Itās the thing we have to shift to get to the drink we crave. And then, perhaps, itās the cause of that annoying clinking rattle after weāve accidentally kicked it down the street, where someone else had casually tossed it. Yet thereās a lot more to bottle tops than you might think, as this exhibition aims to prove.
Crimped metal crown caps were first patented by Irishman William Painter in Baltimore in 1892 and, whilst after a century of predominance they are now rivalled by both plastic screwtops and cans, billions of them are still in use around the world.
STORIES, MEMORIES, ROOTS, WINGS
The reason we find them attractive enough to want to collect, is the impressive thought and creativity which goes into the designs printed on these 26mm diameter discs of tin and steel. If you care to look, many of them have stories to tell ā about the liquid they contained, the people who made it and the place they come from. But some are also quite enigmatic, ambiguous, humorous or even unsettling, and this appeals to our imagination and curiosity. Also because weāve always enjoyed walking and travelling around the world and around this region, weāve come to cherish these tops as reminders of places and people weāve encountered along the way. And now that our chances of travel have become so circumscribed by pandemic, weāve valued them even more as imaginative stepping stones to other places and sensations.
THE WORLD OF THE TOP
There are well over a quarter of a million different designs in circulation, covering almost every topic and colour combination you can imagine. They range from the old German monastery breweries that have stuck with the same traditional motif that may have been around since the 1400s, to funky splashes inspired by the latest technology, fashion or social media sensation.
Personally we are more attracted to tops with distinctive and more contemporary personalities, rather than to heritage, as our selection probably reveals. But we also respect the powerful feelings and memories that can be evoked by a venerable image. Philās first associations with bottle tops come from recollections of his Grandad, an old collier who relished a bottle or two of ale, and heās always on the lookout for some of the old brands he remembers him drinking back in the 1960s. We also recall some of the drinks that would have been ubiquitous around this part of the world back in the day, such as Ben Shawās pop. If you are local, and of a certain age, you will surely remember the logo of Samuel Webster who owned scores of pubs in the Calder Valley, before being bought up and absorbed by a global giant. By the way, that lost logo is now used for a brand of beer in China!
Thereās a good chance this may be the first display of bottle tops you have seen. Collecting them is very popular in certain countries such Germany, Poland, Russia and the USA but is rare in the UK. There are about 20 people around the world who claim to have over 100,000 in their collections and the awesome GĆ¼nter Offermann of Hamburg has accumulated 288,421! We, by comparison, are dilettantes with a mere 4,000 from 130 countries, and we have no plans to follow in GĆ¼nterās footsteps!
THIS EXHIBITION
The pieces we have chosen are not a typical cross-section of the world of bottle tops but they reflect either designs we like, places we have been (including many collected from the street) or drinks weāve enjoyed. They are mainly from beer bottles but they also include other beverages such as water, juice, mixers, wine and even whole tomatoes.
Maybe next time you come across one in the street or at home, you might pay it a little more attention and respect.
Two images. I took them both in the same place but 11 years apart.
One portrays a vast factory floor, full of revolving drums, attended by a worker prominent in a fluorescent jacket. The air is thick with fumes and dust, and regular blasts of hot steam make the atmosphere in there hot, sticky and filthy. Try to imagine too the smell, the acrid taste at the back of your throat, and a deafening cacophony as the drums crunch a cargo of rocks, robbing them of their precious iron ore. Outside the temperature is well below zero, as weāre in the high Arctic of northern Norway.
Now hereās a teaser. Which picture comes from 2003 and which one did I take a few weeks ago?
Pat yourself on the back if you guessed that it is in fact the scene of balletic bliss which precedes the dark satanic mill by a good decade - but youād be forgiven for thinking otherwise. After all hasnāt it been the certain and hegemonic dictum of our age that heavy industry has passed into history, to be superseded by the weightless world of knowledge, affect and creativity?
We ought to know better by now that nothing is straightforward. That life is not a simplistic progression of A followed by B followed by C, but a messy, contradictory, endlessly circular ramble. Wherever we may be, we are not at the āend of historyā or any of those other utopias the gurus of neoliberalism so recently tried to sell us.
Of course I didnāt need to trek way beyond the Arctic Circle to learn, this but it was brought home to me with a crashing, metallic certainty during my recent return to the town of Kirkenes.
Kirkenes is a place of extremities which first took me under its spell in 2003. Nominally part of Norway, it lies further east than Istanbul and to the north of almost any habitation on earth. I arrived in mid-summer and spent a week on a crazy dopamine high, induced by round-the-clock light and sunshine. But whilst Norway generally projects a rather gentle and diffident face to the stranger, Kirkenes was raw, uncompromising and unruly. It made no attempt to hide its purpose ā ripping resources out of the ground or from the sea, processing them, shipping them out and then heading for a bloody good piss-up.
Almost the first people I encountered were a couple in a quayside bar. He was brazen, hirsute and weather-beaten ā like Amundsen back from traversing the Northwest Passage ā and sat himself across the table from me. āYouāll drink with me, Engelskmannā sounded more like an order than an invitation. Before Iād had chance to make a choice his lady friend slid neatly alongside on my bench, effectively cornering me against the wall. She was a good 40 centimetres shorter than him, rotund and worse the wear for drink. He brought us all a beer and started his spiel. āSo you all alone in town is it? Do you like look of my Saami friend? Thereās not much to do in Kirkenes - maybe you like get know her a little better?ā
I was trapped ā between the Devil and deep blue Barents Sea. But the permanent daylight brings a certain clarity of mind and, whilst playing along with them I hatched a plan. I figured her bladder was smaller than mine and if we kept on drinking she was bound to need relief eventually. She did, and that was my chance to escape. Out of the bar and in to the night. With the sun beating down, I ran past the harbour full of rusting Russian trawlers and beneath the sprawling iron processing plant which loomed over the town and back to my lodgings.
Gladly I wasnāt alone in Kirkenes, but the guest of a remarkable group of women, the Pikene pĆ„ Broen (or Girls on the Bridge in honour of Edvard Munchās painting). The Pikene are artists who have made it their quest to take on this shambling beast of a town. They havenāt set out to tame Kirklees, so much as at to bring out its softer and more sensual elements, whilst also exploring some of its darker depths. I was in town back in 2003 to help them in their most ambitious adventure to date.
The brooding Sydvaranger mine and processing plant had closed in 1996 after 90 years of production and had sulked redundantly for seven years. By gentle persuasion, and a stubborn disregard for multiple rejections, the Pikene had finally got the owners to allow them access to the plant to stage a happening, the Barents Spektakel. An eclectic band of international artists and activists had been assembled and were allowed free rein to explore the plant, the mine and the worldās most northerly railway that linked the two.
And the Pikene have bigger beasts to tame too. Namely the arrogance of governments in Oslo, Moscow and NATO HQ in Brussels, who have all conspired to make this part of the world a militarized and brutally demarcated zone, since the end of the Second World War. Pikene liked to recall a time when there were no borders here and the indigenous Saami people roamed freely following an ancient way of life. But the expansion of nation states and the pursuit of mineral wealth turned this reindeer tundra into prime real estate and boundaries were carved into it.
You might find Kirkenes on the map of Europe and assume that it was Terra Nullius or Ultima Thule, a place of little consequence on the edge of nothingness. But that wasnāt how it felt to the people who lived there during the War, finding themselves caught between the Russian and Nazi armies, who lobbed more ordnance at the town than any other place except Malta. On retreating, the Nazis compounded the misery with a scorched earth obliteration of every building, leaving the townsfolk with no choice but to survive the 1944 winter living in caves.
With peace came the Cold War and a Soviet frontier only 10 minutes away. A new settlement was hurriedly thrown up, part garrison, part factory town huddled around an industrial harbour. To this day few would dispute that Kirkenes is functional and unlovely ā there to do a job with no aspirations to win any beauty contests. But long after the Cold War ended there was still suspicion towards the neighbour in the East, little warmth or trade coming in either direction, and no encouragement from Oslo to change things.
And what of Kirkenes itself? Well like the whole of Norway it is a wealthier, more urbane and more outwardly confident place thanks to a decade of earning ā and spending ā its oil wealth. But what surprised and disappointed me was that that they didnāt seem to have used the money to make the town a more liveable and vibrant place to live. On the contrary many of them had upped sticks and moved out of town to bigger houses in newly sprawling suburban estate. And it seems like the local council is encouraging this by building new public facilities in the suburbs as well as granting permission for out-of-town shopping malls. Everyone needs big SUVs to reach everything and fewer people seems to walk anywhere, so downtown Kirkenes had an empty haunted feel about it. It all felt very American Midwest.
Ā Just as many parts of the world are waking up to the problems of suburban sprawl, downtown neglect and car-driven consumer lifestyles, it seems like Kirkenes has just discovered it. Back to the future once again.
Meanwhile, Pikene pƄ Broen, both more cosmopolitanly global and more rootedly local than their fellow townsfolk and blinkered politicians, are remaining steadfastly in the town square. They will still be there when the men in red braces decide the price of iron ore means Sydvaranger has to close again. But neither will they fall for the empty boosterist guff which suggests that every former rustbelt town can be restored by creative industries and celebrity architects. They have formed the BLA (Barents Liberation Army) to campaign for a more humanistic alternative. And, like the Saami, whose land this once was, their knowledge and spirit comes from a deeper source.
Ā So here was a chance to dig a little deeper and find other versions of the truth. Maybe also to discover some of Odessaās sumptuous architecture, of which the hotel receptionist had proudly boasted as he checked me in. Trouble was, even a cursory scan from my 18th floor lookout told me I was a good three or four miles from the historic centre so there would be no chance of nipping out during coffee breaks at my conference. An expedition would be necessary.
Ā I finally stole more than a few moments and headed for the tram stop. It quickly became apparent that the shabby Soviet-era Yunost (Youth) stood in less than splendid isolation, surrounded on three sides by large areas of scrubby woodland. I paid it no heed but, as I was rummaging for a few hryvna for the fare, I started to realise it wasnāt as empty as it had first seemed. As my eyes accustomed I could pick out a shape here and there ā walls, buildings, statuesā¦ or the remains of them. By the time the tram swept by, curiosity had already clutched me and I was off, probing for a weak point in the perimeter fence. I didnāt have to look far before discovering a decrepit gateway through which I could slip.
I picked my way around trying to rebuild some sense into the apparent chaos. It looked like it had been a diverse and integral community, with homes, offices, shops, what looked like a former cinemaā¦ and even a library.
They had probably been built between the ā50s and ā80s but their level of decay suggested they should be much older than this, and that meant just one thing to me. They were of a woefully shoddy Soviet construction, whereby seemingly adamantine concrete can be reduced to flakes and dust within only a generationās wear and tear.
Clearly, though this was no mere functionalist suburb. It had been designed as a place for pleasure ā even, hard as it might seem, a place to delight. There was a band-stand and the remnants of benches encircling it. And scattered around were several fountains from which water would once have sprinkled with no purpose other than to relax or enrapture passers-by.
Although the largest I came across obviously also carried with it a more ideological injunction to embrace the healthy, physical demeanour of the new, superior Soviet citizen, whether at work or play. Like some Ancient Greek marble, the diving careless nude seemed stranded above her rotting plinth.
And therein lay the answer to the puzzle. We were not meant to be in a distant Black Sea-coastal outpost at all. We were in Arcadia.
Russia has always had a thing about ancient Greece and Byzantium, seeing itself as the heir and guardian of those traditions in the East. The Soviet Union, if not explicitly, also assumed these airs, particularly in its monumentalism. What I had stumbled upon was a vast, abandoned component of that once great mythology and machine ā a holiday and sanatorium complex. This was no empty hulk of a former steel mill or power station ā though it had as vital a role to play, by recharging the batteries of the Soviet labouring masses. This was Arkadiya which, between the 1920ās and the sudden collapse of the empire in 1991 had been one of the largest and most desirable places of rest, recuperation and reward for the fatigued stakhanovites and hassled commissars of Stalingrad, Sverdlovsk, Gorki and Magnitogorsk. This was sanatorium city ā a place of elaborate water cures and special diets as well as the more conventional pleasures of sun, sea and sand ā the Odessa Riviera!
Accounts from the 1980s boast of over 20 separate sanatoria here, with attendant residences and various pleasure domes. A large auditorium now stands trashed and forlorn but I can still imagine it being full to the gunnels with happy families looking for a good night out. Perhaps they were guffawing to one of Odessaās saucy comedians, swaying to Leonid Utesovās dance band (pictured), or harmonising with one of the sentimental shansons of the cityās ānational treasureā crooner and silver screen idol Mark Bernes. Odessan song seemed to be accorded a special place in Soviet life similar to that of Canzone Napoletana in Italy. Its style is lush and full of longing and melancholy, with just a hint of false romanticism for the free-spirited criminality of the dock-side, as well as a strong Yiddish influence, reflecting the fact that Jews once made up over a third of the population.
But I am jolted suddenly out my reverie. Scanning the wreckage of a housing block across from the theatre, I do a double-take. Is it? Can it be? No, surely not. But yes, it really is a washing line full of someoneās drying smalls. With a shudder it dawns upon me that along with the Soviet ghosts, Arkadiya now has a new clientele ā part of Odessaās small army of homeless and destitute people.
