The black lake

Not much has changed yet, nothing really massive, but a lot of important details are different now that the Kuhlman factory in Odomez is newly (but temporarily) inhabited by workers.

These weeks, their main new objective was to empty and depolluate the big pool that's located between the buildings and the former workers' housing estate, along the Escaut river. Now separated from the river, it used to be a water station for the barges that came to the factory.


But, that's not exactly how we perceived it the first times we came to Odomez. It's a huge, concrete surrounded, square pond of black water, and it's now used by the neighbors as a kind of big waste deposit. All around the pond, they have dumped all kinds of stuff, from the usual tires to diverse everyday objects : doors, children's push chairs, umbrellas, washing machines, televisions... and there's not enough depth for these to be hidden. They appear at the surface of the water, still there. Because of that, it's obvious that the pond is not just the abandoned water station, but has now become something different that nobody would have predicted.
It has a presence. Silent, stubborn, but fearful also. People see it from their windows. Some even come around to fish, and children play by.
It fascinates me. Somehow, i always had that image in my head that the periode of our living is surrounded by void, endless and indeterminate oceans of blackess. It's like that black hole. Some say it's the dust to which we all belong in the end, some say it's the big-everything, the unity where everything is gathered again. Visiting Odomez always gave me a strange feeling of time, and of "my time", and the black lake definitly appears to me as a kind of incarnation of this strange representation of temporality. Piercing weirdly, materially, through the wild grass.
It may sound mystic, and it certainly partly is, though i will not enter this matter here. But i think it also has a real psychological, and therefore substantial, effect.
This tendency of the neighbors to use it as a dump also reminds me of the tale of the flute player of Hamelin. There's this tragic twist of fate when, just as you're trying to prevent yourself from being dispossessed, you do so well that you finally end up throwing everything away by your own will. It's what they do. Sacrificing pieces of their lives to satisfy this menacing pond... and eventually, even though it stays calm and doesn't grow, it has eaten everything anyway.

On a more general level, i think it points how weird is the relationship that these people have to waste and pollution. It's definitly a polemic question, and it calls for debate, but we're so much fed with the same ideas about pollution over and over... If anything, it could be a good start to stop fearing it and cursing it, and accept it as a part of our environment. Some places of the Earth's figure have been transformed for good by one of its animal inhabitants, and from an holistic point of view, there's no fear to have about it. Just modifications of the organisations of chaos, i'd say. Of course, i wouldn't even mean to say that the pollution is not a danger for life. But i'd like to call for a more general point of view on the matter, so as to allow us to see other faces of the phenomenon.

The Compagnons du Hainaut (the local Emmaüs community) do not have a really close relationship of neighborhood with the inhabitants of the "cité ouvrière", who sometimes have trespassed upon the Compagnons' land and tried to break and enter in their buildings - perhaps hoping to find hidden treasures among the Compagnons' huge amounts of stuff. However, they share this very odd and unique relationship to waste, where things thrown out are not expected to disappear, collected by the garbagemen in the morning. The Compagnons simply have too much things to throw away to care to have everything recycled and, as time went on, they filled a few areas of their homeland with truckloads of stuff. With the start of the demolition, the bulldozers have returned the soil and unearthed all kinds of things out of the ground. It now feels like the archaeological site of a long-gone civilisation, and i always spend as much time gazing at the ground as at the buildings.
Among these, what the Compagnons are responsible for is not really distinguishable from what the neighbors are. Both, for example, both believe in the role of fire as a good tool for destruction. We often are choked by the black smokes that come out of the Compagnons' chimneys - and there are some black spots where the neighbors burn things out.

What's specific for the Compagnons' is to be found inside their buildings. During these twenty years, they have collected far more objects than they have sold, and huge amounts of furniture, dozens of pianos, tons of dishes, hi-fi equipment, clothes, computers, toys, books, records... basically everything you can imagine as an object was gathered in the building they occupied (now bound to demolition), under the waters piercing through the roof's holes, slowly rotting away. Like a post-apocalyptic museum. A broad selection of the late occidental civilisation production of artifacts, but like dug out of the remnants of the nuclear war. Objects, objects in unnumerable quantities, all in the same status of last stop before the dump (nobody sells things to the Compagnons, everything they have to sell has been given to them). This is definitly connected to contemporary societies of mass production & consumption. It's like they have reached that point where so much things are gathered together, that they all crumble down under their own mass. Not an antithesis for capitalism, but a process pushed so far that it returns against itself.

