Performing Ruins [1st ed.] 9783030406424, 9783030406431

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PERFORMING LANDSCAPES

Performing Ruins Simon Murray

Performing Landscapes Series Editors Deirdre Heddon Department of Theatre Film & TV Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Sally Mackey The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama London, UK

Performing Landscapes offers a critical study of generic and complex sites for performance, including forests, ruins, rivers, home, fields, islands and mountains. Distinctive to this series is that such landscape figures will be located both on and off the theatrical stage, approached as both material and representational grounds for performance-led analyses. With its unique focus on particular and singular sites, Performing Landscapes will develop in novel ways the debates concerning performance’s multiple relations to environment, ecology and global concerns. Editorial Board Professor Stephen Bottoms (University of Manchester) Professor Una Chaudhuri (New York University) Dr. Wallace Heim (independent scholar) Professor Carl Lavery (University of Glasgow) Professor Theresa J May (University of Oregon) Dr. Paul Rae (University of Melbourne) Professor Joanne Tomkins (University of Queensland) More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14557

Simon Murray

Performing Ruins

Simon Murray University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK

Performing Landscapes ISBN 978-3-030-40642-4    ISBN 978-3-030-40643-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40643-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: NVA St Peter’s Hinterland (Main block with light projection), March 2016. Image: Alaisdair Smith, courtesy of Angus Farquhar. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor’s Preface

The Performing Landscapes series provides an international platform for the first comprehensive critical study of generic but complex sites of performance landscapes, located on and off the theatrical stage and within and beyond the frame of cultural performance practices. Acknowledging and engaging with the nature-culture dynamics always already at play in any concept of and approach to ‘landscape’, authors’ original research and innovative methods explore how landscapes—such as mountains, ruins, gardens, ice, forests and islands—are encountered, represented, contested, materialised and made sense of through and in performance. Studies of singular landscape environments, experienced from near and afar, offer up rigorous historical, cultural and critical discussion and analysis through the dynamic and interdisciplinary lens of performance. In the context of the twenty-first-century climate changes the series also directs attention to performance’s diverse contributions to environmental debates. Performing Landscapes aims to understand better how specific landscape locations function as sites of and for performance and what performance practice and analyses does to and for our understanding of, and engagement with, landscapes. Glasgow, UK London, UK

Deirdre Heddon Sally Mackey

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Acknowledgements

This book has many authors and creative accomplices. I hope I have thanked below all those who have given me advice and information, identified ruined sites, located ‘ruinish’ performances and talked with me in myriad circumstances and places about ruins, performance and abandonment. It has been a journey of nearly five years and by the end of it I have—thankfully—(almost) exhausted all the bad jokes and puns about being ruined that I have regularly made along the route. The support I have received has come in various shapes and guises and I try to identify these below. All of it, however, has been thought-provoking, generous and helped me to unfold my understanding of how ruins work, how they perform and how they affect us in dark and ruinous times. During the making of this book I have undertaken many recorded conversations—I prefer this more open-ended term to that of ‘interview’—in Scotland, Wales, England, Greece, Poland, Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sicily. In this context I would like to offer the following huge thanks for so generously giving me their time, sometimes on more than one occasion: Phil Smith, Tim Etchells, David Williams, Mike Pearson, Tara (ts) Beall, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Carl Lavery, Anticlea Agrafiotis, Anna Tzakou, Anestis Azas, Angus Farquhar, Hayden Lorimer, Joachim Mannebach, Yvonne Whyte, Gigi Argyropoulou, Simos Kakalas, Damianos Konstantinides, Richard Rabensaat, Delia Bosch, Sebastien Scholz, Paolo Podrescu, Ali (Alexander) Schroeder, Carol McGuigan, Topsy Qur’et, Katarzyna Kosmala, Peter Lorenz, Ivan Skoko, Igor Vidačković, Dino Primorac, Marina Đapić, Jelena Basic, Sanja Burić, Nermin Hamzagić, Nihad Kreševljaković, Jacek Glomb, Magdalena Gołaczyńska, Tomasz vii