This is a reminder that since 1991, and probably long before, Odessa has been the home of many people, particularly orphans and youngsters, who have been abandoned to their own fate. Hard drug use and HIV reached catastrophic levels during the chaotic years after the collapse of the USSR and the founding of Ukraine and, whilst things are still awful today, there does at least now seem to be will and a system for helping these poor souls. I left quickly, not wishing to impose myself as a gawping intruder into their world.
Ā Just over the wall from here, however, there is another intruder which will impose itself soon enough. āBiznesmenā have not been slow to recognise the availability of prime real estate with sea views and dubious tenure. A new Arkadiya is rising (pictured). Brasher and more charmless than their predecessors, a string of seafront developments are now springing up to tempt the cash-rich winners of the all-or-nothing game which has been Ukraineās 23 years of independence.
I make a discrete but hasty exit in the direction of Boulevard of the Proletariat ā the avenue which links this erstwhile workersā paradise with the Odessaās city centre. Only now itās returned to its pre-Revolutionary title of Frantsuzsky Bulvar (French Boulevard).
Ā Before I get there however I tumble unsuspectingly into another world entirely. French Boulevard alerts me to the fact that Odessa has long been keen to associate itself with other countries and cultures. After all, it was founded in 1794 by Catherine the Great, and her consort Grigoriy Potemkin, to be Russiaās window on world and it had no compunction in inviting influential foreigners to make their mark. A refugee from the French Revolution, Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septimanie de Vignerot du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, became the city governor and imposed a decidedly gallic flavour upon its rapid expansion.
Ā If I had known this at the time I would not have been quite so surprised to have stumbled through the undergrowth to find a ruin which might easily have been transported from the Palace of Versailles.
This turned out to be The Orangery, a now battered remnant of what had once been some of the most desirable real estate in the whole of Tsarist Russia. Long before biznesmen or commissars, Odessa had been the place where the Russian aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie came to get away from it all. They built themselves small summer palaces and dubbed them ādachasā ā something I had always tended to associate more with a suburban shed and a cucumber patch. By the way Iām sure youāre wondering about the intrusive yellow pipe. It could conceivably be a recreational gymnastics bar for sanatorium residents, but, Iāll wager itās more likely to be for gas supply. Itās the way they do things around here.
Ā Iām very grateful to Sergey Kotelko for subsequently explaining some of the history of French Boulevard, as well as its current plight. He is one of a small handful of local people who cherish Odessaās early history and are trying to preserve it before itās all swept away. You can find out more about what heās been doing and the scale of his task here and here, along with some ravishing pictures of Odessan architecture.
Ā One of the dachas had been built by the French Baron Jean Rainaud, who played host many times to the father of Russian literature Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. Pushkin was a passionate man and wouldnāt have been a Romantic poet worth his salt if he hadnāt been having an affair of the heart with someone he shouldnāt have. As if he needed an extra challenge, Pushkin just happened to choose Lise the wife of the serving governor of Odessa, national hero and vanquisher of Bonaparte, Prince Vorotsov. Worse, he didnāt seem to mind who in Odessa found out about it, and even composed some pretty suggestive verses inspired by his tristes with Lise in a hidden cove next to the dacha:
Ā Loveās refuge is ever filled
With a coolness, murky and damp.
There the waves, unabashed,
Never silence their prolonged roar.
Ā The Orangery itself was part of a neighbouring estate built by Grigoriy Marazli, prominent scion of Odessaās Greek community and a popular mayor and philanthropist of the late 19th century. He is reputed to have imported the whole of its 40 metre metal framework from the United States. After his death, ownership passed to the auspiciously-named Pyotr Tolstoy, who died in mysterious circumstances during the chaos following the Revolution of October 1917. It was later absorbed into the giant Chkalov workersā sanatorium, but now its future ā or even survival - must be very uncertain, and its days numbered ā unless some oligarch, imagining himself to be a latter day Pushkin, decides to restore it.
Ā I decided to push on towards the city centre, leaving behind Arkadiya, but not before pondering what, if anything, it all meant. Itās easy, I guess, to get all maudlin and think that for this part of Odessa itās been all downhill since the 1800s. From aristocratic elegance, to gerry-built workersā playground and now transmogrifying into a brash symbol of the Ukrainian criminal crony capitalism, that is even now being fought over by masked men in Kyivās Independence Square. But who are we to say that those Tsarist dachas and palaces were any less ostentatiously tacky or egocentric than todayās edifices? Or, in a Russia where serfdom/slavery was not abolished until 1861, that the money used to build them was any less ill-gotten than the oligarch bling? Nor should we belittle the experiences of the toiling millions who found a few weeks of rest and pleasure in Arkadiya, whatever the merits of the system that built it. At the same time, millions were doing likewise in Britain ā including me, perched on the knee of my coal-mining grandfather as he sank another pint of ale and coughed up coal dust from his raddled lungs, overlooking an ocean of less-than-elegant caravans and the chilly North Sea.
Pushing on I pass a strange concrete structure. Itās the entrance to a deep dark echoing well. The debris around it suggests that it almost certainly is, or has been, occupied by homeless people. I wince and move on. Emerging from the woodland and ruins Iām into a different place entirely, but perhaps more typical of life for the majority of Odessans. Firstly a scruffy, rough-and-tumble but rather friendly and democratic little resort. Two guys, perhaps trying to snooze off last nightās vodka, are sprawled across my path. They overlook the beach - and all of human life is there.
Ā Girls totter along on heels which always seems a centimetre higher in Ukraine than anywhere else. Their beefy, thickset paramours look incongruous trailing behind them the tiny toy dogs that seem to be this seasonās fashion accessory.
Ā Around the corner and there looms the garish pink rococo wedding cake which is Chernomorets Stadium, home of FC Odessa. I somehow think Pushkin would have approved of the colour scheme.
Thereās a match on too, so bunches of men and whole families are scattered around the grass making impromptu picnics of beer and sausage, and posing for snaps on the balcony overlooking Odessaās still sprawling and vibrant port complex.
The walk was drawing to a close. Yet thereās much Iād still like to say and write about Odessa. The exotic jumble of different architectural styles which evoke Odessaās short but tumultuous history, and the jostling of so many cultures cheek by jowl. Iād like to look more into the way extremes of poverty and wealth seemed to live side by side. For example, across French Boulevard from Marazliās dacha had stood the cityās principal manufacturer of champagne, but beyond that lay Odessa largest and most benighted slum, before it was unceremoniously swept away. Iād like to evoke the smells and noises which must have characterised Odessa in its buccaneering heyday when it supplied much of Europe with Ukrainian wheat and beef. Peasants would converge on the city driving huge herds of cattle from the vast rural interior, before slaughtering and butchering them en-masse close to the quayside. It wasnāt all elegance and charm! Thereās also a story to be told of the spectres, past and present, who occupy the miles and miles of catacombs which riddle the soft limestone beneath Odessa.
Ā Iād like also to tease out more about Odessaās lofty aloofness from the rest of the country which, even now is being played out; it being said that the city regards the current Ukrainian insurgency with bemused insouciance. But more than anything else I want to get under the skin of the trope that Odessa has always been a city of tolerance and creative hybridity which, given that the city erupted in a major pogrom at least every generation through the 19th centurey, can only be partly true.Ā And, crucially, the almost forgotten invasion and occupation of Odessa by the army of Romania in 1941, which led to the disappearance of over 200,000 Jewish people, with hardly any assistance from the Waffen SS. To all of this I must return, at another time, in another place.
I drifted out of Shevchenko Park and past a Jugendstil masterpiece which, in another city would have a preservation order upon it, but here has vegetation clinging to its faƧade and is up for sale. I was making for the dockside now and, block by block, there were increasing signs of restoration, gentrification or new-build. However, Odessa still had one more surprise for me.
Riven as the landscape is by deep ravines running down to the sea, Odessa lies on two levels. This means ā a little like in Edinburgh ā that you can be walking along an apparently normal street and suddenly find yourself looking down on another layer of street life twenty metres below. And thus ā in the very heart of the city - I discovered Devolanivs'kyi Descent ā quite easily the most battered and abused piece of inner-urban real estate Iāve seen. Itās hard to imagine how idiosyncratic Devolanivs'kyi Descent actually is, because on all sides it is surrounded by the typical, bustling infrastructure of a modern city. Yet this street is so extravagantly and comprehensively abandoned that it feels like the set from a dystopian movie shoot.
I get down to street level ā literally ā and the very surface is bubbling and erupting like acne. Itās as if the road has taken on sentient form and is slowly morphing and metamorphosing into a Ballardian nightmare, or some phantasm from a David Cronenberg film.
Iām jolted out of such musing by the crash of rocks around me. Iām being stoned by a bunch of punks on the roof of one of the ruins. This is probably their home and they assume Iām here with malign intent. I try to explain otherwise but my Russianās not good enough. Retreat seems judicious.
Ā Subsequently Iāve tried finding out more about Devolanivs'kyi Descent from my various Odessan contacts. They say nothing ā or pretend I hadnāt asked the question ā as if Iād drawn attention to a scar or blemish on their face. I suspect the backstory is no more mysterious or romantic that a grimy real estate scam. Someone is waiting for property prices to reach the level where it will be profitable to clear the lot and erect another swathe of hideous apartments. I just hope someone takes care of the punks.
Ā Not 500 meters from the end of Devolanivs'kyi Descent and I am in the one place in Odessa which almost anyone would recognise ā the foot of the āPotemkinā stairs.
As I start my ascent, a couple with a pushchair are coming down. Fortunately their grip on the handlebars is secure and thereāll be no repeat of cinematic history today.
The steps are steep. Itās been a long walk and Iām more tired than I thought. I turn and catch, out of the corner of my eye, a collection of prone figures sprawled across the steps. Have Eisensteinās white-tunicked Tsarist guards been spreading mayhem again?
Ā No, for all of its many and fearful challenges, Odessa is a place rather more relaxed than in the past, with the world and with itself.
Ā Whooossshhh! Another blast of scalding air hit the ceiling and rebounded onto the top of my head. āThatās it. Canāt take anymoreā, said the young guys as they scampered out of the sauna in pain. That just left me, and him - the man commanding the water bucket and ladle. āYou want more Mister!ā I smiled weakly, as he raised the temperature another infernal notch, before adding aromatic oil to the stove and taking an enormous lungful of air.
āYouāre new here arenāt you?ā āYesā he said, āValery, Iām Russianā. So here I was in my Yorkshire home town with my very own banyan. We hit it off quickly, Valery and me. He was chatty and Iām interested in most things Russian.
I finally decided I liked him well enough to confide I was planning a trip to Russia in the coming week. āOh, tell me, where you going?ā āWell itās a very strange and unusual place. Very few Russians have even been there. Itās called Norilskā.
He beamed. āNorilsk! I know it well ā my brother lives there! Iāll give you his address ā heāll take good care of you.ā
Ā And he was right. Norilsk is right off the travel agenda of the English ā and most everyone else too. Itās rather an acquired taste for people with unusual predilections ā and special permission. Not only did I need a visa but also the written approval of the Interior Ministry, even to board a plane in Moscow and take the 4 hour flight over the Ural Mountains to north-central Siberia.
Ā Norilsk really shouldnāt be there at all. Itās the most northerly city of over 100,000 people in the world ā and, being built on the tundra permafrost, also the coldest. By rights, no-one beyond indigenous hunter-gathers or temporary workers, should be expected to live in such a place. But such niceties were never observed in the Soviet Unionās quest to conquer nature ā and Putinās Russia is of a similar mind.
Ā Norilsk is a city of superlatives ā but most of them not the kind of thing a patriotic Mayor would be keen to plug you with. Yes, it produces a quarter of the worldās Nickel as well as vast amounts of cadmium, copper and palladium, and offers the 4th highest wages in Russia to those who mine it. It has to because, as a consequence of Norilsk being amongst the 10 most polluted places on earth, its men have the highest incidence of lung cancer in the world. It is also the birthplace of one of the jailed leaders of Pussy RiotĀ Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.
Norilsk has a dark heart too. It was founded in the 1930s by Stalin as the centrepiece of his forced labour Gulag network. In its 21 years as a work camp over 400,000 mainly political prisoners passed through ā and over 17,000 died of intense cold, starvation and beatings and were buried in the vast cemetery overlooking the city. It was here I decided to start my walk around Norilsk. The temperature was minus 25ā°C, and locals told me I was lucky to be there in such unseasonably mild weather.
The Norilsk Golgotha cemetary is now a field of memorials raised variously in honour of Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Jews and others who were worked to death in the āCorrective Labour Campā. There is also recognition of a heroic and entirely peaceful uprising of 69 days by the inmates in 1953, which took place between the death of Stalin and the denouncing of Lavrentiy Beria.
Actually itās one of precious few places where Russia has officially acknowledged the terror it unleashed upon its own and many other peoples. Sadly, itās still a message many Russians cannot stomach and the memorials have suffered several desecrations in recent years.
