Industrial Nostalgia: The Case of Poldi Kladno ****************************************************************************************** * Petr Gibas ****************************************************************************************** Abstrakt In the last few years, industrial architecture has started to attract more attention than before. In order to pursue the issue of growing aesthetic interest in the industrial lands contemporary visual and related discoursive representations of industrial architecture and landscape in the Czech Republic. Discussing the case of a vast industrial brownfield adjac town center of Kladno, a former industrial city in Central Bohemia, I try to show how the architecture is in fact aestheticized. By questioning what lies behind such aestheticizati how industrial landscape and the past it embodies have been negotiated within the urban sp the visual as well as discoursive representations of industrial architecture as predominan and nostalgic. My argument is, however, that nostalgia does not have to present a weakness originates in the image we hold of our past and it embodies our fears about our future. It as a position from which we could critically question our present-day existence and our po Our aesthetic perception has been changing. The discussion of the reasons why it has been what lies behind such changes is needed since it relates to the wider discussion about our with the past and thus also about the image we have of ourselves. Klíčová slova industrial landscape, post-socialist landscape, nostalgia, industrial aesthetics, Poldi Kl Článek v PDF ke stažení [ URL "LM-853-version1-industrial_nostalgia_petr_gibas_lide_mesta. Poldi Kladno is a big industrial site in Kladno, a town in Central Bohemia. Within the Cze context it is a well-known factory, not only because of the economic importance it played the 20th century, but mainly because of its presence in many works of art ranging from soc paintings and writings to the writings of Bohumil Hrabal. Even after its decline in the 19 attracts attention - because of the political background of its break-down, because of its the form of a ruinous brownfield just in the center of the city, and last but not least be aesthetic appeal industrial ruins have for many people nowadays. When I visited Poldi in spring 2008 - it has been my last visit so far - I met there a gro photographers from the 120 km. distant town of Lanškroun (fig.1). The ruins, usually inhab visited from time to time by people walking their dogs, by Gypsies trying to mine out rare metals in order to sell them or by individual explorers li suddenly full of activity. Here and there people arranging their tripods could be seen thr the walls or in distance. When I realized where they were from, I, indeed, asked them what so far. They agreed on that they wanted "to document the state of it all because in few ye there." It was "the ravages of time" that brought them there and I could not help myself, nostalgia in what they were saying. I think I understand them. It is the time at work that makes ruinous spaces so appealing ( Something has been vanishing, something irreplaceable, and the only thing they can do is t of it. If they do not, something will vanish without a trace. Such an urge to document the loss and disappearance goes inevitably hand in hand with melancholy and nostalgia. However I am referring to is a special kind of nostalgia, an aimless one. Surprisingly maybe, it d getting back to some particular golden time, at bringing back the past. It is a similar ki Svetlana Boym speaks about when she says that nostalgic can be homesick and sick of home a 2001, 50). It stems from the physical encounter with ruinous spaces where the past and pre felt to co-exist in a kind of unmediated form, it stems from the physical encounter with t disappearance rather than from the wish to get back in time. Figure 1: Photographers from Lanškroun in Poldi. Source: Official web page of Lanškroun Ph (http://www.fotolan.cz/akce-fotoklubu/rude-kladno-nejak-vybladlo-13.4.2008/; 21 April 2008 Industrial architecture has attracted more attention in the last few years than probably e the general interest in it has been steadily growing. I believe the strong appeal industri ruins in general - have for us, people of late modernity, stems from their ability to indu After all, it is the late modern society, which is preoccupied with searching for its own (industrial) ruin that can be seen as a slowly but inevitably vanishing link to our immedi we can think of nostalgia dismissively as of a symptom of weakness, an excessively emotion people unable to face challenges of the present, "an abdication of personal responsibility homecoming, an ethical and aesthetical failure" (Boym 2001, xiv). In this paper, however, make case for nostalgia, since I believe that understanding it can help us to understand o In doing so, I will concentrate on three intertwined issues. I will sketch out very briefl and "ideological" context of the Czech industrial architecture and its representations in century. I will explore contemporary visual and accompanying discoursive representations o landscape using examples from photographic books and web pages created by professional as photographers in order to shed light on and to understand the contemporary interest in ind I will argue that the contemporary industrial imaginary is predominantly nostalgic. Throug I will try to comprehend the role the industrial imaginary plays within