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Turketti, Robert Urbański, John Eames, Dan Kneafsy and Malgorzata Bulanda. In addition to these priceless encounters, many others have helped and advised me along the road, told me about performances in ruins—many of which sadly I have been unable to investigate—and suggested names of artists, performers and academics I should surely contact. In this context I must initially single out and thank Phil Smith who, at the beginning of my research, compiled a remarkably long list of ruin performances across the United Kingdom and beyond. My thanks in this respect also go to Claire MacDonald, John Hall, Maria Kapsali, Teresa Brayshaw, Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Apostolos Lampropoulos, Konstantinos Thomaidis, Sara Jane Bailes, Louise K.  Wilson, Roman Sebastyanski, Duncan Jamieson, Adela Karsnia, Michael Pinchbeck, Jalena Basic, ‘Bob’ Whalley, Trish Reid, Mark Evans, Simon Persighetti, Minty Donald, Nick Miller, Martin Spence, Roberta Mock, Sally Madge, Rachel Clive, Nigel Leask, David Archibald, Chris Crickmay, Jennie Crickmay, Macarena Andrews, Nicolo Stabile, Roddy Hunter, Judit Bodor, John Keefe and Vicky Price. I must particularly thank various friends and colleagues who have read draft chapters and given me feedback in their capacity as ‘critical friends’. Carl Lavery has been endlessly generous in this respect and we have had many productive and intriguing conversations over the years which have helped and guided me. Other readers, too, have been plentiful with their time: Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Anselm Heinrich, Mike Pearson, Richard Rabensaat, Joachim Mannebach, Ali Schroeder, Topsy Qur’et, Nihad Kreševljaković, David Williams, Anna Tzakou, Tara Beall, Angus Farquhar, Amph Thomson and Peter Lorenz. I discovered— in multiple senses—the startling wonders of Gibellina through David Williams and the heroic imaginations of Mostar through Peter Lorenz. I thank them both for their generosity, time, contacts and conversations. As a fellow author—of mountains—in the Performing Landscapes series, Jonathan Pitches has, as ever, been a source of great support, intelligence and advice during what, to a certain extent, has been a shared journey of writing, false starts, anxieties, discoveries and excitements. The lovely Theatre Studies team at the University of Glasgow has been patiently supportive in all these endeavours and our computer wizard Michael McCann has, as always, dealt tolerantly with my incompetence around various pieces of software. Many thanks, also, to photographer-artists, Richard Rabensaat, Tara Beall, Russ Basford and Steve Allison, who have let me

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use their images without cost. The front cover image of NVA’s Hinterland was taken by Alaisdair Smith and I must thank him and Angus Farquhar for generously allowing me to use this without cost as well. I’m delighted that my front cover makes a small contribution to remembering NVA’s St Peter’s project. I must thank the Performing Landscapes series editors, Dee Heddon and Sally Mackey, for their support, thoughtfulness and trust in giving me this project and coaxing me on at difficult and hesitant moments. Their feedback after the first full draft of the manuscript was incisive, properly demanding and generous. At Palgrave Macmillan, in the final stages of preparing the manuscript, Jack Heeney has been most diligent and endlessly obliging in responding to my numerous questions and uncertainties. And finally, of course, my wife, Wendy (Kirkup), daughter Isla and our dog, Tally, have had a lot to put up with over these five years of ruinous thinking and writing. I suspect that they are heartily relieved to see the project well and truly ruined. I thank all three of them, particularly the Labrador in whose walking presence I had a ‘conceptual breakthrough’ around how to structure what you have in your hands. Many generative and thoughtful conversations with Wendy have guided me more than she realises, and at the end her technical skills around assembling and presenting images have been absolutely invaluable. Thank you all.

Contents

1 Introduction: Ruining the Project, Subjectivities, Fields and Methods  1 Ruination as Structure of Feeling   4 Performing Ruins, Situated Practices and Writing Performance: A Partial Vision   7 An Elasticity of Ruins and Matters of Definition   9 My Europe  10 Resisting Homogeneity Whilst Seeking Associations: An Overview of Chapters  13 Questions to Ask a Ruin in Ruined Times  19 Bibliography  20 2 Ruins in Context: Context in Ruins 21 Discourse: Thinking Through Ruins  22 Contemporary Thinking and ‘Ruin Porn’  25 A Poetics of Dereliction: Ruins Across the Arts  27 The Allure of Ruination in Theatre and Performance  31 Bibliography  38 3 Performing the Antiquary: Classical Ruins in the Greek Imaginary 41 The Role of Antiquary in the Greek Imaginary  41 Makronisos and Giaros: The Ruin as Political (Re)education  44