From the Golgotha hill you get a pretty clear idea of what Norilsk is all about. A vast sprawl of city apartments intermixed with industrial wasteland with a permanent pall of yellowish smog about it. Itās now half the size it was when the Soviet Union fell, as even the high wages canāt induce people to come and settle for long, and many ethnic Russians have returned to the āmainlandā (Norilsk is considered an island surrounded not by sea but by ice). On the other hand, itās said that when its āclosed cityā status was rescinded in 1991, the city council persuaded Moscow to re-impose it ten years later, because it was uncomfortable with the large numbers of impoverished migrants who were arriving from central Asia and the Caucasus in search of a better life!
Even so, my next destination confirms that this Arctic metropolis is a place of great ethnic diversity. Norilsk has the northernmost mosque in the world and the estimates are that between a third and half of the population are at least nominally of Muslim faith. The mosqueās caretaker Mukum Sidikov made an apparently perverse, but very Norilsk, sort of choice in his life. His Uzbek grandfather had worked up here in the Soviet times but headed back south when his homeland gained independence. But his grandson Mukum retraced those steps in search of a paypacket he could only dream of in Uzbekistan. Heās not so sure it was a good decision because he now seems rather despondent about the chronic illness and tiredness which, he says, prevents most of Norilskās Muslims keeping the faith.
Thereās a pretty clear demarcation within the labour market of Norilsk, particularly since restrictions have been placed on unskilled labour migration. Many of the skilled workers in the vast Norilsk Nickel smelting plant, which I visited, are likely to be Ukrainians with maybe some Moldovans and Kazakhs. Meanwhile Azerbaijanis run much of the commerce and service economy, with Uzbeks cornering the taxis trade.
The rivers of molten nickel were awe-inspiring, and the heat was welcome, but pretty soon I was itching to get out onto the streets and get a feel for the ordinary life of Norilsk. It may share a latitude with northern Alaska and Greenland, but the first thing you notice is that this place was built with some attitude and a sense of permanence. The monumental apartment blocks at the head of Lenin Prospekt could easily have graced a boulevard in St Petersburg
It also still oozes the pride of the pride of the pioneers who first came of their own free will to turn this from a prison camp into a regular city and who laughed equally in the face of raw nature and yankee capitalism. Everywhere are symbols of Khrushchev-era confidence in the onward march and inevitable triumph of novy sovetsky chelovek, the New Soviet Man.
Murals and slogans, which in Moscow have long since been erased or replaced by Macdonalds or LāOreal, are still retained in Norilsk. Itās as if, in this climate of unremitting hardship, the people are thought to be still be more likely to get out of bed in a morning stirred by thoughts of construction, solidarity and international fraternity than a desire to consume global brands and elite club goods. And whoās to say theyāre wrong?
Ā Heading into a residential district, itās clear the city officials have been out with pots of the brightest paint they can find. In a city where the sun never rises for 6 weeks, and for much of the rest of the year is blotted out by pollution, itās a fairly obvious way of trying keep up peopleās spirits.
But thereās no hiding the fact that a lot of the apartment blocks are now empty and that no-one expects them ever to be lived in again. Norilsk is in inexorable decline.
This may seem ironic, as thereās no doubt Vladimir Vladimirovich and his oligarch-ocracy lust after Norilskās mineral riches even more than their Soviet predecessors did. Production keeps rising and new reserves are still being uncovered. Itās just that having a hulking great dinosaur of a city on the 69th parallel is not the way to do it these days. The way of the future is to locate the workforce in much friendlier climes along with their families, and simply fly them in to temporary camps in the North to do their shifts. But āhold onā you say.Ā What about Global Warming and the melting Polar Ice Cap? Arenāt things going to start getting a bit easier for tundra-dwellers in the future? Funnily enough, no ā at least not for Norilsk.Ā Melting of the permafrost upon which the city is built will result in one thing ā Norilsk, like Venice, is starting to sink. I walked past abandoned apartment blocks that have begun to keel over, quite alarmingly. They had been stripped and cannibalised by residents of adjacent blocks, making them seem like the skeletons of once-great whales on a beach.
Ā The last salmon pink tinges of Polar half-light were colouring the smutty snow. It was time to leave. I probably wonāt be asked back. It would have been a lovely bookend to the visit to have ended up in a sweaty Norilsk banyan with a bottle of vodka and Valeryās brother. In the end I had to settle for the bottle.
But no amount of vodka could have explained the very last thing I saw on the streets of Norilsk that night. An ancient whiskered man approached me, shouting and gesticulating. Then he started to strip off his clothes and a crowd quickly gathered. Still mouthing oaths couched in religious mysticism and down to his underpants, he somehow managed to find two buckets full of water, which he proceeded to douse himself with. This I told myself , in a temperature now pushing minus 30, could be nothing less than my first encounter with a yurodivy ā the classical āholy foolā straight from the pages of Dostoevsky or Gorky. Norilsk is Russian to the core.
Making, Taking and Losing Public Space in Kaliningrad
What is public space? Is it just something that was there before us and will still be there after we've left? Or is it a more dynamic thing, that can come and go and that we have to work at if we want to retain?
Ā In western Europe we are getting a little less complacent about who can do what where, and who can monitor and regulate it, but essentially we take our public space for granted. Itās only when you move out of this bubble you appreciate for others the stakes are rather higher. Three separate experiences in the Russian city of Kaliningrad brought this home to me recently.
After all, itās not every day of the week that you find yourself in a newly created public space that used to be the private home of a KGB censor!
Kvartira is an Aladdinās Cave in a most unexpected place. Just off the main Prospekt Mira, down the residential Koloskova Street you pass the usual stolid rows of soviet 5-storey Kruschevka blocks and come to a corner with a difference. Thereās brightly coloured furniture outside, a ping-pong table and along a whole wall a mural celebrating sociability. Kids are running around and shouting in an area which is otherwise silent. Step inside and you find a normal Russian apartment which has been transformed into something else. Every wall is covered in shelves of books, DVDs, CDs of vinyl LPs, except the bits that are devoted to paintings, posters and fascinating ornaments. And in the midst are invitingly comfy sofas and some very high specification hi-fi and film projection equipment. It might seem to you this was the private pad of the ultimate cosmopolitan sophisticate. Well cosmopolitan it certainly is, but one thing it aināt is private.
Ā āAnyone can come in here, watch a film, play a disc, borrow a bookā¦ or bring one in.ā says the founder Artem Ryzhkov. āWe get all sorts of people in here, from street kids right through to big-shots. Last week we had Anatoli Chubais (architect of the radical Russian privatization plan of the 1990s). He borrowed a book on Warhol ā though he could probably afford to buy a few Warhol paintings!ā
Ā āMe and my wife and kids used to live here but we moved out to allow the public to take over. Itās a lot of work. Even my Mum helps out at weekends, but itās worth it because this kind of experience just isnāt available in most Russian cities, particularly for youngsters.ā
Ā Artem was born in the flat and knew it had been in his family a few generations, but when he started looking into it in more detail he got a real surprise. All the blocks around had been reserved for nomenklatura: people with high status in the Soviet system such as Baltic Fleet captains, city officials and NKVD spooks. It was an awful shock for Artem when he learned his own granddad had been the chief censor for the city. In these very rooms had been stifled countless creative opportunities and careers, so it now seems like a wonderful irony that Artem and his family have thrown them open to so many new possibilities.
But whilst the place has become the hub for a real mixture of people, he had to work much harder to win over his neighbours. āWhen we opened four years ago I sent all 30 an invitation, but none of them came. Instead we had a visit from the police, who said theyād had a complaint.ā
Ā After that Artem went on a soft offensive. He encouraged his kids and others in the neighbourhood to use the space for games, but he noticed many neighbours simply used it as a toilet for their dogs. āI had the idea of identifying every turd with a little coloured flag according to its depositor: āPoodle, 7 years old, left on Thursdayāā. Very quickly and discreetly the area became much cleaner.
āWeāve now started a small regular gathering outside under the oak trees. Nothing raucous; just a place where people can sing, strum instruments and bring food, but a new thing for this area.ā Again, not a single neighbour took up their invitation. āBut I did notice the curtains started twitching. Before long a few ventured outside, under the pretext of walking their dogs, of course, and gradually a few have joined in. Now thereās only one local resident still to win over. He still calls the police regularly but it feels like weāve finally changed this place.
āLike me theyāre also the descendants of the old communist elite. Itās a stark lesson in how a repressive climate can live on from one generation to the next. Itās like a conspiracy of silence, which weāve finally started to break down with Kvartira.ā
Artem is working at many other levels too (like an international film festival and a city blog) to influence this most singular of cities. And it is the very special history and appearance of Kaliningrad that takes me to the second public space that struck me.Ā Without going into a history lesson, which is better done elsewhere, we should note that the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, cut off from the Motherland and wedged between Poland, Lithuania and the sea, used to be the Prussian city of Kƶnigsberg. It was pulverised by the Royal Air Force and finished off by the Red Army in 1945, who went on to remove every German resident and most traces of 700 years of Teutonic culture. A completely new population drawn from Russia and central Asia were shipped into a newly-built city and told to get on with it as if nothing had happened beforehand. As the USSRās westernmost outpost it was run in a highly secretive and militaristic fashion, but since opening up it has, being a port, slowly started to become one of Russiaās more ethnically diverse cities.
In short, Kaliningrad is a city built in layers of history, often is sharp contrast and jagged separation from each other: a crusadersā outpost, junkersā imperial bastion, birthplace of Kant and refuge of liberal free-thinkers, Nazi icon, city of homo soveticus in its purest form, abandoned dystopia of the 1990s, failed āHong Kong of the Balticā in the 2000s and now a place pregnant with possibility.
Ā Looming over the centre of the city and visible from most parts is the Kaliningrad House of the Soviets. It stands on the former site of Kƶnigsberg Castle, ancestral home of the Hohenzollern dynasty, which was obliterated at the orders of Leonid Brezhnev to make the way for what he intended to be the crowning glory of the new city.
Started in 1960 and never completed or fully occupied the Dom Sovyetov has stood in less than splendid isolation ever since, unloved apparently by most citizens - they call it Monster. Too structurally unsound to be used or developed, and apparently too dangerously full of asbestos and other nasties to be taken down, it just stands there sulking. Although at Putinās instructions it has recently been painted pastel blue to cheer it up!
There are numerous alternative uses suggested, including Artem Ryzhkovās idea of making it a hyper-real museum of Soviet life, complete with appallingly rude shop-keepers and public servants.
Ā However, itās the space around it that caught my eye.Ā I took one look at the vicious guard dogs employed by owners Protostroy and realised I wouldnāt be able to do any uninvited urban exploration in the building itself, but the vast plazas and grounds around were under rather less vigilance. I managed to find a gap in the fence and passed from a very stark concrete square into a completely different world. Ā When originally planned and laid out the grounds would have been impressive ā and deliberately so, with vast concrete piazzas, walkways, balconies and water cascades designed to make the House of Soviets appear atop a giant ziggurat.Ā But at least 30 years of neglect and exclusion have allowed nature to creep, ramble and now sweep back.
Ā Whilst at the very centre of a large city there was little sign of human presence other than a few empty beer cans and hypodermics. The place was returning to wilderness as certainly as might a Mayan temple in the jungles of Yucatan.
Ā It was a lovely contrast to Kvartira. There a place resolutely private and anti-public had been opened up and liberated. Here a place designated as the expression of public will, as appropriated by the state, had been deliberately put out of commission, out of mind and out of existence. And this had not been the seat of just one totalitarian regime but two, with imperial Prussia still lying beneath a metre of reinforced concrete. I think I prefer it this way.
Ā And, finally, to the third public space. Much more conventional in many ways because the triangle of land where Theatre Street meets Lenin Prospect was designed and built to be public, and continues to play the part, complete with working fountains, manicured gardens and triumphal statue on substantial plinth. It was meant to be the centre piece of our visit to Kaliningrad during the Corners Xpedition of east-central Europe: the place for which the city authorities had granted permission to a group of international artists and performers to make a 60-minute intervention on 28 August 2012.
Iāve watched and participated in previous such manifestations in the Balkans (see earlier blog) but there was no doubt that with this one being in Russia (and the recent furore around the trial of Pussy Riot) there was an extra frisson of anticipation. With no advance public announcement there was no crowd of Kaliningraders awaiting the intervention. It just started. A woman mounted the plinth and was joined by another. They embraced and then began to kiss. People stopped what they were doing and started to look. It went on and on. It was the work of British-Portuguese artist Rita Marcalo. Whilst she didnāt publicise the fact, it was meant as a comment upon the recent trend in several Russian cities to outlaw public displays of homosexuality.
Ā Meanwhile a second artist, Katarzyna Pastuszak from Poland, also climbed the podium and left red carnations strewn around the base of the statue. She then painted her feet red and walked down the steps and across to the fountain. She filled a bucket with water and attempted to clean away her red footprints. The piece became increasingly manic until she and much of the plinth were saturated.
Ā Other artists were doing more discrete things in less visible parts of the square, but it was clearly these two pieces which triggered what happened next. A police car arrived and the officer walked across the square, responding presumably to a public complaint. Our hosts from the Centre for Contemporary Art spoke to and evidently mollified him, as he didnāt try to intervene or stop what was going on. After an hour, the performances ended, people cleaned up and were gone.
