Marco de referencia para ACV: parámetros, hipótesis y consideraciones

In her classic anthropological account of pollution, disorder and danger, Mary Douglas (1966) claims that disorder spoils the pattern and at the same time is the very material of which the pattern consist. Where there is dirt there is system. The unwanted is disposed of so that order can be reestablished. This is a form of boundary maintenance and the context of the thing is fundamental to understand why it is perceived as an anomaly - as matter out of place. She guides our attention away from the thing itself and considers the context and the underlying systems of ordering and classification as the crucial element. It is difficult to write off the central importance of classifications and exclusions when dealing with industrial heritage sites like Kokerei Hansa. There some buildings are deemed more central than others. The

compressor house from 1928 which holds the Demag gas compressors is one such gem “of particular value” at “the core” of the site that constitutes the “highlight of every tour” (Pfeiffer and Strunk 2010: 21, 50, 38).

Buildings that were added later have been defined as less central because they fell outside the listing decision from 1998 which focused on the buildings from the 1920s and 1930s. A huge gasometer was demolished in 2005 and other buildings have also been dispensed with. The practice of heritage listing can be likened with a sanctioned forgetting which makes the material legacy of the industrial past less overwhelming and more manageable. It is a form of boundary maintenance which make the remaining parts of the built environment seem even more indispensable. Any form of historic preservation is always already a form of prescribed forgetting. The authority vested in specialists to designate heritage allows some buildings, objects and sites to be defined as less important. With the assessment by art historians, historians of technology, archaeologists, architects and planners a threshold is established where certain objects fall within and others fall out and are destined to pass into oblivion. It was maintained during IBA Emscher Park that “to remember can also mean to admit

transitoriness, not to create the impression that everything can be held onto” (in Raines 2011:

195). Debary (2004) goes further and claims that industrial heritage, more than a duty of remembrance is also a strategy of forgetfulness, a form of staging history fading into oblivion.

Subsequent to official heritage designation there are innumerable ways of going about preservation and making the industrial past sensible to visitors. These decisions range from the wording in phrase in a leaflet to prevent stones from falling from brick stone buildings.

Which action is more urgent and what decisions can wait? What can be done in the meantime to make a site accessible without intervening too hastily in the aura of a specific building or site? The critical view of cultural heritage as a negation of difference often exaggerates the stability of heritage both as a discursive and material practice. Kokerei Hansa illustrates how some things or buildings (like the compressor house) are confined to relative stability while others (such as the Sieberei) cannot be said to signify order or offer any stable, unilateral meaning.

The all too common binary of waste and heritage eclipses the compromises between man and matter, the provisional character, and the precautionary attitudes which sites like Kokerei Hansa actually bear witness of. This binary draws on the presumed violent antipathy to disorder, in the words of Douglas our condemnation of “any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications” (Douglas 1966). In a similar vein, the cultural geographer Tim Edensor understands heritage sites as commoditized memories which are grounded in spatially regulated and selective procedures which “banish epistemological and aesthetic ambiguity and disguise the innumerable ways of using objects, thereby limiting the interpretative and practical possibilities for those who encounter things” (Edensor 2005c:

312). Against this I will claim that specific instances of industrial heritage, either out of bare financial necessity or a more conscious conceptual approach - or probably both - include provisional solutions, trials and errors and minimal interventions. There is an innumerable range of choices and restrictions facing preservationists which escape the neat separation between canonized heritage and rejected waste. A professional tolerance for cognitive confusion and spatial ambiguity detract from the idea that a heritage site always occasion a spatial restructuring into “discrete, functional, single-purpose realms” (Edensor 2005c: 312).

Kokerei Hansa quite clearly provides a visual counterpoint to the modernist binaries that would suggest that such a rigid ordering of space could in fact be envisioned and it also implies that the discrete realms of things can be challenged with persuasive concepts like Industrienatur which actively encourages epistemological confusion. The core of the concept of Industrienatur as I have come to understand it is based on the recognition that the recession of the total industrial landscape produces irregularities which can never again be transformed into discrete, functional, single-purpose realms. In this regard it is important to take note of the of the foundation in charge of Kokerei which implied that the pressure of utilization can be stalled of in favor of a more precautionary approach which admits that we do not have the

full knowledge of potential uses, nor can we rule out the possibility of a buildings potential failure and inevitable demolition. To give things time is to admit the limited applicability of a strict rejection of the matter we call waste.

3.11 Conclusion

After a period of economic growth and optimism the giant smokestacks and blast furnaces of the Ruhr area gradually came to be regarded as part of a sustained structural economic crisis and were no longer the arbiters of future potential. As seen in this chapter the process of opening up and securing public access to former industrial plants has been an important part of the industrial heritage strategies in the Ruhr area. Public access to these sites is a key issue and at Kokerei Hansa this has been an overriding priority of the foundation in charge of the preservation of the former coke plant. In practice this entails securing the site structurally and making sure that physical obstacles to industrial sites have been removed. In the vicinity of abandoned production plants disused rail tracks and strips of fallow and contaminated land effectively hindered any systematic public encounter with the monuments of industry.