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Performing the Classical Ruins of Ancient Greece: Epidaurus and Delphi  47 Theatres of Epidaurus  48 The Delphic Idea  55 Bibliography  58 4 Nature’s Ruins: Gibellina–A Dream in Progress 61 Belice Valley: Earthquakes and the Birth of Nuova Gibellina  62 Il Cretto di Burri  70 Theatre, Performance and Joseph Beuys  72 Orestiadi Foundation and the Museum of Mediterranean Weaving  75 End Words: But Impermanent and Provisional  77 Bibliography  82 5 Dissonance and Contestation: Ruining Heritage and Its Alternatives 85 Reactivating Industrial Ruins of the Ruhr: Duisburg-Nord’s Landschaftspark and Essen’s Zollverein  86 Zollverein and PACT in Essen  87 Landschaftspark in Duisburg-Nord  93 St Peter’s Kilmahew and NVA: A Place for Our Times 102 St Peter’s and the Kilmahew Estate: A Brief History 103 NVA and St Peter’s 107 NVA/St Peter’s: Pause or Ending; Dotted Line or Epitaph? 118 Postscript: St Peter’s/NVA—Another Ending 121 Bibliography 125 6 Legacies of War: Performing Balkan Ruins127 Mostar: ‘The First Thing You See Are Ruins…’ 128 Leaving Mostar: Reflections on Dramaturgy 141 Under Siege: Sarajevo’s Theatres Against Death, 1992–1995 144 Normality 151 Resistance 152 Symbols of Dignity and Freedom 155 Texts of War in and Beyond Sarajevo 158 Performing Memory (1): Sarajevo Red Line 159

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Performing Memory (2): Bolero 160 Performing Memory (3): Vraca Memorial Park, Nermin Hamzagić and Copenhagen  161 Waiting in Sarajevo: Sontag’s Godot 163 Twenty-Five Years on: The Sarajevo War Theatre (SARTR) 170 Bibliography 172 7 Ruins of Capital175 Ruination and Performance in Contemporary Greece 176 The Mavili Collective, Embros and Green Park 177 Anna Tzakou: A Geopoetic Response to Ruination 184 Elefsina, The Old Oil Mill and the Promise of European ‘City of Culture’ 186 North Beyond Athens: Thessaloniki 193 Beyond Athens: From the Argos Festival to Universal Topos 198 Gathering Threads: Reflections on Reactivating Greek Ruins, Ancient and Modern 199 Brith Gof: Performing Occupations 203 Performing the Shipyard Ruins of Govan and Gdansk 214 Gdansk Shipyards 1999–2014 216 Govan: The Graving Docks and Beyond 220 Govan and Gdansk Collaborative Projects, 2012–2020 224 Govan and Gdansk: Unfinished Narratives 228 Bibliography 230 8 After Communism and the Cold War: A Ruined Inheritance233 Performing Cold War Ruins in Berlin 233 Berlin and the Wall as Diasporic Ruin 234 Field Station Berlin and the Devil’s Mountain 237 Kunsthaus Tacheles (1990–2012) and Paolo Podrescu 249 The Ruination and Reinvention(s) of Flughafen Tempelhof 258 Polish Ruin Theatre in Wroclaw and Legnica 264 Wroclaw’s Theatres of Ruins 265 Legnica and Teatr Modjeska: ‘a most ruinish theatre company’ 268 Polish Postscript: Crumpled Paper and the Ruinous Emballages of Tadeusz Kantor 280 Bibliography 283

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9 Conclusion: Ruining the Ruin or Pausing at a Partial View287 Bibliography 294 Bibliography297 Index309

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6

Samuel Beckett, London 1976. (Image: Jerry Bauer) Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion. Wiki Commons. Upload 2 July 2008 by Dorieo21. (Author: Stell*R) Theatre of Epidaurus. Wiki Commons. Upload 27 June 2013. (Author: Ronny Siegel) Theatre of Delphi. Wiki Commons. Upload 24 July 2012 (Author: Challisrussi) Nuova Gibellina: Pietro Consagra’s unfinished Teatro Nova. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Nuova Gibellina. Pietro Consagra’s Stella L’Ingresso del Belice. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Memorial stone for Ludovico Corrao, Nuova Gibellina. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Montagna di Sale (Mountain of Salt) Orestiadi Foundation Museum, Nuova Gibellina. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Il Cretto, Alberto Burri at site of ruined Gibellina. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Il Cretto, Alberto Burri at site of ruined Gibellina. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) PACT (Art Centre), Zollverein. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) Coal Washing Plant (Bauhaus) Zollverein. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) PACT Summer Programme 2018, Zollverein. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) PACT Studio Zollverein. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) Blast furnaces, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) Water channels, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