Ā It raised some difficult questions though. The complaint to the police, apparently, had been less about the specific content of the interventions and more about the location, ie not at the base of any old statue but of a representation of Mother Russia. This had been taken as disrespectful to the Russian people as a whole, and in this isolated exclave and birthplace of Vladimir Putinās wife, national sentiment is a touchy subject.
Ā It raises questions of what can and cannot be done in public space, but also what should and shouldnāt. Just how much history or knowledge of local iconography should an artist or activist know before intervening, and how much notice they should take? Is the individualās freedom to self-expression balanced by the onlookerās expectation to be spared offence? Could it pave the way for further such interventions in other parts of Kaliningrad or might it make the authorities even meaner with permissions in the future?
Ā Three very different types of public space and very different ways of using them, taking place within 24 hours and 500 metres of each other in a way that probably couldnāt be repeated in this way anywhere else Europe. Thatās Kaliningrad.
Do walls store secrets and memories even though their owners are long gone and forgotten? If they do then in Lviv they must almost be the mortar that holds the stones together. That this Ukrainian city exudes meaning from every manhole cover and window frame is, for me, beyond question. The place has taken the brunt of many of Europeās most significant and traumatic upheavals of the last few centuries. It has at least 8 different names, testament to the variety of people who have either dominated it or called it home.Ā Thatās no particular surprise you might say, as few cities in central Europe have been spared occupation by conquering armies and imperial masters. But Lvivās experience, it seems to me, is of a different order entirely. Ā It has, after all undergone the equivalent of a demographic and cultural blood transfusion.
We know Lviv today as a city in the west of an independent Ukraine, but much of its recent, suburban, architecture tells us it was indubitably once part of the Soviet Union, whilst in the inner city Polish baroque jostles with Austrian Art Nouveau reflecting earlier rulers. Streets off the main square are named āArmenianā and āSerbianā in recognition of past communities. For most of its history (until 1941) Lviv (or LwĆ³w) was mainly a city of Poles and Jews, with Ukrainians only a small minority.Ā The great majority of the Jewish population was murdered shortly after the Nazi invasion and then the Poles were either killed or hounded out by Ukrainian nationalists in Europeās first large scale experiment in ethnic cleansing, towards the end of the War and in the early years of the āpeaceā that followed.
Ā Now, however, the Ukrainians share Lviv with few others than a growing trickle of tourists, and it has now become the epicentre of a very purist form of ethnic Ukrainian nationalism, inspired in opposition to the perceived āRussificationā of the state government in distant Kyiv.
I thought about all this as I wandered around the Pidzamche district of Lviv. Itās an old quarter quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks which separate it from the up-market city centre. Pre-World War II it was a lower class area of houses, with workshops and small factories scattered in and amongst, populated mainly by Jews. When the SS arrived they transformed it into a ghetto where the population eked out a squalid living until they were transported to death camps. It was said the Germans, and their Ukrainian police collaborators, took a particular sadistic pleasure in putting the ghetto beside the railway as the regular clang of locomotive bells reminded the Jews that the next train might be the one that took them to their death.
After, the war the Soviets designated it an industrial zone and dropped several large hulking factories onto the tight knit street pattern but, fortunately, I found this hasnāt ruined its integrity or intimacy. I spent several hours snooping in and out of courtyards and alleyways and was charmed and intrigued. These had been built as workersā housing and still were, yet they had been built with style and affection, most of them adorned with Sezession plaster, ironwork and tiling. The original factories too were more than utilitarian, with decorative flourishes and caprices including one like a Ruritanian castle.
Ā As I walked it brought to mind a Polish language film I saw earlier this year. āIn Darknessā tells the story of the last days of the Lviv ghetto, and centres on the true story of a small number of Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust by spending two years living in the sewers. They were rescued by a Polish-speaking sewerman Leopold Socha who originally saw them as a source of income who he could exploit until their cash ran out, at which point he would turn them into the Ukrainian SS. But he found himself sympathising with them to the extent that he eventually risked the life of he and his family to protect them until salvation arrived.
Somehow I felt reassured that streets that had once witnessed such terror could now exude domestic normality with kids kicking balls against walls and old women trudging from church to shop to home.Ā But even more reassuring was the knowledge that some people are determined to ensure that the lessons of the past are neither ignored nor forgotten. A group of local Ukrainian historians and artists, supported by a Swedish university have just begun a long-term process of rediscovery, uncovering the layers of history that had been wilfully buried and then haplessly neglected. This project Searching for Home in Postwar Lviv: The Experience of Pidzamche, 1944-1960will be a vital step to establishing some objectivity at a time in Ukraine when history is in danger of being abused for political ends.
Ā Lvivās city centre projects some rather different messages. Superficially it could be Salzburg or Wurzburg with all the chocolate box prettiness and order of classic mitteleuropa. Indeed the general lack of the usual global brand names amongst the cityās shopping and dining offer makes Lviv appear more distinctive and authentic than most places. It feels relaxed and urbane and wholly unproblematic. Or so it seemed, for while Lviv may not have a Starbucks, it does have its own rather unique hospitality chain run by local entrepreneur Andriy Khudo and his company !FEST, which goes to the heart of my concerns about the soul of this city.
His first outlet āAt the Golden Roseā stands next to the large hole in the ground where once stood the cityās central synagogue. Its style is to present a variety of Jewish stereotypes of varying degrees of offensiveness, loosely draped over an appeal to Lvivās Jewish heritage.Ā Guests can dress up as Hassidic elders, haggle over the bill and other stunts. Khudo thinks this is funny and so do many locals too as the place is very popular. Meanwhile, there is still no officially-sponsored museum. The Simon Wiesenthal Centerās complaint about the restaurant has fallen on deaf ears. Meanwhile there is no officially-sponsored museum to the cityās Jewish heritage.
Ā So popular has this formula for rewriting history proved that Khudo has opened a second restaurant, based upon Ukrainian nationalism. Ā I ducked off the main square, down a dark corridor, and knocked on a wooden door. It was opened by a man brandishing a World War II vintage machine gun. He looked menacing ā but became very shy when I tried to take his picture. My guide whispered the password āGlory to Ukraineā and we were in, descending into what is a reconstruction of a partisan bunker, because this is Restaurant Kryivka or āHideawayā. Itās initially all rather exciting and slightly conspiratorial as your eyes accustom to the darkness and you see youāre surrounded by weapons, banners, uniforms and pictures of rugged bearded men, ready for action.
Ā First impressions are that this is just an innocent patriotic tribute to brave partisans who sacrificed all they had to defend their land and loved ones from brutal invaders. Somewhere between the French resistance and the Viet Cong with a hint of Dadās Army thrown in. OK, you admit, probably not all of these guys were angels, but then you canāt make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and the omelette in question was the creation of a first ever national homeland for Ukrainian speakers. Whatās wrong with commemorating that with an eatery, you might ask? Nothing, unless, that is, youāve read some (objective) history. This will tell you that the faces in the pictures are from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which didnāt simply fight against invading armies, but also collaborated with them and carried out the dirtiest work of the Waffen SSās Final Solution. They also settled scores with hundreds of thousands of Polish speaking peasants and citizens in an appalling orgy of terror, murder and deportation that some have compared to Rwanda.
Of course some fought honourably to defend Ukrainian speaking civilians from equally appalling treatment by Germans and The Red Army but this cannot excuse the bloodbath they unleashed on neighbours and fellow citizens. Some might plead this was just a mindless spasm triggered by extraordinarily difficult times. For sure the war was a far more complex affair than in the West, where a simple binary calculation made clear who was friend or foe whereas, in the East, allies and benefactors transformed into enemies and torturers with alarming alacrity to an extent that the normal rules of war soon became meaningless.
But the leaders of the UPA had been preparing for this moment over a long time and when conditions arose, they were programmed to commit genocide and mass deportation as a justifiable means to an ethnic Ukrainian homeland. Freedom and identity were indistinguishable from racial purity and violence was the only means to achieve them.
Of course they didnāt achieve their aim immediately as Ukraine was absorbed for 46 years as a soviet socialist republic. Independence was finally achieved by peaceful means when the USSR dissolved, and Ukraine belatedly began the process of nation- building. Nations we know need myths and they need heroes, and perhaps we can judge a people by the examples they choose. French national pride extols the Revolution and, in extolling the ideas of liberty egality and fraternity that it gave birth to, we also tend to gloss over the Terror from which it sprung.
Perhaps this is the argument put by the people who were behind the construction of the place I visited next after the restaurants. On a hilltop near the St George Cathedral stands a huge monument ā probably the largest in the city. You assume it must be another former Soviet monstrosity but no. It was only erected in 2007 and is the memorial to Stepan Bandera, founder and ideologue of the UPA. Ukrainians in the process of building a national identity are seeking heroes and Banderaās star has risen rapidly to the extent that in 2010 he was declared a national hero in what amounts to a secular beatification. What shocked and surprised me was that it was done by Viktor Yushchenko as almost the final act of his Presidency. Yushchenko is seen in the West as the leader of the Orange Revolution, a victim of Russian dirty tricks and generally a good guy, so why would he uplift a grisly fascist mass murderer to such exalted status? Two years on and President Yanukovitch, whoās portrayed in the West as a shady Soviet throwback and Putin stooge, decided to rescind the hero status. So whoās the good guy here?
Ā Sad to say the memorial still stands, loud and proud (as in several other western Ukrainian cities) at the head of Bandera Boulevard, and had fresh flowers around it when I was there. Itās likely to stay there too, along with the restaurants, because the city of Lviv is controlled by the Svoboda (Freedom) Party, which shares many of its ideological roots with Bandera, but disguises them with a slick marketing facade. But, whatever we may think of Ukrainian internal power politics, it seems to me that that if the Ukrainian nation cannot come up with a better national hero than Stepan Bandera then it has serious problems going forward.
And Lviv too should be asking itself which of its citizens should best represent its image both at home and abroad. Iād suggest it dispatches Banderaās monument to the same place the old Soviet statues were dumped and erects some others to truly heroic Lvivians. Imagine what a gesture of humanity and maturity it would be if this Ukrainian city celebrated a Pole who saved Jews from murderers with a monument to Leopold Socha. Itās probably not going to happen ā so maybe instead they should do away with the idea of monuments altogether. Whilst in Lviv, I had the chance to meet lots of inspiring people who donāt subscribe to the prevailing mood, particularly in the artistic community. Clustered around the Dzyga Art Association and the Centre for Cultural Management are people who hold more progressive and humanistic visions of what this city might become. Letās hope one day theyāll prevail.
The pen is mightier than the sword, weāre told, but what about the battle between the gear stick and the paint brush?
āSo you say in England you have streets with three lanes of traffic? Here we have streets with seven, and weāre going to cross one now.ā "Heās exaggerating", I thought as Salvador Ramirez Medina led me though the CoyoacĆ”n district of Mexico City. āSo how are we going to get over it Salvador? Fly?ā āNo, Iāve made arrangements, youāll seeā.
We arrived and, sure enough, he was right. Seven lines of growling, fuming, impatient traffic, aching to roar into the main highway but tamed and restrained, for a minute at least, by a thin white zebra crossing, which pedestrians gratefully scuttled across.
Ā āUp to last year there were no facilities at all for pedestrians in this area ā you risked your life everyday just to go to the shops. Of course people had been pleading with the city to do something about it, but nothing ever happened. So we decided to take matters into our own hands. One early morning I went out there and painted the zebra crossing myselfā.
āNo way?ā I said, āAnd how did the drivers treat it next day?ā āThey stopped and, as you see, itās become a habit.ā āAny problems?ā I asked. āWell, because we could only afford cheap paint, it very quickly wore out. But before I had chance to get out there and repaint it, the City came along and did it for me. Theyāve adopted it as their own now.ā
I call that a result.
Salvador is an activist in the Colectivo Camina Haz Ciudad (Walk Your City) group. Subversive Urbanism recently visited and took some walks around Mexico City with Salvador, and others like him, who are campaigning for ordinary people and public space in this manic megalopolis. Hereās what I found.
With a metropolitan population of over 20 million and rising, Mexico City is the second or third greatest concentration of we humans on this planet. And because the Aztecs originally chose to site their capital in the bowl of a volcanic crater, the space available for all of them is limited and reaching saturation point. People are now building in ever more tenuous locations up the precipitous rims of the cone and, to all intents and purposes, Mexico City is full. The rules of supply and demand say that land is at an absolute premium, which means people will go to all kinds of lengths to acquire and protect both private and public space. Itās often far from pretty but it is endlessly ingenious and fascinating.
Ā My first impression of Mexico City is that someone said to Donald Trump and his friends, āHey Don, imagine a place where you can do what the f*** you like with no hassle from pinko bureaucrats and human rights busy-bodies? Itās all yours, go for it!ā A ride along the (inappropriately named) Avenue de los Insurgentes reveals urban neo-liberalism red in tooth and claw ā where it seems money talks and everyone else listens. I shouldnāt really be surprised to find all this going on in Uncle Samās backyard but itās always still a shock to be in place where power and privilege seems so unencumbered and where the devil takes the hindmost.
