Post Industrial Landscapes

“The opening sentence of Patrick Keiller’s new film, voiced with laconic precision and italic irony by Vanessa Redgrave, is calculated to quicken the hearts of admirers of Keiller’s enigmatic oeuvre: “When a man named Robinson was released from Edgecote open prison, he made his way to the nearest city and looked for somewhere to haunt.” Robinson in Ruins is the third of Keiller’s feature-length essay-fictions to deposit his eccentric protagonist among the relics of millennial England, where he functions once more as the comically half-deluded conduit for the director’s own brand of visionary scholarship. As a fictional invention, the autodidact aesthete Robinson, whom we only ever encounter via the films’ narrators’ vexed relations with him, is an absurd sort of wraith, tricked up from reminders of Defoe and Céline, but surely also a descendant of the Regency showman Robertson, inventor of the proto-cinematic phantasmagoria. In Robinson in Ruins, his spectral patch is the landscape around Keiller’s own home in Oxford: its industrial heritage, its residual romanticism, the weird energies of Englishness at a time of global economic collapse.

In successive close-ups, a patch of lichen on an Oxford road sign comes to resemble the profile of Goethe. Robinson, at large among the relics of military-industrial technology, eventually settles on a disused cement works, crumbling into romantic ruin, as the potential site of a new utopian community. The history of clearances and land riots ghosts the new landscape of PFI follies, unpeopled agribusiness and the amnesiac transformation of every fraught patch of land (Greenham Common included) into a Site of Special Scientific Interest. All of this is rendered, meanwhile, with Keiller’s customarily austere but rapt visual style – though in this case, as suits a film partly about the persistence of pastoral in the face of rapacious land grabs, the shots are longer. The camera tarries with fields of oil seed rape, nodding foxgloves and shivering primroses until they start to look monstrous, every bit as alien as the relics of 19th-century architecture and décor that so exercised the surrealists. Before Keiller’s (or Robinson’s) prophetic gaze, the English countryside is a monument to itself, and ripe for revolutionary appropriation.”

Text reproduced from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/nov/20/robinson-ruins-patrick-keiller-dillon (accessed 18/09/23)

“In ‘The Natural History of Staffordshire’, Dr Robert Plot, the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum describes an early account of the county’s pre-industrial pottery manufacturing during the late 17th century. Apart from documenting potters’ practices and processes, Plot details the region’s natural clays that were once fundamental to its rise as a world renowned industrial centre for ceramics. Yet in recent decades, the factories and communities of labour that historically developed around these natural resources have been subject to dramatic downturn. Global economics have resulted in much of the region’s ceramic industry outsourcing to low-cost overseas production.

Today, despite ongoing attempts to regenerate the city of Stoke-on-Trent, the economic fallout and human cost of the decline of traditional industry remain omnipresent throughout the six towns. Plot’s pre-industrial mapping of North Staffordshire in the 1680’s, has been echoed through the artistic research project Topographies of the Obsolete*, which has recently surveyed the region’s post-industrial landscape through a range of multi-media responses primarily centred around the former Spode factory site. Through various phases of on-site practice-led investigation, interconnected strands of discourse emerged that examine the socio-economic impact of globalization upon community and place, the contemporary ruin, and the artist as post-industrial archivist/archaeologist. Topographies of the Obsolete frames a particular point in time through which artists have opened up a different perspective to the complexities of socio–economic decline addressed by politicians, economists, historians and ex-employees. It documents both the aftermath of the Spode factory closure and the repurposing of its post-industrial fabric through processes of culture-led regeneration.

This one-day symposium will reflect upon this recent history. The topics uncovered through Topographies of the Obsolete will be expanded upon by a panel of experts previously unconnected to the project, from the fields of art and design, anthropology, urban sociology, critical theory and cultural geography. It will offer a broad range of inter-disciplinary perspectives surrounding the effects of de-industrialisation upon communities and landscapes, and the urban renewal of such cities through art and culture-led strategies.

*Topographies of the Obsolete is an international artistic research project initiated by Bergen Academy of Art and Design that explores the post-industrial landscape and its associated socio-economic histories, industrial architecture, production remnants through a range of interdisciplinary artistic practice. The project primarily explores how ceramic and clay can be understood as both material and subject in contemporary art practice.”

Text Reproduced from http://topographies.khib.no/events/2015/11/topographies-of-the-obsolete-s-symposium-at-the-ashmolean-museum-of-art-and-archaeology-university-of-oxford/.
Image reproduced from http://spodefactoryart.blogspot.co.uk/ [accessed 04/07/11]

Further Links: Thingness Essay, http://spodefactoryart.blogspot.co.uk/, http://topographies.khib.no/