33 47 48 49 65 66 66 67 67 68 90 91 91 92 96 97

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Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10 Fig. 5.11 Fig. 5.12 Fig. 5.13 Fig. 5.14 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 Fig. 6.9 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. 7.7 Fig. 7.8 Fig. 7.9 Fig. 7.10

Gantry crane and elevated rail tracks, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) Theatre in the old Blowing House, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) Frieze by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) Old Power Station and performance space, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) Kilmahew St Peter’s, Cardross. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Kilmahew St Peter’s, Cardross. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Kilmahew St Peter’s Open Doors Event, August 2017. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Kilmahew St Peter’s, Cardross. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Staklena Banka (Bank), Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Stara Biblioteka (Old Library), Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Stara Biblioteka graffiti, Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Konak Barracks, Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Pockmarked ruin, Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Partisans Park, Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) If you are looking for hell … Contemporary Art Gallery, Sarajevo. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Partisans Park, Sarajevo. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Susan Sontag Square, Sarajevo. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Green Park Café, Athens. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Old Oil Mill (performance space), Elefsina, Greece. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Old Oil Mill (temporary theatre seating) Elefsina, Greece. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Old Oil Mill (ceramic installation) Elefsina, Greece. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Thessaloniki covered market awaiting demolition, 2017. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Thessaloniki covered market (abandoned music cafe), 2017. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Thessaloniki Kodra Barracks (theatre space). (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Thessaloniki Kodra Barracks installation. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Thessaloniki Kodra Barracks. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Wall graffiti signed by ‘The People’, Omonia Square, Athens. August 2016. (Image: Simon Murray 2016)

97 98 98 99 106 106 107 108 130 130 131 131 132 133 149 162 170 182 190 191 191 195 196 196 197 197 201

  LIST OF FIGURES 

Fig. 7.11 Fig. 7.12 Fig. 7.13 Fig. 7.14

Fig. 7.15 Fig. 7.16 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 8.6 Fig. 8.7 Fig. 8.8 Fig. 8.9 Fig. 8.10 Fig. 8.11 Fig. 8.12 Fig. 8.13 Fig. 8.14

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Mike Pearson in The Lesson of Anatomy, 1974. (Image: Steve Allison)213 Mike Pearson in The Lesson of Anatomy, 2014. (Image: Russ Basford)213 Creative intervention highlighting train tracks on Toolmaker’s Street in Gdansk Imperial Shipyard by Ben Parry and Lee Ivett (2015). (Image: Ben Parry, courtesy t s Beall) 223 Words Walking – Feminist Poems and Songs of Solidarity in Gdansk Imperial Shipyard, devised by Metropolitanka’s Anna Miler and t s Beall (UWS Summer School 2015). (Image: Graham Jeffery, courtesy t s Beall) 224 Chalking and commemorating July 1917: 14,000 Marched For Peace. ‘Strong Women of Clydeside’ artwalk, 2018. Lydia Levitt pictured. (Image: Chris Leslie, courtesy t s Beall) 225 Govan Docks during Govan Beacon, 2010. (Image: Ben Rush, courtesy t s Beall) 225 Berlin Wall fragment, 1990. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) 234 Biljana Bosnjakovic, PURGE, Teufelsberg, Berlin, August 2016. (Image: Richard Rabensaat 2016) 245 Biljana Bosnjakovic, PURGE, Teufelsberg, Berlin, August 2016. (Image: Richard Rabensaat 2016) 245 Teufelsberg Radome Tower, Berlin. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) 250 Teufelsberg US architecture students presenting future plans for transformation of site, Berlin. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) 250 Teufelsberg, bike sculpture, Berlin. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) 251 Teufelsberg cartoon slabs, Berlin. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) 251 Tacheles building awaiting redevelopment. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) 255 You gentrify, We occupy. Street message, Berlin. (Simon Murray 2018)256 Tempelhof Airport Terminal, Berlin. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)261 Teatr Ad Spectatores, abandoned water works building, Wroclaw. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) 267 Teatr Ad Spectatores, company base Wroclaw. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) 267 Teatr Modjeska, abandoned Piekerach supermarket performance site, Legnica. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) 278 Teatr Modjeska Made in Poland, Legnica. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) 278

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Fig. 8.15 Fig. 8.16

Teatr Modjeska theatre posters, Legnica. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) Teatr Modjeska—Jacek Glomb, Tomasz Turketti & Malgorzata Bulanda in Legnica (13 May 2018). (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Ruining the Project, Subjectivities, Fields and Methods

If everything is lost, what is this thing we are left with? Ruins are what we are left with when everything is lost, but this is far from nothing. (Etchells 2018, n.p.)