Itās a city of sharp inequalities and segregation. As Mexico City has grown itās fuelled the emergence of an expanded upper class, and these ābeautiful peopleā have decided they no longer wish to live at close quarters with the mass of common Chilangos as their forebears would have done. So they now have the chance to escape to mushrooming new citadels on the edge of town (such as Santa Fe) where they can cruise between gated communities and air-conditioned malls untroubled by unpleasant sights or thoughts.
Inconveniently, however, the beautiful people found they still needed to take their gas-guzzlers into the city for the tiresome business of consolidating and expanding their wealth, but Santa Fe only had ordinary roads. So the office of the Mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, had the bright idea of building the Supervia Poniente, a raised concrete highway which would bulldoze its way through two public parks, a protected nature reserve and acres of ālittle peopleā housing in the Magdalena Contreras district. I know much of the rest of the world has long since decided elevated expressways are expensive, dysfunctional and anachronistic, but why allow reality to spoil a sexy project that will hopefully deliver the Mayor a lot of influential new friends? The aspirational middle class locals too have come to see the car as the ultimate status symbol, so Mexico City has become clogged by traffic, and its infernal fumes, but the political system has little incentive to improve it.
Ā Fortunately a group of people have stood up against Ebrardās folly. Indeed such has been the outrage that his arrogant plans have elicited that the many formerly small and isolated groups concerned with public space and ecology in Mexico, have been united and emboldened into forming the Frente Amplio Contra la SupervĆa Poniente de Cuota en Defensa del Medio Ambiente (Broad Front Against the Western Superhighway and in Defense of the Environment). At this very moment a large building overlooking the road construction site has been occupied by artists who are staging a high-profile exhibition Flesh and Concrete, as if to shame the authorities. Although it does look like Ebrard will get his way and build the Supervia, it may well prove a final straw for many people and create a critical mass of public opinion that says āenough is enoughā.
Ā Salvador (pictured) told me about the many sub-strands of public activism which have been feeding into this growing river of protest over recent years. At the forefront has been the cycling movement which is now large and vocal. So large indeed, that Mayor Ebrard realised he couldnāt ignore them and should try instead to incorporate and passify them. Learning from the successful Ciclovia movement in Colombia, he announced a car-free Sunday in the downtown which has become enormously popular. But according to Salvador he has used this as a smoke screen to obscure the fact that most of the money he promised to spend on making the city safe for cycling - throughout week - is still being spent on motor car infrastructure.
Ā So the group has taken matters (and pots of paint) into their own hands becoming guerrilla street painters of new cycle lanes. This isnāt the first time the paint pots have been out though. In a city where road-builders routinely ignore the fact that anyone other than drivers might wish to move around, thereās been a long and successful tradition of guerrilla pedestrianism too, or as they call it in Mexico City, Wikibanqueta.
Ā The original motivation for their action pre-dates supervia and arose from the scandal of Santa Fe. Each day, large number of poor people were traveling to this ācity within a cityā to work as cleaners and gardeners for the offices and condominiums. But because no-one thought to include sidewalks or footbridges when the transport infrastructure was put in, they were daily risking their lives to get to their places of work. Tragically several have been killed by traffic.
Salvador told me how his group will arrive at a typical road which lacks only sidewalk or safe space for pedestrians, and paint in green lines and symbols to designate where cars may not go. Remarkably, it works as this YouTube video shows.
Ā Ciudad Mexico is a city larger than most nation states and, in the context of that, these actions could be dismissed as pin-pricks, but maybe the tide is beginning to turn. If Chilangos come to realise that they really are āall in this togetherā and that even the wealthiest cannot insulate themselves from a toxic environment, then a movement back towards a shared citizenship may be possible.
A transcendental alternative to Balkan reality: Bogdan BogdanoviÄ
You know how, occasionally, you idly click onto a website or a blog and the images seem to jump out and burn themselves into your subconscious? That happened to me last year with a blog called Crack Two which had lovingly gathered images of ā25 Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments that look like they're from the Futureā
Ā Thereās only one thing wrong with the Crack Two blog. In my humble opinion it doesnāt portray the very best monument of all. I had the chance to visit Number 26 last week and Iām going to use this blog to celebrate it - the Partisan Memorial, designed by Bogdan BogdanoviÄ in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Ā Of course itās not entirely ignored and Iām not claiming to have rediscovered it or anything. Thereās even a small Wikipedia page about it. Nevertheless, one has only to take a cursory look at this litter and graffiti-strewn site to see that it currently doesnāt hold pride of place in the hearts of many Mostar residents, whatever side of the political and cultural divide they may stand on. āAnd a good thing tooā, you might be saying to yourself. After all, what are most monuments? Either the bombastic attempt of a particular elite to stamp its bogus ideology onto the future; or a sad reminder of a terrible and often futile loss of military lives in pursuit of national glory. Bosnia needs no reminders of its troubled past and every encouragement to look forward.
Ā But the sad thing is that many of these monuments, and those of BogdanoviÄ in particular, were born from very different motivations, and this why they appear so startlingly different. As he explained himself in an interview:
āAbove all, the majority of my monuments were in honour of victims, not victors.
Ā And to be perfectly frank, I must say that my monumentsā¦ were not real monuments. At least, they did not have the appearance of monuments. Rather, they were stories, interesting objects, fantastical ones, and much visited, especially by young people.
Ā How was this possible? Well, because my monuments were very archaic. They might as well be Mesopotamian. To get around the finer points of nationalism, which always wants to know if such-and-such a shape is its own or not, I designed my work in such a way that it might have been artefacts from the origins of civilisation. I think that this was the winning recipe for these monuments: I always avoided national imperatives.ā
And walking around the Partisan Memorial I really felt like (at the risk of evoking Erich von DƤniken imagery) this was something that might have been transported from the future into the distant past and then left to gradually return to nature.
Ā To my shame Iād never previously heard of Bogdan BogdanoviÄ but he turns out to have been a remarkable human being. As well as an architect he was an artist, philosopher, urbanist and author of 25 books. He had also been a partisan and was for a short time a politician serving as mayor of Belgrade in the 1980s. Eventually he became a critic of MiloÅ”eviÄās toxic nationalism and went into exile, dying in Vienna in 2010. To the end he proclaimed a humanist credo:
Ā āUrbanity is one of the highest abstractions of the human spirit. To me, to be an urban man means to be neither a Serb nor a Croat, and instead to behave as though these distinctions no longer matter, as if they stopped at the gates of the cityā
Ā Iām attracted to his work, and the Partisan Memorial in particular, because they are devoid of any symbols of communism or other ideologies; and instead seem to evoke ancient mythological forms, refreshingly different from the Socialist realism monstrosities which still litter the former Soviet and Warsaw Pact republics. Ā I like too the way they dignify brutalist construction methods and aesthetics which, when applied elsewhere have been (often deservedly) disparaged. It was constructed during 1963/64 at a time whens Titoās Yugoslavia was pioneering a third, non-aligned, course between the nuclear armed hostility of Cold War rivals, and exudes that spirit of humanistic optimism, as well as cosmic detachment from the lunacy of the times.
Ā Another thing that really attracted me to BogdanoviÄās Mostar creation is its total empathy with its natural surroundings ā not something you might Ā expect from a socialist modernist working in concrete. Mostar is in the heart of Karst country ā a landscape formed from carboniferous limestone which erodes to produce an unmistakeable combination of shapes, textures and shades. I know it well because it echoes the Yorkshire Dales area of Britain that has been such an important part of my own love affair with landscape. I took one look at the memorial, its deep carved gullies and dry cascades, its stepped walls and individual commemorative blocks for the dead, and I was transported back to the limestone pavements of Malham Cove and the chasm of Gordale Scar of my Yorkshire boyhood. And, now the site has become rather neglected, nature is slowly reclaiming it, including the lovely orchid (Orchis morio) I discovered growing there.
Ā I guess many of the monuments of the ancient past that we now honour as āiconicā have also gone through periods of being in and out of both political and cultural fashion. This one isnāt even half a century old yet and itās already been through several mood swings and will no doubt find a renewed meaning and popularity in the future. Indeed it was thanks to the deeply knowledgeable and reverent guidance of two very young Mostar residents, Ronald Panza and Mili SefiÄ of the AbraÅ”eviÄ youth project, that I discovered the place at all. Now Mostar, and the whole of the former Yugoslavia so badly need these heirs to the great humanistic tradition of Bogdan BogdanoviÄ.
When is a city not a city? When you have to buy a ticket to enter it, maybe. Like Pompeii or Petra ā dead cities, you mean? No like Dubrovnik in Croatia. Excuse me but I didnāt know Dubrovnik had died. Well it hasnātā¦ yet. But read on.
I met Slaven Tolj at Lazereti Arts Workshop. He founded it with a group of graduates from the art academy in 1988 to bring some contemporary art spice to the rather conservative art scene of spectacularly beautiful Dubrovnik on the sleepy Dalmatian coast. But, he told me, the whole situation was transformed when war came to sleepy Dubrovnik in 1991. Although the city had no military or strategic significance, a group of Serbian and Montenegrin troops positionrd artillery on the peaks overlooking the city and proceeded to pound 2000 years of history into Swiss cheese. Why? Well thatās another story, but what matters here is the effect it had on Slaven and his friends. Life suddenly became far more meaningful and intense. The war radicalised many people but in the case of Slaven it gave him a social conscience and a determination that contemporary art should have a socio-political as well as an aesthetic dimension.
Ā With the end of the war Dubrovnikās residents emerged from the ruins of their city to survey the damage. For Lazareti it was a moment of opportunity with an abundance of empty property with potential for use as ateliers, workshops, clubs and bars. In particular they took on a long narrow strip of buildings and yards alongside the waterfront which had once been a quarantine hospital and had been semi derelict. It soon filled with a rich mix of artists, performers, tech geeks and people who had been sickened by the war and wanted to build an alternative future for Croatia. After several years of semi-legal squatting they approached the city council for a more secure status. Whilst in the late ā90s much of Croatia was run by rabid nationalist/authoritarian supporters of Franjo Tudjman, the mayor of Dubrovnik was a liberal-minded and independent thinker who was prepared to open a door to the artists. They were offered a long lease on the hospital in return for their agreement to repair and make it habitable.(at centre of picture below)
Ā These were golden years in Dubrovnik. Still largely off the tourist map, it became a haven of free-thinking and creative production. Of courses it couldnāt last.
The city was largely restored with the support of the world community, but when its job was done and attention was turned elsewhere, it was inevitable that a place so rich in cultural resources would attract the interest of biznismen, the commercial-political class that seems to have inherited the western Balkans. The mayor was deposed and a neoliberal administration under new mayor Andro Vlahusic (pictured below with golfer Greg Norman) voted in with the vision of transforming Dubrovnik into a gigantic bizniz opportunity. Once they circulated pictures of beautiful Dubrovnik around the world, they figured the world would want to visit ā and they were right. There was just one awkward factor, the citizens of Dubrovnik, who might have other ideas.
Ā Actually, the war and economic recession had hurt Dubrovnik in ways that couldnāt easily be repaired by stone masons alone. From a pre-war population of 5500, there are now less than 800 people living within the old walled town. But far from this shrinkage being seen as a problem, Slaven Tolj says the politicians will not be satisfied until the 800 have either died or moved out to the suburbs. So what kind of a mayor would want his own city centre to become completely depopulated? Well, maybe a mayor who wants to turn his city into a corporately controlled tourist honey-pot which can only be entered on purchase of a ticket, thatās who! Itās a radical accusation, and one that the city administration would no doubt deny, and would be (to my knowledge) a unique situation for a once living city to become a hyper-real museum/shop in the space of a generation. However, there are only four gateways into the historic centre of Dubrovnik so it will be cheap and easy to stick a turnstile on each. Indeed,Ā Vlahusic has already been accused of wanting to become the mayor of Dubrovnik Ltd.
Ā Itās not that Vlahusic wants to depopulate the whole of Dubrovnik. On the contrary he has ambitious plans for many to live on the plateau which rises above the city, in a sparkling new community of condominiums and golf resorts. Ah yes, golf. Weāve already noted in an earlier blog post that golf is a massively controversial issue in Croatia (see the picture below of that well-known board-game Golfopoly) and none more so than on Dubrovnikās mountain of SrÄ (pronounced āSergeā).
Slaven Tolj is one of the leaders of a large citizen action group called āSrÄ Is Oursā devoted to opposing the development plans and maintaining the vulnerable natural ecology of the unique karst landscape. Even Pave Župan RuskoviÄ, the official responsible for tourism, was sympathetic to the cause, but she was recently sacked by the mayor, thus removing one further obstacle to his plan.
Ā Meanwhile Tolj and Lazareti are now also coming under direct threat from the powerful politico-business interests. Lazaretiās location overlooking the main harbour is no longer seen as good enough only for artists but as āprime real estateā. There are some who think it would make a mighty fine casino, and would go to any length to āpersuadeā the artists to move out. A none-too-subtle hint of what these lengths might be was given on 19 April 2012 when, at a concert in support of āSrÄ Is Oursā, Slaven Tolj was taken on one side by a bunch of security guards and beaten up.