our relationship t industrial landscape. And I will use the example of the industrial brownfield of Poldi Kla question how the past, industrial heritage and urban space are being experienced and negot social late modernity. The paper, however, does not represent a detailed study of post-socialist or late modern i landscape with sociologically precise account of actors, with detailed analysis of their i thorough description of their strategies. Such a study still waits to be done, and not onl context. I would like the reader to recognize in this particular piece of writing an essay up ways of thinking about recent general shift in appreciation of industrial landscape, wa story of changing industrial imaginary. Hence the generalizes, which help me to delineate to produce a particular understanding of industrial landscape that could eventually suppor detailed and fact-devoted analyses of industrial landscape. I understand contemporary industrial imaginary as infused with nostalgia. My argument here nostalgia does not have to present a weakness since it originates in the image we hold of embodies our fears about our future. It can thus serve as a position from which we could u critically question our present-day existence and our potential futures. The general aim o lies in acknowledging the potential of theorizing both nostalgia and industrial landscape. I believe that questioning the nostalgia grounding the contemporary industrial imaginary c understand our post-socialist situation in our post-industrial landscape. Industrialization in the Czech Republic and its photographic representations Figure 2: Anonymous - Poldi Ironworks in Kladno, 1895. Source: Composite authors (eds.) Tv doby: Svědectví fotografie/ A Portrait of Industrial Age: Captured in Photography, Prague: for Industrial Heritage, 2007. In the Czech part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the process of industrialization began s first part of the 19th century and the pace of industrialization had been rising throughou 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Central Bohemia became one of the most import regions in the Empire, with Prague at its center, and Kladno, the town I will concentrate part of this essay, as a vanguard of heavy industry in the region. The other important reg in the northeast of the country with the town Ostrava at its heart. The process of industr brought about two radical and linked changes - the transformation of lifestyles and the tr landscape (cf. Hozák 2007). These two changes lay at heart of the early photographic repre industrial architecture and its context. The industrial boom with the promise of the seemingly never-ending technological progress the material but also the mental aspects of human life. Modernity measured itself against the achievements of the human mind, through works of manufacturing, engineering, through t aimed at subjugating matter, space and time by means of technology and technology seemed t future for all mankind. New aesthetic experience of technology emerged, the one that is of to as sublime - that of awe, wonder, and amazement aroused by the confrontation with the i of man-made objects (Nye 1994, xiii). The quasi-religious experience of technological subl found in the "uncritical admirations for new technical innovations, extolling human ingenu as ‘a triumph of the spirit over nature'" (Hozák 2007,14). Just like the idea of progress intellectual foundations of modernity, the experience of technological sublime lies in the experience. In the world of modernity, which is increasingly desacralized, "the sublime re reinvest the landscape and the works of man with transcendent significance" (Nye 1994, xii Nevertheless, the feeling of technological sublime was in the Czech Kingdom at the end of accompanied by a kind of nostalgia for the past, a sense that something "had changed drama as a result of the advancement of industry and transportation" (Scheufler 2007,29). Conseq photographers tried to capture and document the existing state of towns and landscape and been changing because of the industrialization of the country. Figure 2 represents the Pol Kladno shortly after it was founded in order to illustrate what kind of landscape photogra change I have in mind. Figure 3: Jindřich Eckert, Julius Müller'n - Vojtěch Ironworks in Kladno, 1878. Source: Co (eds.) Tvář průmyslové doby: Svědectví fotografie/ A Portrait of Industrial Age: Captured Prague: Research Centre for Industrial Heritage, 2007. Apart from the attempts to document the changes on one hand and to embrace them on the oth strand of photographic representation emerged in the Czech Kingdom at the end of the 19th Photographic pictorialism "was not interested in faithful depiction of reality but tried i mood and atmosphere to move closer to the techniques of painting and graphics and thus int new dimension into the photographs - a sense of the reality portrayed. ... The documentary whether true-to-life or idealising, withdrew into the background and was replaced as the c attention by conveying mood and feelings evoked by the machine and the role of the man wor the machine" (Scheufler 2007,33-34). Figure 3 represents an example of such mood-conveying representation of technology - aestheticized iron works in Kladno. The sublimity of new technological objects and newly created landscape together with the n from the changes in the landscape went hand in hand with the aestheticization of technolog hope that within the course of the