I come to ruins through the fictions of J.G. Ballard and W.G. Sebald; through the writing and performance practices of Samuel Beckett and Forced Entertainment; through a post-war childhood growing up in the 1950s near London and sometimes playing on bombsites amongst Rosebay Willowherb (fireweed) and Buddleia; through media exposure to the war ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane, Hanoi, Kosovo, Damascus, Sarajevo, Aleppo and many, many more; through the abandoned steelworks, pitheads and engineering works of Tyneside, Teesside, Glasgow and North Lanarkshire; through an abundance of contemporary performance work sited outwith the proscenium arch or black box studio; through growing old(er) and through a sometimes acute sense of a lived body pursuing an inexorable pathway towards ruination. Somewhere in all this, I am propelled, too, by a childhood memory of perplexing clarity from exploring a deserted and derelict farmhouse with my family in rural Sussex when I was about six  years old in the early 1950s. We were poking around in the upstairs rooms when my mother announced quite sharply that we should leave at once because this was an ‘unhappy’ house and she felt ill at ease. My mum was not given to psychic outbursts such as this and I can’t remember whether the rest of the family felt similarly disquieted. However, this was certainly my first encounter with a sense of the uncanny (Das © The Author(s) 2020 S. Murray, Performing Ruins, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40643-1_1

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Unheimliche), defined loosely as that blend of the familiar and unfamiliar which is experienced as being peculiar, mysterious and unsettling. Much later I was to learn that this was a common trope of described sensations when encountering ruined sites. For Freud, when in the presence of the Acropolis in 1904, the ruin activated a strong sense of the uncanny which in turn provoked repressed schoolboy memories that he attributed to oedipal guilt (Laveryand Gough 2015, p. 2). In his elegant book, The Last of the Light: About Twilight, Peter Davidson evidently encountered similarly abandoned post-war houses. He writes: In blue and green landscapes, drained of their nature by winter dusk, remote abandoned buildings, shuttered against the season, feel as if they are summoning shadow inhabitants to people them. In those days, there were still empty and partly ruinous houses far into the foggy fields, open to our rash exploration. Almost everywhere still there was the post-war sense of places abandoned, remote even then in what seemed a deserted landscape, one that now seems intensely crowded. (Davidson 2015, p. 92)

What kind of book have I written? One which, I hope, responds sensitively and creatively to the aims and ambitions of the Performing Landscapes series by engaging with the micro and macro landscapes—both material and metaphorical—of ruination, the agencies and ecologies of performance in ruined locations and which helps to trace the nature/culture dynamics of derelict sites. However, it is not quite the book I had planned when I first embarked on its writing. In some crucial respects, I have at least partially ruined the structure and the edifice of the book I originally proposed. This was not a wilful or perverse act of destruction, rather through an emerging sense of (a) the danger of producing a reductive, baggy and sprawling volume largely based on secondary research materials, which tried to cover too much ground and therefore lacked focus and coherence; (b) an awareness that the discoveries you make as a creative venture unfolds often invite the project to follow new and perhaps unanticipated directions, moods and dispositions; and (c) a sharpening clarity around what species of writer I am and what sort of writing I am capable of. The ‘sprawling bagginess’ issue generated an ever-sharper awareness that I had to identify an appropriate set of contours and constraints in the construction of the book. ‘Discoveries’ in this context are always a mixed blessing, inviting appetite and excitement on the one hand and, on the other, a cautionary awareness that unearthing unanticipated new