It was indeed with a heavy heart that we left Dubrovnik that day, wondering to what fate we were leaving its brave campaigners and beautiful environment. If there is one consolation it is the knowledge that Slaven is not alone. Heās part of the Pravo Na Grad movement, which was born in Zagreb and now spans Croatia, and which has already shown it will not simply roll over and allow a greedy few to rape this country.
āCome back again. Donāt forget us. Donāt leave us on a desert island. Do not put us aside ā we are yours and you are ours.ā
This poignant plea was one of many messages people left for me as part of a social experiment I ran as I toured the Balkans on my two-week CORNERS Xpedition. I asked the question "Kako biste pozdravili stranca?" (How do you greet a stranger?) Not all of them were as warm and heartfelt as this, but most were hospitable to me and to other strangers.
The Xpedition was punctuated by signature events in each of the three ābase campā cities in which we settled. Our plan was to stage āinterventionsā in public space and to gauge the reaction of local people. In each case we arranged in advance with a local group to find a space and time with maximum numbers and variety of people, and to ensure that nothing we did would cause gratuitous offence or disruption These interventions were not meant to be flash-mobs which might alarm or provoke the locals, although there were times and places where some of us felt that a gentle shaking up of the status quo would do no harm at all. However, on a previous Corners Xpedition in Lapland a Polish performance artist had narrowly avoided arrest by officious Swedish police for innocently producing a penknife in a public place, so we had to be wary of local sensitivities.
Ā We deliberately chose to avoid major cities because they are more complicated and time-consuming and because our aim was to reach into the very ācornersā of the European corners we were visiting. This is why we settled on Užice in Serbia, Cetinje in Montenegro and Mostar in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Užice is relatively remote industrial city of 52,000 people in the mountains of western Serbia with little international profile, and a predominantly Serbian population. Cetinje is a small city of 14,000 which nevertheless carries the title of honorary capital of Montenegro thus attracting tourist and business traffic, and its citizenry is predominantly Montenegrin. Mostar is widely known as a city of historically mixed ethnicity, which is one of the reasons it was extensively damaged in the civil war, thus attracting international attention and aid. Institutionally and physically it is now sharply divided between Bosniak and Croat populations, although they seem to have kept a lid on conflict in recent years.
Ā Each time about 10 people in our party chose to make an intervention, some of them trying something different each time and others, like me, repeating the same thing. Itās important to say these were not polished performances designed to attract a formal audience, but a public response or even interaction was welcome, particularly in my case. Others included a Polish dancer, a Croatian posing as a street cleaner on strike, an Irish former political prisoner with his eyes and ears covered up, a Swede posing as Zlatan IbrahimoviÄ a famous mixed-ethnicity footballer, a Slovene reading a blank newspaper, a group of Serbian needle-workers and another Croat who climbed a tree and whistled the national anthem of the former republic of Yugoslavia.
Ā My āshowā was both the most elaborate and simplistic. I posed the question āHow do you greet a strangerā to the passing pedestrians, and asked them to imagine that a new person had moved into their town and gave them a selection of simple graphics expressing basic human emotions, with the advice that they should choose the one which best expressed their feelings towards the stranger. I didnāt give any clue to the identity of the stranger, so it could as easily have been someone from a different neighbourhood as from a different country or ethnicity. The graphics were mainly of the smiley/scowling face variety, or stick men interacting with each other in various degrees of welcome and inhospitality. I also included some national flags and spiritual symbols. People were invited to select a symbol and pin it to a board, with an option to also add a written comment.
Ā The locations varied. In Užice we chose the bus station figuring this would provide a steady flow of people from a cross section of the community. It turned out not to be an ideal location, it being too cramped, so each of the interventions jostled with the other for space and probably left punters rather puzzled. Maybe also those in a hurry to catch the bus home might have been irritated by the crowds that gathered to see us. Shops fronted onto the space but several were empty, and many of the others were cafes where grizzled older man drank beer and morosely chain-smoked. The crowd was supplemented by an enthusiastic bunch of college students who had been gathered by a supportive local lecturer. In Cetinje we chose an open air site in the main square which allowed greater space and a clearer awareness of each contribution. After a long stretch of wet weather the sun shone so the outdoor cafes had quite a few locals in search of sun, fresh air and escape from the nicotine fug indoors. Finally in Mostar we managed to select the first really hot day of the year in the Spanski Trg, a new public space created in honour of Spanish peace-keeping troops who died in the Yugoslav war, and still overlooked by the gaunt and bullet-pocked shells of buildings wrecked in the fighting. It was also next to a school which is nominally mixed, although Croatian and Bosniak children are educated separately within it.
It should be said that in none of the places did we struggle to arouse the curiosity of local people, particularly kids, and my screens had people viewing or responding to them for most of the 60 minutes of the exercise in each city. Doubtless however, if there was a default user it would be a girl in her late teens accompanied by one or more friends. Young men also responded, but we had fewer and fewer respondents as you go up through the age demographic. Indeed I can almost remember all the elder respondents because they were often quite expressive and keen to write messages. Most middle aged and elderly people, particularly men, gave my stand a wide berth and generally refused to participate even if canvassed in their own language. Ā
Ā Although getting them to choose emoticons and make comments was the primary aim, I also wanted to see how people behaved at and around the stand. Did individuals appear to act differently from those in groups and did mixed groups behave differently from uniform ones. I general I didnāt notice any striking difference although these kinds of questions require a much more rigorous and scientific observation than I could give in these unscientific conditions. How, for example would a professional social analyst have dealt with the roving packs of friendly dogs that wanted to join on the fun in Cetinje?
Ā However, I did decide that we shouldnāt be too keen to jump to assumptions about peoplesā views according to how they look. A couple of suede-headed hard cases swaggered to the stand and searched until they found the smiliest smiley face they could find. Meanwhile a counter cultural-looking dude who appeared to have just stepped out of art school, had no hesitation in picking a āweāre closedā icon. Generally itās very difficult to identify peopleās ethnic background from their appearance in the Balkans. For example whilst many of our respondents would have undoubtedly been Muslim we only had one group that wore explicitly Islamic clothing.
The actual results in each city were as follows:
It suggests that Mostar was the city most welcoming to strangers, whilst Cetinje was the least hospitable. Whilst Iām happy to stand by these findings, I think in reality the differences between the three places are less pronounced than it seems. For example, we had a high response from young students in both Užice and Mostar ā and in the latter many of them were themselves foreign pupils of the international school, suggesting they had made a very definite choice to live in the city, and held fairly cosmopolitan values. In Cetinje however we had what Iād think to be a broader cross-section of society with more older people and more men who (I have no doubt) were responsible for most of the negative symbols. So if we are looking for a headline figure that reflects all three of the cities, and maybe the rest of the western Balkans too, it would be that two thirds of people are welcoming to strangers, with the rest less so including a hard core of a fifth to a quarter who are hostile.
Ā People were generally keen to add comments although the majority were of the āWelcome to my townā or āhave a nice day varietyā. There were several, like the one I opened with, expressing the sense of isolation which many Balkan people feel. This is particularly pronounced in Serbia which still feels like it is doing penance for the disastrous policies of Slobodan MiloÅ”eviÄ by being forced to stand outside the shop window of Europeās economic mainstream:
āPlease donāt leave us behind in this forgotten place. Take us with you.āĀ
But in Montenegro too we picked up the same mood, with someone suggesting that only one in ten of Cetinjeās population is in secure and regular employment: āTake me to Londonā and āIām wondering, what are you doing here?ā
Others were less despairing, showing a defiant optimism in the face of adversity: āRemember our hospitality and then one day return the compliment.ā (UŽICE) āSerbia ā always a country which gives and receives. Think about that!ā (UŽICE) āWelcome to our city and our country. We have great hearts and soulsā. (CETINJE)
Mostar seemed to express the most civic pride: āWelcome to the most beautiful city in the world.ā āWelcome to Mostar. I hope you enjoy it, Inshallah.ā But Mostar also expressed some of the most ambiguous and openly aggressive messages: āYouāre all we need.ā āWelcome to hell. Watch out for the bullets.ā And āUltras Mostar.ā
Finally, there was a plea from a (presumbly) older citizen of Užice who asked us to āLook on us as you did during the time of Tito.ā This might simply have been a case of āJugo-stalgiaā, but I would like to read it as a plea to the world to stop looking on people of the western Balkans as victims and give them a chance to show once again their capacity for solidarity, optimism and innovation.
Finally it left me wondering what would be the response to this exercise in my own cityā¦ or indeed anywhere else. Maybe Iāll show up in a square near you before long.
I took a walk in one of the worldās smallest capital cities today. Indeed, up to the First World War Cetinje was the smallest of them all, but this pint-sized powerhouse has obviously never felt any sense of inferiority as its elegantly laid-out boulevards are dripping with embassies, ministries, museums and royal/presidential palaces. Okay, I know, Podgorica is where the mundane business of running the republic of Montenegro goes on, but for romantics (which evidently includes current President Filip VujanoviÄ), this former royal capital of under 14,000 people is where the symbolism of power lies.
Ā I was glad I took a little detour from the main boulevard as I would otherwise have missed the surreal Klub Jugonostalgicara ā a shrine to Josip Broz Tito and all his works. Itās the first of its kind Iāve seen on this tour and I thought at first it was just a bit of post-modernist irony that had escaped from the art school. But the owner noticed us loitering and came out in his carpet slippers to open up his inner sanctum. No arty clever dick this, the word āunreconstructedā was made for him, but he was pleasant enough.
Ā Pushing on I came to the so-called most attractive building in Cetinje, and Iām not disagreeing. It had been the French embassy so displayed Art Nouveau detailing that would have been cutting edge in its day. Itās a lovely sight.
Across the street was the Ministry of Culture which has been moved here from Podgorica to oversee the restoration of the town, but the size of the task it faces was staring it in the face. To one side was a haunted house of a villa. I managed to get inside for a snoop around. The winding staircase looked abandoned to glue sniffers and crack heads but, amazingly, there seemed to be people living in some of the rooms.
Ā The other neighbour is one of Titoās impositions, the old shoe factory which has now been closed and partly demolished, but I managed to get in to explore the remaining sheds. Looming over them all is LovÄen, the original āblack mountainā after which Montenegro is named.
Ā Of course, Cetinje was built to meet the needs of a particular āleisure classā of Edwardian plutocrats, and now it has found itself another one. The shoe factory is the home to Cetinjeās tribe of feral dogs who occupy its every corner. They make marauding forays from here into the town centre but they are, Iām glad to say, benevolent. Maybe it was the season, but they clearly had more interest in each other than in me.
Ā Apparently the shoe factory is destined to become a new faculty for the university whilst the nearby, and colossal, fridge factory is slated as the home for MACCO a massive arts and media centre named for Marina AbramoviÄ, with involvement from Rem Koolhas. Both projects are held up indefinitely by the financial crisis and property development slump, but this is a double-edged sword, because it has also slowed to a trickle the tide of speculative building projects that was blighting the western Balkans.
Ā My last picture rather sums up the alternatives for Cetinje, and perhaps for many other places too. A foreground of abandonment, a middle ground of carefully restored and highly liveable town-houses and in the background an upstart glass tower, that arrogantly breaches the skyline conformity of Cetinje but is un-let, unloved and vacant.
This is the story of a donkey that thought it was a space-ship.
Ā So as we drove through the mountains of western Serbia on the Corners Xpedition and looked down upon the industrial city of Užice, my eye focused immediately on its distinctive style. This is city of towering blocks in a setting of steep mountain slopes, and so itās not surprising that someone has dubbed Užice the Hong Kong of Serbia. Užice was a city with a special place in the iconography of socialist Yugoslavia. It had been the place where Titoās partisans made a successful stand against the Nazi invaders in 1941. Such was there joy that they declared the foundation of the Republic of Užice, In effect it was the first place in Europe to be liberated and became the prototype for the post-war socialist republic of Yugoslavia. For this reason it always held a special place in Titoās heart, and he showered it with official visits, honours and tower blocks. But Tito is long gone, and it shows.
Ā But of all the jostling skyscrapers of Užice, one stood out - quite literally. It wasnāt so much a building as a reinforced concrete rocket. Concrete brutalism and the dream of space travel were both part of my childhood experience and both have lost their allure somewhat in the intervening years. In Britain the few remaining icons of brutalism have been hated and hounded almost to extinction but it seems it reached its apogee in Yugoslavia. They are no more loved here than in UK but, it seems a weak economy and limited property development climate has generally saved them from major refurbishment or demolition.
Ā So there it stood, Hotel Zlatibor. 16 floors of magnificent, ludicrous space-age concrete. A once proud Titoist fantasy, now down on its luck and recently closed - awaiting a future unknown. A friend from the region told me she had stayed there towards the end of 2011. Sheād been shocked to arrive in a virtual haunted house because the hotelās website had given the impression it was a thriving concern. (It still does, in fact, as you can check here). Indeed sheād asked the young kid on the reception desk if sheād seen her employerās website. The receptionist said no. My friend said the website was rather misleading, and the girl said āyes, so Iāve heardā. The place went bankrupt and defunct shortly afterwards.
