understood ruins in paradoxical dialogism, torn between human spirit and nature, past and present, purpose and chance. According to the German sociologist, built architecture rested upon humanity bending natural matter into precise forms according to its own imagination; on the other hand, a collapsed building, its turning into ruins, is a tragic confirmation of its artificiality. In a ruin, materials regain their true form and return to their natural status; they emanate peacefulness and melt back into the surrounding natural environment, confirming their being something ancient, something of the past.
The attempt to describe and make sense of industrial cities has characterised a great deal of cultural production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For instance, in the British literary context, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1855) takes place between London and Coketown, a fictional northern English city of red bricks, covered in thick smoke. Manchester resident Elisabeth Gaskel also sets two of her novels (Mary Barton, 1848, and North and South, 1855) in industrial settings of the North, also contrasting industrial cities with the supposedly more civilised South. Descriptions of the early-industrialised towns are from the very beginning based on a comparison with more cultural or refined places. At the same time, authors are always keen in portraying architectural and atmospheric features. These elements didn’t change much over the years. There has always been an attempt to understand industrial cities through cultural ones, that is, by comparing landmarks, layers of history, inhabitants, and cultural artefacts.
The 1950s’ so-called kitchen-sink films also focus on describing northern industrial cities. These black-and-white portrayals of desolate individual destinies, in surroundings dominated by brick walls, gasworks, and puddles, collaborate in defining the post-war industrial crisis. The same happens with Italian neorealismo, which often focuses on the inner migration of unskilled workers from the rural South to the northern industrial metropolises, such as Milan, or to desolate lives at the margins of quickly developing but still ambiguous in-between spaces. These films share a common trait: their portrayals of poverty, social distress, and urban problems come from a privileged standpoint, that in the British new wave film has been codified as ‘that long shot of our town from that hill’. According to Andrew Higson (1996), the abused opening shot from above is, in fact, programmatic to the romanticising of working-class lives in industrial settings. Neorealismo, on the other hand, focused its view on industrial wastelands and on the undefined spaces, rising between rural surroundings and city outskirts. These vague spaces were used as mirrors for the eradicated individual not able to be modern or traditional, no more rural but not yet proletarian. This is, for instance, the dramatic condition of the protagonists of Pasolini’s works such as the film Accattone and the novel Ragazzi di Vita. All these works codified industrial landscapes as mirrors for troubled subjectivities, thanks to the use of black and white and to the focus on industrial debris. Rarely do we see in these films active industrial spaces at work; they are more a medium to define a certain sensibility, which goes back a long way. Industrial wastelands become in the post-war European cinema the topos of what Boym calls ‘ruinophilia’ (Boym 2008).
An interesting aspect, however, is the persistence with which the industrial atmosphere and the ‘industrial crisis atmosphere’, in particular, continue to haunt our urban mindscape. According to Böhme (1993), atmosphere is a spatial concept that arises neither from the subject nor from the object, although it maintains object-like and subject-like features. Atmosphere is the space allowing objects to articulate their presence; however, it is also sensed in bodily presence by subjects—it is a subject’s state of being in space. Böhme’s definition of atmosphere makes sense of the modes of relation between object and subject in spatial constellations. It implies, therefore, not only art-related judgemental elements but, as stated by Lehtovuori, ‘it foregrounds a two-way relation between people and their environment, where both the social and the material aspect are equally constitutive. People bring with them the social questions: Class, gender, professions, culturally coded practices and social networks, as well as urban economy and policies, enter the analysis’ (Lehtovuori 2010, 82).
Lehtovuori describes Helsinki’s Makasiinit, former railway warehouses later appropriated as a site of DIY cultural events until their destruction in 2009, with these words:
Firstly, the rough aesthetics, scars of time, smell of wood and tar and the historic allusions of hand-made bricks, steel trusses and other paraphernalia all contributed to a special atmosphere that attracted users and underlined the value of a different place in the increasingly sanitized city centre. Secondly, the size of the buildings and the rail-yard, their form reminiscent of a town square, their direction vis-à-vis views and flows, and the fluid, sieve-like spatial organization, originally made to facilitate quick movement of goods through the warehouses, are all specific configurational qualities that explain why the buildings were so well-suited for various events and other temporary uses. The atmospheric and configurational analyses help to understand how, precisely, the material artefact of Makasiinit was valuable as a ‘living’ and connected socio-spatial (socio-material) reality. (Lehtovuori 2010, 77–78)
The author never openly claims that the atmosphere of the place can be classified as ‘industrial’, but I think that this is a key element in understanding the fascination that the Makasiinit exerted on Helsinki’s population. The Makasiinit radiated their own industrial atmosphere in an augmented way because they were located in the very centre of a capital city known for its culture and for its political role (and not because of its industry). The fact that the Makasiinit lied a few metres from the stairs of the Finnish Parliament collaborated further in increasing the modality of its atmosphere.
Talking about an industrial atmosphere always implies the reverberation of certain perceived or imagined industriousness, brutalism, roughness, rhythm, murkiness, and noise emanating from street corners, empty buildings, means of transportations, public squares, encounters, faces, appearances, and styles, possibly in all social and material realities. Different cultural traditions and representations created a huge array of narratives about less educated, louder, dirtier industrial city inhabitants, and about their attitude. For instance, in the British context, from Charles Dickens to kitchen-sink films, from the ‘Madchester’ music scene to Coronation Street, the bleak industrial towns of the North have been celebrated as ‘the land of the working class’ (Shields 1991). Even more important is the fact that an industrial city has little symbolic or branding value, when compared to other urban centres. Just by pronouncing out loud ‘Paris’, ‘London’, ‘Helsinki’, or ‘Oulu’, ‘Bochum’, ‘Antwerp’, it is very easy to determine the toponymies that reverberate in our imaginary and the ones that are more anonymous and empty. There is still little place-value connected to industrial cities because these cities were born without proper connotations outside the world of manufacturing and production. The attempt to shift their place-value to culture and creativity is fairly new, and the results have been too unalike to determine their overall success. One of the reasons behind the impact of the industrial atmosphere could lie in this indeterminacy as well, with the difficulty in associating it to a place in particular. The industrial city can therefore be seen first and foremost as an articulation of space, not of place. The post-industrial