There is often that same feeling of apocalypse. For example, like in this other room, on an abandoned side of the site. They used to use it a dump, and it has now become completely filled with stuff, melted with the wild vegetation. Recently, i was devastated to see that the workers had almost completely shut down any access, even visual, to that room. It was one of the first spots we discovered. A square room of about 10 meters wide, first floor and roof vanished, and ground completely covered with vegetation and dirty dump. I don't know, maybe you could argue psychologically with the fact that i'm somebody afraid of the future. But it's also a fact that i've seldom felt so peaceful in my life as when i was gazing at this apocalyptical scenery. These feelings are so strong that i'm now surprised when i show pictures of this to people, expecting them to see that beauty, only to hear them complain about the pollution. It'd be a complete misunderstanding to see these clichés as, even partly, political or social, at least in the usual ways of thinking. They're only about apocalypse, that is, to come back to its original sense of "revelation", visions through time.


I've been fascinated since childhood by the very special beauty of this land, "le Nord", which seems to wake up only with the first cold days of autumn, and lies precisely in its raw, scorched earth, flora and industry amalgamated. It's shamely too often despised, even by the people who've been living here for generations. Desolation, failure, loss are inscribed everywhere, and i think it's one of the most beautiful things...
For now, the emptying of the lake is on hold, partly because some of the neighbours claimed their fishes back...

The Lure of the Local

Hello everyone.

I just wanted to draw your attention to this book by Lucy Lippard entitled Lure of the Local available through The New Press, or at your favorite book retailer, I'm sure.

The book addresses many of the issues that we ourselves are exploring on this site and may provide a great springboard for conversations, etc. Lippard focuses on aspects of contemporary art, history, geography and cultural studies and how they relate to form a sense of or exploration of place. The book is broken up into five sections:

Part I Around Here
Part II Manipulating Memory
Part III Down to Earth: Land Use
Part IV The Last Frontiers: City and Suburbs
Part V Looking Around

Here's a little teaser from the first page:

Place for me is the locus of desire. Places have influenced my life as much as, perhaps more than, people. I fall for (or into) places much faster and less conditionally than I do for people. I can drive through a landscape and find myself in that disintegrated mining cabin, that saltwater farm, that little porched house in the barrio. ( My taste runs to humble dwellings nestled in cozy spaces or vulnerable in vast spaces.) I can walk through a neighborhood and picture interiors, unseen back yards. I can feel kinesthetically how it would be to hike for hours through a vast "empty" landscape that I'm dashing through in a car- the underfoot textures, the rising dust, the way muscles tighten on a hill, the rhythms of walking, the feel of sun or mist on the back of my neck.... Lucy Lippard, (Lure of the Local, The New Press; New York, 1997)

-cory

abandoned trailer, shipton-upon-cherwell

yesterday, after so many nervous walks around it, i finally braved the insides of the mysterious abandoned trailer in shipton-upon-cherwell. i climbed through the door, and with racing heart, walked slowly through the trailer towards the bedroom.. my eyes fixed on these strange blankets atop a mattress at the far end of the room. such a relief i felt when i learned that nobody was there and i was free to explore. i found torn curtain hemms hanging from rails, a giant screwdriver that had been stabbed right through a wardrobe, barbed wire coiled round a rusting bike, holes in the walls, ceilings and floors.. and dust. everywhere a thick dust. and lingering smell of damp.
there was nothing much to salvage here. mostly trash, a few old abba tapes, cutlery, and a rusted pile of dragonfly fairylights.
perhaps the next time i return, i will leave something there instead.

more photographs here

Overview of an outer place

I think i might well be writing at lot about Odomez in the upcoming months. Sorry if it seems a bit of a monomania, but after all, every visit we pay to the old giant sets my mind in motion and i might as well put these thoughts down on paper and share them here.