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materials, ideas and investigations may encourage too much departure from the core concerns of the original project. The issue of the texture, form and function of my writing became a preoccupation as I began to carve out the chapters you see before you. A perplexing mix of feeling pleased (enough) with the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of my writing and sometimes incapacitating anxieties that what I was producing was inadequate for an academic volume. I return to this below. In the following chapter I provide an overview of the field of Ruin Studies, but suffice it to say at this juncture—and over the last two decades—these have become popular and crowded meadows indeed. My initial research swiftly revealed that multiple lenses were being applied to ruin and ruination through the often-overlapping perspectives of archaeology, urban studies, literature, cultural geography, social history, visual arts, cultural studies, heritage, photography and film. Curiously, theatre and performance studies seemed conspicuously absent from this busy landscape, an exception being in and around the territories of site-sensitive or site-specific practices where performance (in all its manifestations) has, with increasing enthusiasm, abandoned the habitual limitations of the proscenium arch and the black box studio. Here, examined in more detail later, the work and writings of Mike Pearson (Pearson and Shanks 2001; Pearson 2006, 2010; Pearson and Turner 2018) are particularly salient. Reasons for this attention—a turn or a moment—to ruin, dereliction and abandonment perhaps merit works of sociology or cultural studies in their own right. A significant feature of this turn, manifested particularly in my book, is the preoccupation with contemporary rather than ancient ruins. Less a re-visiting of Tintern Abbey, Machu Picchu, the Roman Agora, Pompeii, the Acropolis and Gothic castles, much more a passionate engagement with the ruins and detritus of warfare and those left—directly or indirectly—in the wake of an endlessly restless capital seeking new markets and enhanced profitability. Throughout the five-year lifespan of preparing this book, I would regularly reflect on the question of why this particular period (late twentieth/ early twenty-first century) has spawned such interest in ruins. Of course, ‘interest’—often a far too benign term—begins, on the one hand, with those people whose homes have been destroyed through warfare, political agency or apparent ‘acts of God’ such as earthquakes, floods, tsunamis and hurricanes and, on the other, with those whose livelihoods have been ruined by the exigencies of economic change and industrial decline. Beyond the painful histories of people who have had such a raw

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investment in these sites before they were destroyed or abandoned into dereliction, there are significant constituencies of interest whose business it has become to excavate ruins for what they can afford or enable in terms of either intellectual labour or as material sites to be visited as tourist and heritage locations, and as—sometimes illicit—spaces of adventure, trespass, play and love-making. And beyond these typologies of investment in ruins, there are the multiple engagements of artists, filmmakers, photographers and performance makers, and, of course, herein lies the field of enquiry for this project. Linking many of these constituencies are the shape-shifting behaviours and purposes of activism and protest. Here, the ruined site in question can absolutely be the object and subject of dissent and action, or a kind of spatial surrogate for other furies, causes and missions.

Ruination as Structure of Feeling In an issue of the Performance Research journal On Ruins and Ruination (2015), editors Carl Lavery and Richard Gough respond to their own question as to what explains the recent resurgence of interest in ruins and their meanings. They write: It is surely no coincidence that the new fascination with ruins should arise at a moment of profound ontological and epistemological uncertainty, a period in which the temporal horizons that defined modernity in the West are under threat as a result of human-induced climate change, economic transformation and ‘crisis’, terrorist attacks, a quasi-permanent state of global warfare, digital technologies and renewed fears about nuclear destruction. (Lavery and Gough 2015, p. 1)

If this is an astute distillation of the temper of the times which frames our current preoccupations with ruin (concrete noun) and ruination (abstract noun), it is not a formulation which only applies to academic and intellectual pursuits. Much more than this, I take Lavery and Gough’s words to suggest a pervasive ‘structure of feeling’1 (Williams 1997) produced by many strata and interests within Western societies. Although, of course, it was never articulated as ‘ontological and epistemological uncertainty’, time and again during my fieldwork excursions I would hear artists, performers, activists or curators express a mood or experience of ruination beyond, or separate from, the material ruin in question. Often,

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I encountered an elision between ruin (concrete noun), ruin (verb) and ruination (abstract noun). The material ruin, it seemed, was often difficult to discuss or understand without slipping into wider feelings and states of apprehension and uneasiness about economic decay, political disillusion and a tangible waning of optimism. In my conversations with Phil Smith,2 he talked about ‘living through a sense of end times’ and the ‘beginning of the end of post-war optimism’ (Smith 2018), and these feelings were further contextualised by the all-encompassing frame of living through the Anthropocene and environmental catastrophe. For Smith, however, and like others I encountered, ruins are ‘not ends when stories have ended, but dynamic sites, full of layers, all talking to each other, always agendive’. He went on, ‘enter a ruin as if you were meeting it, expect ruins to be active, rude, pulling rank, not speaking’ (Ibid). These propositions are revisited later in the book, particularly in relation to Chap. 5 on the St Peter’s/NVA (nacionale vitae activa) Seminary project. For Raymond Williams, ‘structure of feeling’ offers a form of thinking which invites an interweaving relationship between the social and the personal, the structural and the experiential, and the macro perspective with the micro. Cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, offers a complementary construct with which one could frame this sense of ruination. In the context of this book, Hall, reformulating both Gramscian notions of hegemony and Williams’ ‘structure of feeling’ might have put it something like this: ‘what is the “present conjuncture” that drives us to become acutely sensitised to ruin and ruination?’ In a conversation with political activist and cultural geographer, Doreen Massey, Hall says: It’s partly about periodization. A conjuncture is a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape. (Hall and Massey 2010, p. 57)