paper I will succeed in conveying the importance of the nostalgia and aestheticization - for understanding not only the aesthetic interest in tech of the 19th century, but more importantly the contemporary interest in the industrial ruin When, after the Second World War, communists seized power in Czechoslovakia, the image of its representation changed slightly. Industry and the trope of building the country starte prominent place within the communist official discourse. The brighter future should have b technology was to play an important role not only as a means of reaching communism but wit liberatory potential also as one of its constitutional elements. After all, communism (or, the state socialism of the second world) is a high watermark of modernity and its ideas ab stem from modernist dreams about technology and its liberatory powers. Thus the discourse infused with figures such as "miner" or "metallurgist" and the trope of "building the soci a prominent role within the speech of the political system from its very beginning in 1948 end in 1989. Figure 4 shows how the discourse is imbued with industrial imaginary - even t such as the advertisement for a newspaper was based on it, using it while at the same time Figure 4: Sobotka - Rudé Právo-pomocník výstavby socialismu/ Red Justice-helping to build Red Justice used to be the official newspaper of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia. So www.czechdesign.cz/index.php?status=c&clanek=679&lang=1; 21 April 2008 Despite it being such a prominent feature of the communist discourse, I feel there is a pe of studies about this interconnection, and even about the representation of industry throu period. The exhibition catalogue Czechoslovakian Socialist Realism 1948-1958 by Petišková of the few works based within the Czech cultural context that try to explore the link betw representation and different prominent tropes of the communist speech. Unfortunately, as t based mainly on examples of artworks from the Army Artistic Centre, it underrepresents the or using industrial motives. Contemporary interest in industrial aesthetics ... Having been so much connected to the official discourse, the attractiveness and the sublim technology exhausted themselves in the never-ending monologue of the communist speech (cf. The aesthetic and moral appeal of technology and industrial motives evanesced in the last socialism and the fall of communism, which resulted in a wild economic transformation and in the downfall of substantial parts of the Czech industry, brought about the overall poli as well as aesthetical neglect of anything industrial that was left. However, during the l years the neglect has changed into a frenzied interest. Professional as well as layman pho urban explorers, artists and general public are more and more attracted by the ruinous spa around the Czech landscape. To understand what lies in behind such interest, I will briefl representations of industrial landscape by contemporary photographers, since general issue industrial landscape are reflected in their visual and rhetorical statements and thus can means of them. While pondering why the old photographs depicting the industrialization process in the Cze so appealing for us, Hozák offers a few reasons. It is the appeal of the topic itself, the ask ourselves when confronted with such photographs, "the emotional strength, drama, and r photographs and the wealth of information they contain," as well as "the sense of almost i that many of the photographs from this period, especially landscape images, are often able us" (Hozák 2007, 8). But mainly it is the process of change captured by the photographs th so emotionally charged for us. "The confrontation of two evolutionary poles, which many of succeed in capturing, portraying the end of a world of relative tranquillity and unspoiled it collided with the predacious and reckless onslaught of technological civilization, was as overt and telling in form as it appeared at the end of the nineteenth and the start of century" (ibid.). I find Hozák's account extremely apt. However, I believe the changes that occurred in the modernity - or for the second world in the age of post-socialism - are comparable to the o at the end of the 19th century, at least regarding their aesthetically-emotional appeal. I symbolic that the subsequent ends of the century brought profound changes to the lives of as to the landscape. The old technology of modernity and its physical manifestation in the landscape has given place to a new form of post-industrial landscape in which only the old factories, forgotten monuments and despised socialist architecture evoke what we left behi the present-day interest in the industrial architecture and aesthetics originates in a sim nostalgia and appeal Hozák describes for the dusk of the 19th century. The often-expressed reason why photographers get interested in industrial architecture is one. In the motto to his photographic book "Ostrava guys to everyone," the photographer Bo says: "I was born in 1965 in Ostrava. Somebody is born to the village and he sees greenery grew up surrounded by smoke-stacks and steel monsters. The sun leaked through them in the night they turned into uncanny castles. I don't know when it happened, but suddenly it got my Ostrava. Original as its people, but alive and distinctive. I still want to explore it, perpetual changes." Here, industrial sites act as sources of artistic and potentially also identity. Hand in hand with