Let's start with a quick overview. What i call Odomez is in fact the name of the town where this abandoned factory is located. Odomez exists since the 12th century, but only grew bigger when the factory opened at the beginning of the 20th century. I'm still missing some infos, but here's what i gathered. It's a small town, about a thousand inhabitants, located in the north of France, just near the Belgian border, about 50km from the nearest metropol, Lille, and 20km from Valenciennes, where my parents live and i spent most of my childhood.

The factory was producing synthetic textile out of chemical processes. It spreads over 7 hectares of land, and used to employ about 1200 workers at its peak. More precisely, it's located on the shore of the local big river, the Escaut, which is know for its barges and "chemins de halage", and, more recently, its pollution.
The factory closed its doors for good in 1962, and remained a virgin land from that time on... until twenty years later, twenty years ago, an Emmaüs community got to occupy about a half of the buildings of the site. Guy Gillet, who founded the community, was then a friend of the proprietor of the site.

I don't know how much is known about the Emmaüs Communities outside France, so i'll go with a little intro about it. It's a charity organisation created by l'Abbé Pierre in the early fifties, independant from the state welfare. These communities basically provide a place where to live to people in need, in exchange for their work. They gather stuff from your attics for free, and sells them inside the former industrial buildings. Half of the money goes to diverse charity plans. Twice a week, people from the cities around come, either looking for low-priced necessities or for lost treasures... Emmaüs Communities are linked with the industrial landscapes and architectural patrimony, because very often, these abandoned sites are the only places where they can get a roof for free (if you read french, there's more info on their website : http://www.compagnonsduhainaut.org/notre%20histoire.html).

That's just how Aurélie and I discovered the place. Went to "Emmaüs" (i use quotation marks because Odomez's community is now independant from the Emmaüs organisation, but still is usually named the same), about a year and a half ago, and stumbled upon this wonderful land of buildings and jungle intertwined... There's a lot of aspects to it, but the community intervenes even inside the abandoned buildings too, throwing away tons of stuff they won't be selling in the empty rooms of the former factory. It's a really impressive process and a fascinating gesture, i think. Some of these rooms are filled with things thrown away, either by the community or by the people living in the houses of what once was the "cité ouvrière" of the factory. These people, though now officially living outside the factory zone, still play a very singular role on it. They live inside what were the houses of the workers. They also have a strange relationship with the water station that is located just between their houses and the buildings. They, very often, throw away their stuff and waste there, down in the dark water.

We got in touch personnally with the Compagnons only recently, when the destruction started. We couldn't come unnoticed anymore, because they have been chosen by the heads of the destruction project to be some kind of nightwatchers. Usually, when a destruction occur, there is always a nightwatcher, and all hope to get inside is gone. But luckily, in fact, the Compagnons are just as sad as us to see the building go away, and they let us go as we please on the site, in exchange for some photo prints for their archives. After all, they've been living here for more than 20 years.

It definitly changed our way of perceiving the whole site, but it's not bad. Less magic, less strange, more human, more about memory, remembering. We used to stay away from historical informations, intentionnally, to keep the strange magic awake, but we can't do that anymore. It's still strange in another way though. It's like we were nostalgic of a time and place where we never have been. I guess somebody has to mourn and remember, and since, to my knowledge, nobody of those of used to work here are still present, why not us ?

I feel this situation really points out how this heavily industrialised region is not at all in harmony with it's own past and memory. Most of the people here feel it's a good thing that all these factories (not only Odomez', but lots of others around) get broken down without any effort or any remembrance. Medias tend to show chemical industries and wastes problems as just bad memories, as things we ought to get rid of. And unfortunately that's just how it is seen i feel. North of France is a highly polluted region, and is bound to have a schizophrenic relationship with its land as long as the medias will only use the idea of pollution as a nightmare.
Yesterday, with Guy, founder of the Compagnons, we were looking at some of the pictures we took so far. He told us that when the Compagnons came over here, they dug a pond for them to relax around and fish a bit. And he said that they had to wait a few weeks before putting the water in it, because when they had turned the ground over, there was a hanging smell of ammonia in the air for days. It was just under one of the tanks used by the factory. Eventually, their put the water, and the fishes did not grew mutant. I think even just the way the vegetation grew wild is a proof that the notion of pollution is relative of a human point of view. On a more general basis about this problem, there is still a debate now, about the Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl. Some reports tend to point out the problems created by the radioactivity, whereas some others show it as an independently created wildlife reserve (Przewalski's Horses, an endangered specie, breed there). Near Odomez, it is know that a rare specie of carnivorous plant is growing, the Drosera.