The ‘present conjuncture’ seems to provide us with a diagnostic set of tools with which to identify and grapple with current calamities and discontents. The term and mode of thinking, or analysis, not only offers up ruination as a productive lens to examine the material and social world, it also obliges us, in a way that has perhaps never been the case in other epochs, to engage with the force fields of ecology and environmental catastrophe. Antonio Gramsci’s description of the 1930s might be appropriate for Hall’s ‘present conjuncture’ when he wrote, ‘the crisis consists

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precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (Gramsci 1971, pp.  275–6). A mood echoed and reconstituted by performance maker, Tim Etchells3 quoted at the beginning of this chapter when, in a programme note for an installation, he writes that ‘Ruins are what we are left with when everything is lost, but this is far from nothing’ (Etchells 2018, n.p.). It is the territory of the ‘far from nothing’ which this book occupies. In addition to the idiosyncratic lineage which I have with ruins—articulated in the opening paragraph of this chapter—I have also found myself drawn strongly to the thoughts articulated above by the likes of Lavery, Gough, Smith and Etchells, who together identify a structure of feeling where a sense of ruination is palpable. For myself, and these performance makers, artists and writers, coming to terms with and understanding ruins requires not only a perpetual awareness of context but also an approach which does not presume a single angle of incidence into the ruin—an approach which necessarily embraces the instability (literally and figuratively) of the ruin, which rejects unitary explanatory narratives and which is open to the possibilities of thought and practice that the ruin affords and enables. Etchells’ ‘this is far from nothing’ resonates with Smith’s resolute commitment to accept ruins as generative and productively provocative places, whilst at the same time acknowledging that contemporary ruins are almost always begat from the ‘present conjuncture’ of living in ruinous times. W.G.  Sebald and Samuel Beckett are writers arguably obsessed with ruination and both share a perspective that out of the wreckage—out of material and psychological desolation—conditions can emerge for regeneration and living life differently. Although from his post-war experience of working for the Irish Red Cross in the devastated Normandy town of St-Lo in 1945, Beckett found ‘humanity in ruins’ (Beckett 1986, p. 76), he nonetheless concludes, somewhat startlingly perhaps, with the suggestion that the ruins of St-Lo offer an ‘inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again’ (Ibid). Sebald’s writing is preoccupied with ruination at a number of complex levels, but unlike many contemporary writers on ruin, he is prepared unequivocally to embrace melancholy as an appropriate—although only initial—emotional response to devastation and destruction. Sebald attempts to rescue melancholy from Freud’s dismissal of the condition as an indulgent and unproductive form of mourning (1917). He writes:

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Melancholy, the re-thinking of the disaster we are in, shares nothing with the desire for death. It is a form of resistance. And this is emphatically so on the level of art, where its function is far from merely reactive or reactionary. When, with a fixed gaze, melancholy again reconsiders just how things could have gone this far, it becomes clear that the dynamic of inconsolability and of knowledge are identical in function. In the description of the disaster lies the possibility of overcoming it. (Sebald qtd. in Melancholia; A Sebald Variation, 2017, n.p.)

In the stories and case studies which follow, I believe it is possible to identify small ‘inklings’ and acts of restitution—often only temporary— which hint at optimism in the face of potentially disabling melancholy. Many of the cultural interventions in the lives of ruins which I describe and reflect upon are certainly small acts within the wider cosmology of environmental disaster, but in their own times may be performed moments of resistance, reinvention and restitution. The drivers of artistic interventions in ruined spaces and the force fields they represent are multiple and various. However, underlying this heterogeneity, it is possible to trace common patterns of performance practice, and the events and projects identified here offer associative links and connected tissues of thought and intention.