the issue of identity goes the urge to document the so far neglected aes of industrial sites, as is not only the case of Renner, but also of the already mentioned photographers. There are, of course, also pragmatic reasons, as in the case of the book "V Industria," commissioned by the steelworks as an expression of its historical importance a in the future of the whole region, particularly in the industrial monuments as a potential regional identity. But I believe all of these reasons stem from - or as in the latter case mixture of aesthetic attractiveness of the industrial photographs and the nostalgia we fee industrial ruins. Figure 5: Milan Sýkora - V pecích už jen tma/Only darkness in the furnaces, 2006. Source: Exemplary instance of such a mixture can be detected in the photographic work and especial commentaries published by Michal Sýkora, a layman photographer from Kladno, at his website in 2006: "It was not for the first time I went to Poldi in Kladno. But maybe it was for th - recently the production was ended in the last rolling mill in Kladno. [...] I was in the everywhere. Sad experience: There was absolute silence in that big factory. [...] It was s was photographically absolutely exceptional and beautiful. [...] The hall was built in the it is closed now. You can guess what they will build in its place. A supermarket, indeed. have a lot of them. I don't know why but I simply like Poldi. I feel that the world I knew No monuments from the 20th century will survive..." (Sýkora 2006a). Here, the nostalgia, m religious, romantic aestheticization of the ruinous space, results in an imminent, even wr of our contemporary situation. Sýkora, Renner and the Lanškroun photographers, they all represent to me a kind of post-mo explorers, mourning about the loss that takes place in the landscape around us while at th desperately trying to document it, to preserve at least a trace, an image of it. As anothe comment illustrates, they aestheticize not only the object of their interest - industrial their experience: "Poldi dies away slowly but surely - so I went there again to see someth it. It was adventurous: unexpected holes in the ground, unexpected strange people [...], p depth or height takes one's breath away" (Sýkora 2006b; italics mine). Contemporary explor kind of romantic explorations; they differ from their romantic predecessors only by having instead of drawing-books. Figure 5 shows a snapshot from one of Sýkora´s explorations. The case of Václav Jirásek and his project "Industria" emphasizes even more the potential aspect of contemporary industrial imaginary. In his work, Jirásek shows how the aesthetica exploration of industrial motives (fig.6) can be combined with a critical stance about the day state of the industry and its social as well as spatial consequences. He "repeatedly s his work is classical color photography, devoid of any manipulative interventions - and in underscores the bizarre, fantastic aspects of the thoroughly artificial, thoroughly man-ma of the factory, showing it to be an actual, and above all still extant reality, however mu expelled it from our consciousness, shifting it far from the angle of vision of contempora dreams, projects" (Nedoma 2006,14). Jirásek thus depicts not only the factories on the ver destruction, but he is also interested in the people still working there (fig.7) - "worker and now ruled by the fear of unemployment" (ibid. 16). In his Industria, the aesthetics of merges with socially critical statement about our past and our present in "a grandiose exp monumentality of the decay and dissolution of the impossibly gigantic dreams of the yester have been tomorrow" (ibid.). I believe there is a threefold reason behind layman as well as professional photographic e industrial ruins. Firstly, it is the urge to document the vanishing world. Secondly, it is to convey the experienced unexpected beauty of such places, strange and organic compound o man-made merging under the auspices of relentless time. There is an aspect of romanticize contemporary photographic as well as discursive representation of industrial ruins and han goes a process of aestheticization of industrial space. In order to turn reality into an a the distantciation of the viewer is needed (cf. Williams 2004,29). But thirdly, despite th there is still, as the case of Jirásek´s Industriashows, a critical potential regarding co industrial imaginary. All the photographic works I mentioned here are the result of about the last 10 years of a I used the example of the photographers´ statements about the industrial landscape in orde the feelings and motives grounded in industrial landscape which I believe are to some exte our times when everybody equipped with digital camera or even mobile phone can become a ph when urban exploration became usual leisure activity, and when open-door days of derelict attract every year more and more people worldwide. The photographers´ statements bare the aesthetic perception of industrial motives has changed profoundly in the last two decades. from the general public, would even think about going to Poldi for a romantic exploration half of 1980s? Figure 6: Václav Jirásek - Untitled. Source: Jirásek 2006. Figure 7: Václav Jirásek - Untitled. Source: Jirásek 2006. ... and the case of Poldi Kladno Kladno is a town with a long and rich industrial history dating back to 1854 when the firs plant was founded close to the city center. Since then, surrounded by coalmines and deposi ore, Kladno