Ā Well I wasnāt looking for a bed for the night, but from the moment I saw the Zlatibor I knew I would have to get inside, but how? Most urban explorers will tell you that before you try scaling the back wall itās always worth trying the front door first. So I didā¦ and it opened! Apparently there was still a skeleton staff, but the reception desk was empty as I passed through to the stairwell. It didnāt look like anyone gave a damn. The Reception had been designed in an age when beige was sexy, and had been subsequently burnished to a deep ochre by 50 years of nicotine.
Ā I snooped around the lower floors, getting inside the amazing ātail finā which, from the inside, felt like being on the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise.
Ā Then in the lift to the top floor. As it creaked its way up I reflected upon what a local women had told me about the Hotel Zlatibor. Iād asked her if it had a nicknameā¦ maybe the rocket or something like that. She said in Užice we call it āthe donkeyā, because itās stupid, costs too much and has never worked.Ā She told me too of a friend whoād stayed there and had counted no less than 11 separate light fittings in his room ā but none of them worked well enough for him to see where he was pissing.
Ā Stepping out on to the 16th floor was like boarding the Marie Celeste. The whole floor of rooms (and several floors below) were clean and ready for their next visitor to arrive in eager anticipation. Itās like the staff had clocked off one day never to return. An abandoned Christmas tree gave a clue to when the end had finally come. The lovely ā80s style telephones are evidence too of the lack of investment over the years.
Ā Only the roof now remained to be explored. A gate blocked the stairway upwards but it was easily scaled and I was up amongst the pigeons and air-conditioning ducts looking down on the city.
Ā It was a bittersweet experience. I know how bad this and places like it have been and there are 101 reasons why we should never design and build anything like it again. But somehow I canāt entirely celebrate its passing because just like the great tail-finned gas-gobbling chevvies of the ā50s this had been such a hopeful, optimistic and romantic statement by the people who created it.
Iād just like to hope that Užice could recapture some of that spirit of optimism and repackage it into something that is more apt for the sensibility of our time. I warmed to this city and its people who, despite the predicament of Serbia in its brooding isolation, had a real spirit. Iāll say some more about this next time but for now, hereās to the donkey that thought it was a rocket.
For the next 2 weeks SubversiveUrbanism is going to be bloggingĀ whilst moving aroundĀ the Western Balkans as part of the CORNERS Xpedition to Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Albania http://cornersofeurope.org/xpedition-balkans, in a group of 25 international artists and researchers.
In several locations along the wayĀ SubversiveUrbanism will be making its own 'urban intervention', an experiment in public space to explore the reaction of people to 'the stranger'. There will be regular blogs on this, as well as the activities of other members of the expedition, and our encounters and interactions with local people.
Readers of this blog up to now might note that whilst it has beenĀ undoubtedly urban, its examples of subversion have been quite subtle and discrete. So, to redress the balance, and because Iām heading back to Zagreb this weekend, I present to you Pravo na Grad ā Zagrebās Right to the City Movement, which is one of the most explicitly subversive examples of urban activism you could ever wish to find.
Ā It will become apparent very quickly that I absolutely love this campaign and have enormous admiration for the people who have organised and participated in it over the last 5 years or so. Indeed in many ways it sets the standard for what I mean by subversive urbanism. The key ingredients are that Pravo na Grad:
# Ā Was concerned with protecting public space against commercial and political incursion.
# Ā Transformed righteous anger into cool, effective action.
# Ā Employed wit, humour, originality and creativity in its methods.
# Ā Avoided aggression or direct confrontation with the forces of oppression.
# Ā Successfully scaled-up its constituency from a hard core of committed actors to a mass movement.
# Ā Appealed on different levels to a broad cross section of people.
# Ā Had real impact and led to real change.
It started with a collection of grungy Croatian underground music venues and youth clubs in the early 2000s, which eventually came to be known as the Clubture network. There was a growing frustration in Zagreb with the lack of facilities for young people to find creative outlets and space for expression. The city had no shortage of empty and run-down factories and warehouses but they couldnāt get legal access to any of them, and when they tried other means they were often brutally removed by the police. The reason soon became apparent. Politicians ā led by the populist mayor Milan Bandic ā and their property development acquaintances - had grand designs on these sites, for commercial use. Not that there was anything wrong in principle with anyone wanting to redevelop the rotting hulks of Zagrebās industrial past, but what aroused suspicion was the secrecy and the top-down approach, excluding young people, or anyone else, from having a voice in what might happen in large swathes of the city. Furthermore, prior to the mayoral elections all the candidates, including the winner, Bandic, had signed a pledge to provide the city with youth facilities, and now he was trying to play dumb over the issue.
Ā Then, one day unannounced, a series of billboard adverts went up around the city with images of Bandic himself with his face crossed out. The Mayorās office put it about town that there was a terrorist campaign against him and, when this was laughed out of court, they claimed a new super-rich political party was being launched to attack him. Then a second mystery campaign followedĀ showing some of the most familiar empty buildings with Totalna rasprodaja (clearance sale) pasted across them. Townspeople looked at each other in puzzlement.Ā
Finally the two instigators of the campaign called national TV and made an on-screen confession that it had been them and, that unless politicians started to abide by some of their pledges, there would be more to come. The two were Teo Celakoski, a cultural activist and co-founder of Clubture and Tomislav TomaÅ”eviÄ, the co-ordinator of Croatian Green Action/Friends of the Earth. Theyād been introduced by Emina ViÅ”niÄ, director of POGON ā Zagrebās Center for Independent Culture and Youth. This three way connection of youth, culture and environmental activism was crucial, bringing together a creative mix of people with different but complementary skills, networks and methods, which was to prove so perplexing to the establishment.
Green Action was concerned about the carving up of large tracts of protected land by property developers whilst the authorities seemed to stand impotently or collusively by. This included a bizarre act of parliament which allowed golf course developers to abuse and even side step environmental regulations, threatening much of the unspoiled and vulnerable Dalmatian coast. They also worried about the number of wealthy people who seemed to flout planning restriction to build themselves mansions in environmentally sensitive areas.
Ā The chance to put their new alliance of talents to the test came when a local oligarch, Ivica Todoric, flagrantly ignored planning regulations on the edge of Zagreb to build himself a family mansion called Kulmer Castle. By declaring the place a hotel rather than a home heād found a loophole in the law meaning the authorities couldnāt touch him ā even if they had wanted to. PNG had other ideas though, and one morning they gathered a small crowd, a bunch of suitcases and a bus and they drove up to the mansion. Standing outside the palatial gates they rang the bell and asked to be allowed to check in ā after all, this was supposed to be a hotel wasnāt it?Ā The owner kept his head down and expected them to go away, but they didnāt. They kept coming back until they drove him mad. The stunt grew in momentum attracting media attention and public sympathy, because it echoed the concerns many had silently held, and that people found it hilariously funny to see the powerful lampooned in such a way.Ā
From the outset, Teo told me, they never thought they had a realistic chance of winning the campaign on this issue. It was too close to the mayorās heart and would be politically too damaging for him to back down on it. Nevertheless, they chose this particular issue because they knew it would arouse enormous public interest ā and they were right. They began a petition and held a series of public events to drum up signatures. They amazed themselves by getting 55,000 people to say they opposed the development.Ā From this they drew up a five layered plan of activism:
# Ā 55000 said they were opposed, of which
# Ā 3000 were prepared to attend public rallies, of which
# Ā 500 would turn up to special actions at a dayās notice, of which
# Ā 150 would turn up immediately on receiving an SMS, of which
# Ā 10 were full time campaign co-ordinators.
Ā Moving rapidly from a tight-knit action group to a popular mass movement brings its own problems with it. What do you do if people support your cause, but for the wrong reasons? For example they got the backing of certain people, particularly the Dynamo Zagreb football ultras, who opposed the mayor less on political grounds and more because he was of Hercegovinan rather than Croatian background. This was potentially dangerous stuff but they managed it by strictly controlling the way in which protest were held. They knew any suggestion that this was becoming a xenophobic rabble might turn the balance of public sympathy Ā back towards Milan Bandic, so at the slightest hint of a dodgy banner or chant emerging at a rally, Teo would snuff them out.
Teo and Tomislav used tactics which ran rings around the security forces. Learning from the violent but largely futile anti-capitalist campaigns of the ā90s, they chose never to engage in direct confrontation whatever the provocation might be. Learning also from successful Green activism, they employed effective methods, like chaining themselves together and encasing their joined hands in plastic tubing, which required long painstaking efforts with chain saws by the police to separate them.
Some methods made great use of symbolism combining the skills of artists and advertising creative within their membership. At one rally everyone arrived wielding toilet plungers, sending a clear message of what they thought Mayor Bandic was doing to Croatian democratic institutions. Another time they manufactured their own brand of bottled water called Mutna (or muddy) and filled it with a foul and filthy liquid which once again hinted at the murky dealings within city hall. And in a guerrilla action at the offices of the municipal planning department, they surrounded and sealed-off the building with police-issue ācrime sceneā tape.
Ā Other tactics employed were, frankly surreal ā like the 5 by 7 meter Trojan Horse. For several weeks in a courtyard overlooked directly by the Ministry of Finance, they built an enormous wooden horse, without ever attracting the curiosity of the authorities. It then took 50 people to wheel it down the street at 4 in the morning to position it in Warsavska, whilst the hapless security guards were looking the other way. The presence of the horse became a rallying point for the final struggle to prevent the excavations and captured the imagination of thousands. The symbolic message here was that Bandic had promised to work for residents ālike a horseā but in fact had behaved more like a modern Trojan horse, smuggling his own private commercial interests into city hall (see video here).
Ā As the protests became more and more effective ā and embarrassing to the mayor ā the authorities upped the stakes. Police snatch squads were formed with the intention of taking the key organisers of the street and into the cells. At this point Teo and Tomislav displayed the skills of a field marshal. As the squads approached they ordered members of the protesting crowd to offer themselves up for arrest, in ranks of ten at a time. They were duly arrested, thrown into police vans and whisked off to police cells. But as the ranks of 10 continued to come forward the chief of police made a quick calculation and realised that there simply werenāt enough police cells in the whole of Zagreb to accommodate them all. He had to send his prisoners to 15 police stations across the whole region and still it wasnāt enough. Finally the chief took a decision to put some into a criminal prison, which was actually an illegal act. All along there was also a battle of the airwaves with PNG putting messages out on the radio to encourage supporters to come into town to get themselves arrested, whilst the police put out counter messages telling people to stay home.
Ā This final night of mass civil disobedience was relayed throughout Croatia and affected a lot of people. Although PNG didnāt prevent the eventual construction and opening of the car park, they had let the genie out of the bottle. The prevailing attitude of resigned acceptance to political corruption was challenged, and copycat PNG groups began to form around the country.
Initially these groups looked to Zagreb for help but Teo and Tomislav again showed remarkable wisdom. They refused requests to become a kind of guerrilla flying squad who would move into hotspots around the country and repeat their Zagreb tactics. Rather than give a man a fish, they preferred to teach him how to fish. So in the DjelujteSami (Act Alone!) section of the PNG website they have created a āself-help toolkitā for anyone wishing to stand up to corporate and political malpractice. This ranges from making people aware of their rights under the law to tactics in peaceful urban subversion.
For a while the combined forced of the municipality and of the property developer Tomislav Horvatincic, prepared to crush PNG by any means possible. Horvatincic took out a lawsuit with the aim of hitting PNG with such a large fine that it would be sunk. In tragic circumstances, it turned out to be the property tycoon that sank. Whilst taking his speed boat along the Dalmatian coast, accompanied by a young woman, he clearly had other things on his mind because he failed to notice a sailing boat in his path. He hit the boat head on killing its two Italian owners instantly. He was jailed, which has not surprisingly taken his mind off trying to crush PNG.
There is justice after all. The struggle continues.
Whatās in a name? Quite a lot, particularly when applied to cities ā and none more so than this one. Thereās nothing particularly intriguing about āDonetskā ā which this city of almost a million people became in 1961 ā itās simply derived from the Donets river on which it stands. But this anodyne moniker was chosen by Nikita Khruschev to replace the polluted industrial townās most toxic asset: its former name of Stalina, dubbed in honour of his monstrous predecessor. But not satisfied with one Bolshevik titan, Donetsk had even briefly in the 1920s been named Trotsk, until the eponymous Leon was air-brushed out of history.
However, the eastern Ukrainian coal and steel town began life with a very different name entirely: Š®Š·Š¾Š²ŠŗŠ° or Hughesovska. Youāre right, it doesnāt sound very Ukrainian so what is it? Welsh? Yes, it was named after John Hughes of Merthyr Tydfil who dug a hole in the ground in 1870 and found iron and coal in abundance. So much of the stuff indeed that theyāre still digging, burning and smelting it to this day, as if Global Warming and the Great Post-Industrial Transformation never happened.
So whilst the mines and steel mills are still belching and roaring, they are no longer owned by the state but a new class of plutocrats who happened to be in the right place at the right time back in the crazy ā90s. Donetskās Capo di tutti capi is Rinat Leonidovych Akhmetov, son of a Tatar miner, industrial magnate, billionaire, politician, football fan, and a man who knows how to buy himself the best libel lawyers.