Before we got outside, Guy also handed us this old image of the factory when it was in activity. It's fascinating to discover buildings that we didn't even thought they existed.


This time, the workers were there, busy at removing the asbesots, so there was no way we were going to go inside this time. Just walking around is already a favor from them, though they are not unfriendly, "just doing their job" i guess...

Aurélie sat down and started drawing for her new project of a mind map. Meanwhile, i went to stalk a part of the area we never explored, because of its heavy vegetation.
I was struck. I stumbled upon one of the old doors of the factory zone, which is still surrounded by a concrete fence. An old, rusted brown iron door that once was a secondary (i think) entrance. I guess workers used to go through that gate.


As i walked a bit further along the fence, i find myself just underneath one of the caretaker's houses. It was impressive, because i really wasn't expecting discovering a new building after all this time. What's even more strange is that i first passed by it without noticing, and then only smelled that chemical smell that floats around some parts of the factory area. There was some barrels beside the walls of the empty house - maybe that was it. I turned back, and saw the house. It's small, two rooms, there used to be a first floor, but there's no floor left, and no roof either. Just the remnants of the fireplace, and the stairs going down the flooded basement. And only one strange inhabitant left...


It's quiet and isolated, so i think we might well be back there to record some stuff live this time, one thing the stress of being inside these odd and forbidden buildings never allowed us to do.

All of this is a bit blurry. I should have started writing sooner, but will try to make up for the delay.

Hello!

To introduce myself, here’s a tale of a place.
Several years ago, I became fascinated with Barton Moss, an area of land between Salford and Warrington. The M62 motorway to Liverpool crosses the moss; Stevenson built the railway across it, almost floating the sleepers on the unstable ground. It’s an eerie place, odd shacks and houses scattered around, but desolate. I did a bit of research about the place and uncovered a few interesting things. For instance, the Moss is a huge shallow dome: peat and rotten vegetable matter are barely constrained by a kind of meniscus. In the time of Henry VIII, the Moss burst, flooding everything in foetid water. Earlier than that, it appears the Romans burnt down a whole forest to stop the natives hiding there (that’s why it’s how it is today). There’s odd stories about the place: there’s a legend (probably invented by Harrison Ainsworth) that Guy Fawkes fled across Barton Moss trying to escape his pursuers – and funnily enough, in the early 1900s there was a firework factory there, which blew up, killing the owner. When the railway was opened, the local mayor was run over by the first train and killed. There’s more, too. For example, the murdered packman…

Maps (food for thought)

Sketching our own personal 'maps' would be a great starting point and undoubtedly a fruitful and honest way of sewing the seeds of collaboration. This is a link that will provide more food for thought along with Rich's inspiring quotes, its comes from Marina Warner's 'Memory Maps' teachings:

http://www.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/adult_resources/memory_maps/what/index.html

M.

the abandoned toilet

greetings and salutations to all.
this is a place i discovered on a walk a few months ago... the remains of what would appear to be an old toilet block situated lone amidst a collection of trees.
scattered over and beneath the ground and its foliage were around 20-30 old discarded vinyls. i took most of the unbroken ones away with me, and used them to create the artwork for the sorrel mini cd-r release. they used to play a strange mixture of old 80s music, dance, and rather silly 'easy listening' compilations of classical music. all crackling and picking up these flickers of dust.
i also discovered a strange rusted jar with some unidentified red object floating in this murky water. out of curiosity i took this away with me, but have not braved opening the lid.
i have revisited the spot several times since and unearthed many other treasures beneath the soil.. (photos of which can be found here) and i am sure i will always be finding new things here.