became one of the leading metallurgist areas in Bohemia. Steelworks were found Wittgenstein in 1889 just next to the older plant and were named Poldi after his wife Leop of heavy pollution and mining industry, Kladno became known as a black town. After the Wor plants were nationalized by communist government, merged into one large factory called SON Kladno acquired another prominent label, that of a red town. Since red had always been the to the communist party and because in Kladno, like in many industrial towns at the turn of there was a strong socialist and communist workers' movement, the history re-narrated by t historiography and propaganda after communists seized power in 1948 tended to hyperbolise Kladno as a workers' town, always devoted to the ideals of communism, as a "black-and-red" A good example of such re-narration of Kladno's history, using the explicit color-based im found in the book written by the leading member of early communist party and the second co of socialist Czechoslovakia Antonín Zápotocký, who was native of the region. His quasi-aut novel, metaphorically called Red Glare Above Kladno, depicts how the idea of communism and it gradually engulfed workers and miners in Kladno and then spread into the surrounding re uses the image of the physical red light illuminating the landscape when steel is discharg blast furnaces and slag is spilled onto dumps as a representation of the communist idea il cultivating the workers' souls. His story starts poetically with: "They spilled slag onto glare glowed above Kladno" to end ideologically with slightly changed: "They spilled slag and red glare glowed above the whole country." In Zápotocký's novel the black-and-red Klad prominent place in the story of the march towards communism. The novel, set in the "black- town and filled with industrial metaphors (as the one I quoted above), can serve as a good of the communist industrial imaginary. After the fall of communism and the downfall of heavy industry in the 1990s, Poldi as a bi broke. Some small plants survived the breakdown of the industrial colossus, but the major km2 area became a brownfield with small workshops or warehouses scattered here and there, with the ruins of old industrial buildings and technology. Figure 8 shows a large part of area. Nevertheless, what survived this breakdown was the image of the red and black indust created by communist ideology, which acknowledges the long and industrial history of the t clogs it with the ideological ballast of the former political regime. What also survived w former Poldi, a ruinous area that attracts some by its aesthetic beauty and historical aut repels others for its discursive connection to the communist propaganda or for its spatial disorderliness. For ones, the aesthetics and historical connections represent a burden to others something that should be protected. Municipal politics in Kladno is controlled by a right-wing party, according to which Kladn history is not a proper, attractive one. In her article about Poldi, Schmelzová (2007) eve municipal clerk according to whom Kladno does not have any proper history at all. Such sta as nonsense but there is a hidden logic in behind. Kladno does not simply have the history wish it had. "People interested in history who come to the town understand that it is far only the red and black town," said the governor of the county on the occasion of the re-op county's museum (CBR 2008) and the mayor of the town warmly supported him. The question, w my mind when I listened to them, was to what extent these proclamations are honest attempt the process of regional identity making and to what extent they simply try to avoid the pr the uncomfortable yet still painfully, even materially, present past of the region. To wha municipality trying to shift our attention from Kladno's immediate past to Kladno's bygone what spatial aspects and consequences does such an approach mean for Kladno and its surrou Figure 8: The view of the ruinous part of Poldi. Source: Author's archive. In order to shed at least some light on these issues I will, in the rest of the paper, con spatial aspects of industrial ruins and by referring to Poldi I will try to show what has in the experience and negotiation of the industrial landscape in general. Poldi here serve point from where I want to ponder the figure of industrial ruin, its spatial and phenomeno and the ways in which it questions our experience of the world surrounding us. In other wo follows, I will try to pin down the ideas about space, past and future embodied in differe approaches to industrial spaces. Edensor nicely shows that industrial ruins are sensually richer and more stimulating than landscape. Full of strange noises, smells and unidentifiable objects, structures and decay environment of the ruins, "its deregulation, decay and the distribution of objects and les matter, provides a realm in which sensual experience and performance is cajoled into unfam that coerce encounters with unfamiliar things and their affordances" (Edensor 2007,227). C bodily movement, there is thus a liberatory potential in the ruin, since the "confrontatio matter offers opportunities to engage with the material world in a more playful, sensual f usually afforded in much smoothed-over urban space" (ibid.). I believe this is the aspect ruins that makes them so appealing and romantic and the explorations of them so "adventuro Industrial ruins - and Poldi Kladno is a fitting example since it lies literally in the