He has elevated his beloved team Shakhtar Donetsk to international status, and erected for it the magnificent Donbas Stadium which will soon host the European Championships and the preening starlets of England and France. Mr Akhmetov doesnāt appreciate being asked too many questions about how he made his money and, as long as his municipal munificence continues, itās doubtful the citizens of Donetsk will care too much either. As the picture below shows though, Donetsk is a city of growing inequality between the penthouse and the pavement.
Whilst in Donetsk I encountered a variety of people and places which, in different ways, are seeking alternative ways of moving the city into the future. It began at my hotel, the in-your-face Liverpool Art Hotel. The owner clearly has a serious crush on the Beatles and Liverpool FC and, in its sheer over-the-top exuberance, it works. Itās a shame therefore that every morning my chirpy Merseyside mood was snuffed out the moment I bounced into the breakfast room. Styled as an industrial canteen the staff were as miserable as sin as they slopped Varenyky on our plates. Despite my best efforts to greet them in Russian, with liberal gestures of Š·Š“ŃŠ°Š²ŃŃŠ²ŃŠ¹ŃŠµ! and Š“Š¾Š±ŃŠ¾Šµ ŃŃŃŠ¾, most refused even to make eye contact.
This triggered off a good debate with my local hosts over the difference between tangible and intangible cultural assets. The hotel owner obviously understood the value of the former by filling his place with Liverpool-themed memorabilia. But heād spectacularly overlooked that what makes a city like Liverpool so special is not just its music and its football, but mainly its people ā their wit, humour and warm-heartedness.Ā You can change the look of a place in quite a short space of time but how many generations will it take before people in the former Soviet Union take pleasure in giving service to strangers?
All this was in stark contrast to the people who hosted my visit to Donetsk, Valentyna Sakhnenko and Daria Deriagina from the marvellous EkoArt youth organisation. EkoArt was set up in 1999 to give young people in the city an outlet for their creative energies. As I know myself, growing up in a once-great industrial city can be a stultifying experience. Society expects you to follow the time-honoured path, which you already know is heading over a cliff and, even if it werenāt, youād want to try something else anyway. But how, where and with whom? EkoArt provides that space. They run projects with evocative titles like āWe create to liveā and āGive your friend a handā and, as if in response to my joyless breakfast bar staff, the uplifting photography gallery āDonetsk Smilesā.Ā
They are now working on an āalternative art guideā to Donetsk. It strikes me as a great idea to offer a different picture of a city from that offered by the cityās official tourist guide ā and also from the increasingly risible Lonely Planet guides which seem to reduce every place to a tawdry list of āmust-seeā bars and shops. On the contrary, if you visit Donetsk soon you will have the chance, thanks to EkoArts to visit āThe forgotten places of our cityā; āThe most āDonetskā places and eventsā; āUnusual points of view on āusualā places of the cityā; āRomantic placesā AND āSlagheapsā. Ā Love it!
And, even as the blast furnaces continue to spew flame and ash and the klaxon calls the miners to another shift down below, there are other people bringing new ideas to the heart of the Donbass industrial zone.Ā Take Luba Michailova, who grew up the daughter of the director of one of the Soviet Unionās largest factories for the production of insulation material. Over 1000 people worked there until its protected market disappeared and it rapidly closed. The two of them set up a Foundation to transform the empty hulk into Izolyatsia - Platform for Cultural Initiatives.
Ā Her vision is to make it an international centre for contemporary art, surrounded by an ecological park which, to say the least, is a bold ambition. Izolatsyia has already hosted exhibitions and residencies by artists such as Boris Mikhailov andĀ Cai Guo-Qiang so it means business, but will no doubt need time to find its true identity.Ā WhetherĀ Luba MichailovaĀ has visited some of the amazing artistic transformations of industrial ruins in Germany, Britain and the US I donāt know, but I wouldnāt be surprised to hear sheād drawn inspiration from the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. The difference, one suspects, is in the business model. The great icons of the Ruhrgebiet Route der Industriekultur were funded largely by state and EU funds and now raise increasing amounts of their revenue from tourism and enterprise. Izolatsyia on the other hand harks back to an older model of patronage of the arts by wealthy dynasties.
However, itās not entirely clear how the Michailov family came by its wealth or how they propose to finance their dream of a ācreative villageā in the longer term. I posed a few questions in this vein to the PR who was assigned to me on my visit. She responded by throwing questions back at me, which left me feeling perplexed and uneasy. Certainly not the kind of openness I would normally associate with the creative pioneers Iāve met in similar project in other countries.
So in the end I left Izolyatsia with an ambivalent feeling. I would always feel inclined to admire anyone who tried to do something unusual, bold and creative in such a blighted post-industrial landscape as this. But in the world of post-Soviet high finance nothing is ever what it seems to be so I remain to be reassured that this is a place that will put artists and the citizens of Donetsk first. I do so want it to be.
So which way forward Donetsk? Cultural dirigisme, foreign imports or home-grown creativity? Well all three of course, but the balance between them will be crucial. The first two can take care of themselves, but friends and well-wishers of the city should do all they can to ensure the grass roots are nurtured and notĀ crowded out in the rush to modernize eastern Ukraine.
āBeware, it will be even colder inside the building than it is out hereā.
Somehow I couldnāt quite get the logic of this as I stood, teeth chattering and knees knocking, on the steps of a grand ruin near the centre of Chisinau, capital of the republic of Moldova. Daniel Schmidt my guide had just walked me around the perimeter of a whole city block, once occupied entirely by the Moldovan national museum of ethnography. Apart from a grand Turkish/Islamic-styled main block which still functioned as a museum (pictured below), the whole vast complex seemed empty, and like it had been abandoned for a seriously long time. The roof was broken in many places and shrubberies were gaining hold and making a decent living amongst cracks in the masonry.
As I shivered pathetically on the pot-holed pavement of Strada Alexei Åciusev, the only source of heat seemed to radiate from Daniel himself. He was almost levitating with energy and excitement for what he was about to show me.Ā Snow was piled high on the roadsides and people bustled past in huddled bundles. A milky sun was setting and Chisinau was hunkered down awaiting the end of a long winter. Iād only been in the country for a couple of hours, for the first time in my life, but already Chisinau was revealing its character. Aside from a few vestiges of Ottoman rule, the streetscapes were largely Russian (Tsarist), Soviet and post-Soviet. Little sign here of central European influences. What threw me though was the lilting conversations of the locals, which were distinctly Latin, deriving from Romanian. This combined with the exceptional number of mature trees along every boulevard, hints that before long this place will rapidly warm up and take on the character of south European city.
He walked me down a long gloomy corridor and then I had the sense of a great space opening up, though it was now totally dark. As he opened some of the shuttered windows I gasped, realising we were in a vast and splendid hall. Ā Opulent crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling and the walls were upholstered and hand-painted as if no expense had been spared. One imagined the pampered elite of pre-revolutionary Moldovan society must have once paraded themselves here.
All this started me reflecting on what must have gone on around this building since it was in its pomp. When the Soviet Union broke up Moldova was a comfortable-ish small republic with a productive wine and agriculture sector and a developed industrial base stretched out along the Dniestr river valley. Sadly, though, itās been particularly ill-served by the political and economic ructions of the last quarter century. 1990s Moldova entered into the highly unfamiliar experience of national independence and self-determination, and a large section of the powerful Russian-speaking community decided they didnāt fancy it one bit. Yearning for mother Russia, but cut off from it by the vast bulk of Ukraine, the rebels set up their own tin-pot state. They got the backing of Moscow and set up Transnistria, taking all of Moldovaās industry with them. Today virtually no world leader aside from Putin recognises this bizarre Ruritanian klepto-statelet, but it has done a pretty good job of trying to drag the rest of Moldova backwards with it.
Anyway, back to the ruins. It was soon obvious that they were not ruins at all and that someone was taking care of this place and, more than that, using it. We groped down more corridors and through antechambers each grandly decorated but stripped of any furniture, but there were clear signs of activity, with a drum ākit here or a stage set there. I was now disoriented and almost rigid with cold but then Daniel pulled back a heavy drape and a great rush of warmth hit me full in the face. The room we were stepping into was covered from floor to ceiling with paintings, murals, posters, fabrics and masks from various parts of the world. The next room had a stage where a band was setting up for a gig and beyond that room after room which were occupied by artists, as ateliers. We were in the home of Art Labyrinth, the collective of artists who have taken occupation of this sad old building and breathed new life into it (pictured below with Daniel enthusing).
Art Labyrinth was set up in 2008 to be the first place where anyone in Moldova could turn if they have an interest in contemporary art, alternative music, and world cultures. They set themselves up as a counter to both the post-Soviet arts establishment and the new wave of Western consumption culture which has finally arrived in Chisinau. As I subsequently discovered, Moldovans are not reticent in expressing themselves culturally and there is still a very lively and diverse folk culture based around the old Soviet network of village Dom Kultura. But Art Labyrinth is (literally) the hot spot for people wanting to take a more critical and divergent cultural path. I was inspired by their determination to challenge their circumstances and to connect internationally, despite the sense of isolation that has been imposed upon Moldova by East/ West power politics.
Finally we took our leave and stepped out blinking into the daylight, and I realised we were in a wide courtyard with trees, and buildings in various states of collapse. Part of it looked like a peasantās back yard with cast off wooden carts and rusting trucks and other detritus stacked up in archaeological layers. Elsewhere it was more like the inner sanctum of a palace, and what had clearly once been elaborate gardens, Italianate pavilions and genteel promenades were now slowly crumbling back into the earth. Bizarrely the place was scattered with large cages which contained improbably exotic birds of yellow, red and iridescent blue-green. It turned out these were the last survivors of a large menagerie assembled by the Soviet authorities for the pleasure of Chisinau residents. A melancholic man with a bushy moustache appeared and scattered seed. Apparently he is still given a stipend to keep them alive.
Rumour has it that the state has finally rediscovered its neglected asset ā and sold the whole site to a foreign buyer. So it may not be the hub of Moldovan alternative culture and urban activism for much longer. Artists as the harbingers and then the victims of gentrification may be a new phenomenon for Chisinau but is an old old story, which is starting to sweep through the former Soviet republics. I may not encounter Art Labyrinth again in this particular location but Iāve no doubt there will be plenty of other forgotten corners of splendid dilapidation for them in in this friendly and under-appreciated city.
Veniceā¦ subversive? When I recently made a short visit to Venice I wasnāt expecting to be inspired to write anything in this blog about subversive urbanismā¦ but I was wrong.
But beyond the tourist tat there are other sides to this remarkable city we should never lose sight of. Firstly the BBC documentary Venice 24/7 reminds us this is a real place full of real people ā both ordinary and extraordinary.
It subverts - magnificently ā any sense that a city should be rational and orderly. The mesmerising tangle of passageways, alleys, courtyards and canals completely defeat any pretentions you might have had to travel directly from A to B. On the other hand you might discover C and D by way of A once again, before realising you never really wanted to go to B in the first place and E is much preferable. And that appointment you had for 2.30? Well the person you were due to meet never expected you to make it by then anyway, so why should you worry? Any other city in the world would tell you that you were about to head down a blind alley with a convenient ācul-de-sacā sign but not Venice. The city seems to be deliberately challenging you to get slightly lost and possibly discover something you might otherwise have missed.
Venice subverts too ā like no other city ā the predominance of the car. Not so long ago this was simply a quaint anomaly. āHa-ha, funny old Venice that hasnāt kept pace with progressā. But perhaps progress is now taking us forward to a place that might be something like Venice in the future. 50 years from now, and probably sooner, we wonāt be jumping into the car to work or to take the kids to school. We might be zipping around by hydrogen-powered scooter but, frankly, many more of us will simply be walking. Being in Venice for a few days reconnects you with the idea that there is a life without cars. Venice, like nowhere else, gives you the experience of being in a dense highly urbanised environment where the automobile is an irrelevance. Maybe we should give the tourists a couple of years off and simply use Venice as a therapeutic retreat for us to rinse our minds of car-dependency and prepare ourselves for the future.
Letās change gear now to a different level of subversion āthe way in which Venice positions itself as a city. Itās Italian for sure, but not wholly. Its long history of conquest and trade made Venice a more cosmopolitan city than most and this tradition remains, as if stored magnetically in the stonework. Italy is currently working its way through a long, painful contortionist dance in search of its identity. How else could it tolerate the long wasted and embarrassing years of the Berlusconi governments? Take a look at the political map of north eastern Italy you will find Venice is cut off from the world not only by sea but by a string of seats held by Lega Nord, a radical right wing party which has used the buffoonery of Berlusconi as a cover to build up a hard and intolerant core inside Italian political opinion. They include the Veneto Province and the city of Treviso whose Mayor is the appropriately named Gian Paolo Gobbo and has made aggressive and racist statements against migrants and minorities. Venetians meanwhile have continued to vote in politicians grounded in the ideas of liberal internationalism. The current Mayor, Giorgio Orsoni, has declared his intention to make Venice the āEuropean capital of human rightsā. Rhetoric possibly but, nevertheless, in a land currently awash in legitimised hate-speak this is a powerful and reassuring aspiration.
And letās not forget that Venice also seems determined to defy every attempt by the experts to prevent it submerging under its own weight and there canāt be anything more subversive than that.
