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...
2 comments:
This is really fascinating stuff, Constantin. You really evoke the place - and not just in terms of your own feelings, but its social & historical context. It's also a nice observation that the pond effectively "reflects" certain cultural values and attitudes.
Have you thought about how you could respond to this artistically? Do you feel that all you can do is document this place, or have you had any ideas about artistic gestures you could make?
Thanks Richard - it's really an interesting question, and it made be realise that one of the most interesting things about Odomez is how much it blurs the difference between pure documentation and pure art. So far, i've had few artistic gestures towards the "water station" - aside from taking pictures, writing, the only thing i've been doing is in fact trying to note down everything i can see that has been casted down in the water. Just writing down the list of all these things - tires, bikes etc... and seeing more of them as the pond gets emptied. Which in its form is purely a documenting gesture, while for me, it has always been an artistic one. In fact, and i think it's something that's reflected in some pictures, there is so much magic there that even pure documenting gestures get artistic. The environment has gone through so much changes that i guess it's not really possible to just be documenting its past by observing its present...
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