ce city - can thus serve as an urban counter-space. Not only are industrial ruins materially sensually richer than the urban space, they are also a space out of reach of any formal po Although being in the center, Poldi is a space on the margin of the city, literally, since occupied by marginalized people, as well as metaphorically, since it is not considered to part of the city anymore. There is no one to exercise formal power over anyone else's cond you can meet big groups of gypsies trying to dig out rare metal pieces from the ground in them, couples at rendez-vous, people walking their dogs, strolling around the ruins, smoki drugs, spraying over the walls, smashing things into pieces or simply taking photographs. can also meet policemen patrolling and embodying the attempts of the municipality to get b the space. But there are so many spaces to hide from their sights and the area is so vast. pre-obsessed with control and security over the public space, industrial ruins offer the s from the regulated urban landscape populated more and more by restrictions and CCTV camera moreover, they can serve as a kind of "thirdspace" (see Soja 1996), the space on the margi is possible to critically think over the issues of public space and its regulations, publi personal responsibility, social injustice and social memory. The liberatory power of ruins does not lie only in their spatial and/or social disorderlin the impossibility to gain absolute control over the space, but also in the connections the past, in their sensual nature. A kind of history we know from the history books cannot be industrial ruins straight away. What the ruins narrate, or in other words, what we can see neither memories of particular events, nor stories of what happened there. In the ruins we thrown out of their original context and we do usually not even know what purposes those t served. Moreover, the things we encounter are rusted, rotten, damaged and dissolved. As Ed incomprehensibility of things and their arrangements within a ruin, the time materialized in them evoke empathy, "vague memories," this all together opens dimensions of memory whic available for inclusion in stories nor communicable." The ruins offer openings, not storie fantasy and imagination. The past they embody is neither history, nor articulate memory. M would argue that memory is tightly connected to meanings hidden for us in our landscapes, articulate but is located in the habitual and the sensual" (Edensor 2005: 846). It is a ´v is hidden in the ruins, a past without any fixed meaning, without any fixed story to be to does not embody the story of, let's say, industrialization, what it embodies is a "vague m passing by. It seems to me the photographers from Lanškroun were right. Maybe it is "the ravages of ti mostly see in the things there, maybe it is a twofold reference to materialization of time industrial ruins so appealing. On one hand, the industrial ruin of Poldi is a silent mater the industrial age, of historical time, which passed and cannot be returned back. But on t decay of Poldi, the process of its dissolution in and into nature reflects and embodies in the passage of time itself. Or, as Rendell puts it, there is "an important temporal aspect whether natural or cultural, that it is not simply a sign of the past in the present, but moment at which what is now becomes what has been" (Rendell 2006,97-8). New materials such as concrete, steel and especially zinc-coated materials, used in new in structures such as warehouses that are being built in the area of Poldi, do not get back t so easily. At least in their present state, they do not embody time in such ways the old a industrial buildings do, and thus seem to us generally unattractive. Or, as one photograph told me, "they are simply uninteresting and, moreover, they are all the same." The resolution about the need to protect the Poldi brownfield area as an industrial herita according to Schmelzová (2007), received by the municipality as well as by the National In Heritage but nothing substantial happened. On the contrary, demolition activities slowly c Poldi from the map. I think I clarified why the municipal government perceives the ruinous as something like a black hole adjacent to the center of the town, or maybe something like according to its color in the municipal plan -, which should be cleared up or at least ord under control. Indeed, it is a space of disorder, social as well as spatial. The tragedy o when one of the big halls collapsed onto four "metal-miners" after they attempted to disma redeem it provided the municipality with a new "reason" to get rid of Poldi. It is, after place where citizens can come to harm. In addition, it is a space of the closest connection to the uncomfortable past of the form its propaganda, discourse and imaginary. It is the most red-and-black space of Kladno and be cleared of its red-and-black history, it must be cleared of Poldi. Poldi is thus uncomf as Schmelzová aptly put it, "the municipality perceives it as an unwanted defect in the at image of Kladno as a calm suburban area of Prague" (Schmelzová 2007,48). Poldi once served image of which was used to adjust and adapt the meaning of history according to the politi interpretation. "It seems that today a similar process of modifying history is at work, ju other way round" (ibid. 47). Since, as the Lanškroun photographers pointed out, if there a traces left, there is nothing to be remembered. Conclusion: Industrial ruins and the