Consequently the opening of Kokerei Hansa to a general public in the Ruhr is a crucial event for two interrelated reasons. Firstly, to designate former industrial plants as cultural heritage is to define them as a part of the larger public sphere. It is transformed from private property to a public asset. Although technically owned by a foundation, it is a public matter made

accessible to anyone. Secondly, to designate former industrial plants as heritage makes them part of a wider public commitment.

The notion of Industrienatur which has been utilized as an important way to makes sense of the profoundly artificial nature of the Ruhr also raises some interesting questions concerning the limits of preservation in spatial, financial and aesthetic terms. At Kokerei Hansa

Industrienatur has been employed as method of underscoring the convergences of industry and nature converge and over time form complex entanglements which challenges the idea of nature and culture preservation as two distinctly separate enterprises. This has recourse to classic ruin theory which describes the creative tension between culture and nature which is played out in the form of the ruin as a form oscillating between durability and decay, culture and nature. At Kokerei Hansa too, it has been important for preservationists to let the sense of mystery persist which is normally evoked by the sight of time passed by uninterrupted. At the same time it was acknowledged that the surrender of industrial machinery and buildings to

nature in practice was environmentally unviable and unjustifiable. The greater public commitment to take care of the old burdens means to prevent further contamination from taking place and in terms of preservation the actual survival of core buildings remains the overriding priority.

The preservation strategies at Kokerei Hansa range from full-fledged restoration to minimal intervention where some structures are less meticulously restored or are framed by the rapid growth of birches. The minimal intervention is meant to leave something to the imagination of the visitors. It is a puzzle where some pieces are deliberately left out. Although the original function of the coke plant is described in detail, the attraction of the site cannot be accounted for only in terms of a close correlation between the original function and its present form.

Defamiliarization is a way of suspending our desire for immersion in the field of

representations. The kind of defamiliarization known from the theatre or film where the actors turn to the audience to address them directly to create a shock effect can hardly be envisioned in the context of in situ industrial heritage preservation. However, the form of

defamiliarization I think can apply to Kokerei Hansa is the way the surrounding regrowth makes the industrial structures seems strangely disjointed and out of place which again allows the aesthetic gaze to take a more prominent role. In situ preservation can certainly appeal to a close fit between representation and the represented creating an illusion of going back in time (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). The effect of Kokerei Hansa is wholly different in my opinion.

There the curatorial efforts are emphasized and the novel ways in which the site can be interpreted is stressed repeatedly as are the new means of seeing the industrial landscape from a different perspective. The efforts of maintaining a volatile balance between forces of nature and a cultural legacy is communicated openly. The result of these interventions is that the authors of the site never attempt to hide behind the masterful illusion of realism, but instead choose to give us vital clues in how to approach the site as a giant art work. On the fringes and less distinct heritage areas where the concentration of listed buildings is less dense and the presence of trees and bushes is particularly apparent is also where we engage critically with the representation and inquire in how far the ruination is designed and controlled or if unchecked ruination is taking hold of the site. To lose oneself in the illusion is what the defamiliarization ultimately seeks to avoid and it does so by piercing through the privileged status of the representation. To this end I think Kokerei Hansa succeeds in making us critically interrogate the form of representation we see. Kokerei Hansa has been firmly and deliberately detached from its “in itselfness” (Bennett 2005: 527).

This changeability is a crucial dimension to be stressed here; it is a dimension important to the larger stakes of defamiliarization of an object, building site which increasingly appear as a stranger to itself. Any intervention dislocates the site’s meaning from the exclusive associations with industrial production. The vast disparity between an industrial plant as a place of production and as a site designed for contemplation and excitement demonstrates this dilemma which arises where the productive forces no longer convincingly provide the exhaustive understanding of the site. The double bind of preservation is that historical relics are supposed both to resist change and acquire new properties to remain relevant. On the one hand, it is essential that they maintain a material concreteness regardless of changing cultural circumstances. On the other hand, they should be recognizable across different social situations and contexts. The desire to intervene as little as possible where possible and to let the material work with the forces of time and nature is a recognizable desire throughout the history of preservation.

The oxymoron concept of Industrienatur is different from the appeal of the untouched. It illustrates the impossibility of the immediate window onto the past. Instead it treats the redundant material as part of a tightly interwoven amalgam of nature and industry where the perception of nature as an idyllic refuge is thwarted. The new treatment of the industrial landscape, to which Kokerei Hansa belongs, is characterized by process of making visible, reopening and acknowledging the problems at hand. Aestheticization in this context is not something which works only to beautify and sanitize the industrial past. It also questions the given boundaries between waste and value and attempts to find the balance between consistency and changeability and between mere perseverance and active preservation. As I have claimed throughout this chapter, the tool of defamiliarization has been vital in this undertaking. The Industrienatur thriving at Kokerei Hansa offers a middle course between the controlled atmosphere of the museum and the indistinguishable, threatening chaos of a waste dump. As signs considered the industrial structures at Kokerei Hansa have been given a double coding; one the one hand they confirm the tremendous impact of the industrial modernity, on the other hand they admit its defeat. The green birches framing the coke battery at Kokerei Hansa might seem a minor detail, but it is essential to our understanding of the site.