nostalgia for the future As Picon observed, "in traditional landscapes, the productions of man, his constructions i surrendered themselves progressively to nature in the form of the ruin" (Picon 2000,76). I ruin is of this kind: severe facades of buildings together with organic clusters of pipes surrender to the organicity and vitality of nature (fig.9). In successive stages, the (ind reintegrates "the traces of human activity into the cycles of nature" (Picon 2000,77). But substantial difference between the ruin Picon speaks about and the industrial ruin? I beli which industrial ruins refer us to time is in fact more complex than Rendell suggests. After all, industrial ruins are ruins of modernity and modernist dreams about technology a The whole thing is not as simple as that Rendell's "moment at which what is now becomes wh the message we can read out is more context-specific and thus can be more telling, more em intellectually charged for us. It is true that "in the body of the ruin the past is both p residues and yet no longer accessible" (Huyssen 2006,7), but regarding industrial ruins, t specific past of ours. In this sense I must agree with Huyssen when he suggests that „we a the ruins of modernity because they still seem to hold a promise that has vanished from ou promise of an alternative future" (ibid.). Maybe here lies the answer to why late modernity is so obsessed with its own past, why it filled with nostalgia. And that is why I believe in liberatory powers of ruins stemming fr they stimulate. That is also why it pays to question industrial ruins and through them to present, our relationship to our past and thus open up the possibility to question also ou foundations of which are now being laid. Industrial ruins are the place from where an alte offered, since they disturb and resist "modern attempts to cleanse, banish ambiguity and o of space" (Edensor 2005, 845). Because of their disorderliness, continuous change and the to be governed, they do not fit well into prepared historical narratives. Rather, they are a narrative potential, a place that encourages starting a new narrative (cf. Crang and Tra addition, since industrial ruins are about the never-ending process of change, they stand attempts to control or fix their meaning and thus can serve as a kind of "thirdspace" open for critique and alternatives. And last but not least, they refer us to our modernist past was seen as offering a possibility. It seems to me the industrial nostalgia is not for the the vanished promises of the past, for the vanished belief in the future. Figure 9: The production of man surrenders progressively to nature - a view from Poldi rui Source: Author's archive. I can imagine a project, for example, in which the decisions and discourse of Kladno munic space of Poldi would serve as a starting point for analysing the power that is being exerc space, and the discourse about public realm supporting it - the discourse about our ´secur and responsibility for ourselves. The future of urban public space we are seemingly inevit - the space crammed with restrictions, CCTV cameras and benches curved in such a way that would not be able to sleep on them - could thus be called in question from the point of vi ´thirdspace´ of the industrial ruin of Poldi. In this paper I tried to elucidate why industrial ruins can be important not only because aesthetic appeal but also because of the connection to the past and the future they hold. aestheticized because of their visual attractiveness and romanticized because of their abi nostalgia, industrial ruins attract us. The encounter with the process of change, with the vanished potential futures embodied in the disordered physicality of industrial ruin groun modern experience, which might be possible to understand as sublime. Industrial ruins can of late modernity, evoke similarly strong emotional response technology did in people of t century. What we experience is the sublime mixture of emotions spanning between the experi and beauty: breath taking, beautiful, awesome, sad, adventurous, exceptional, just to para description of his own feelings when he entered the recently closed rolling mill I quoted the importance of the triad - sublime, nostalgia, aestheticization - I started with for un industrial landscape experience. Because of the reasons expressed throughout the paper I believe the nostalgia accompanying in ruins could prove as a good starting point for a critical reassessment of our attitude surrounding us. Maybe the encounter with the time at work mediated by industrial ruins is late modern sublime experience, and maybe some deep emotion is just what we need in our re socialist age of change. Acknowledgements: I would like to warmly thank Ben Campkin for his ideas and advice regarding the original v paper and Blanka Nyklová for her thought-provoking comments resulting from her thorough re draft. Soubor ke stažení In 1894 the Monument Inventory Commission was set up in Prague in order to organize a phot of sites decided for redevelopment. (Scheufler 2007,30) Vítkovice is part of the town of Ostrava. For a detailed history of Poldi Kladno see Kovařík, J. (1987). Proměny: z historie kladens Kladno: Poldi SONP. The area I refer to as a Poldi brownfield (or in short Poldi) represents only a part of th site. It is the area where the older factory used to be, the area sometimes referred to as or ´Koněv´. For more about this see also Boym 2001, xvi Doprovodné obrázky Petr Gibas [ URL "LM-154.html "]