Performing Ruins, Situated Practices and Writing Performance: A Partial Vision This book is constructed through a number of encounters with ruined locations and the participant actors (theatrical and non-theatrical) who have made work in these spaces. It is not a book framed and driven by theory, nor does it work through a single discipline or subject. It is, however, a critically reflective book which attempts to position, align and, where appropriate, find patterns in the projects and practices investigated through the overlapping lens of theatre, performance and cultural studies. It is a book which allows for singularities and heterogeneities and one which does not follow a rigid structure, but is elastic enough to encompass different theories of ruination, different ways of writing about ruins and their affordances and with different depths of focus and analysis. Where possible I have constructed much of this writing through personal encounters, conversations and site visits, although in almost all cases these have been embellished and contextualised through more conventional

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academic research and reading. In all the chapters which follow I have quoted frequently from conversations I had with artists, theatre makers, writers and activists who generously gave me their time and shared their thoughts. When citing these ‘creative accomplices’ (as I call them in Acknowledgements), I have broken with the formality of academic tradition and refer to them by their first names. Surname alone suggests a distance and formality which I rarely felt at the time, or in situ. For the more obviously academic citations, I default to the habitual conventions of publishing and use surnames alone. The work has been a situated practice in the sense first coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) within the field of learning and pedagogy. Here I understand situated practices of investigation to take place within the context(s) they are enacted and where researchers have a degree of physical immersion and lived contact with the field of their enquiry. I have harnessed Lave and Wenger’s ideas of situatedness in an oblique and intuitive way, but I have also drawn on the insights of ethnography for which my original training in sociology and social anthropology offered some preparation. My approach to writing this book—or at least the case studies which constitute the bulk of the matter before you—has been heuristic, situated and ethnographic: much, but not all, of what I have written has been the result of sensing, seeing and hearing people and places. However, these approaches have always been offered within an outer frame of reflective contextualisation, and here I have attempted to position the apparently singular practices and projects encountered within an historical and political milieu and perspective. My own lived experience in a variety of working activities over a span of 50 years—teacher, university lecturer, adult educationist, trade union activist and educator, actor-­ performer and theatre maker—has helped to shape and form the approaches which constitute this book. Sometimes very consciously, often quite intuitively, the structure and way of writing have emerged out of these diverse experiences of living and working. I remain (largely) confident that this blend of methods, dispositions and ways of seeing are mutually and productively complementary. The book remains, nonetheless and inevitably, an idiosyncratic and partial vision. The content, substance and methods of this enquiry have, I believe, significantly helped to shape both the way I have written the book and its final structure and organisation. Probably, we only write in the way we know and this for me has required moving between different registers of writing: the descriptive, the critically reflective, the speculative, the

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conversational, the anecdotal and the occasionally lyrical. Such a broad palette seems congruent with both the situatedness of my approach, a loosely ethnographic method and the insights of theatre and performance studies harnessed to understand the behaviours and practices of cultural work in ruinous contexts.

An Elasticity of Ruins and Matters of Definition A challenge from the outset lay in the question of how to define a ruin, what parameters and boundaries I should impose. There are at least two complexities in finding a coherent and pragmatic response to this question. The first lies in the understanding I swiftly acquired through analytical and theoretical readings around the ruin, namely that material ruins are never fixed or static. They are always in process of becoming, either before reaching their ultimate point of total erasure or being reconstituted in a new form, and this understanding applies both to a ruin’s material actuality and to the perspectives, behaviours and feelings generated by such sites. A prosaic, but valuable insight into this tells us that, without constant upkeep, maintenance and repair, all built environments are on the road to ruin. As I raise in Chap. 3, ‘Performing the Antiquary’, this understanding offers up the conundrum that the glorious ancient ‘ruin’ theatre of Epidaurus, for example, with millions of Euros spent on it for safety, aesthetic and maintenance reasons may be significantly less close to being a ruin than an office or domestic tower block lacking regular upkeep and repair. The second complexity in defining a ruin lies—in Britain and much of the Western world at any rate—through an almost default visual lens of perceiving the archetypal ruin as the crumbling feudal castle, the transcendent and evocatively decaying medieval abbey or the heritage-preserved buildings of the Roman Coliseum or the Athenian Acropolis. If such images and ways of seeing remain a widespread perception of what ruins ought to look like, this is largely due to the way such decay has been represented through classical painting (e.g. Piranesi, Turner, Constable, Goya, Bruegel, Friedrich and Canaletto) and the romantic poetry and literature from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Although the dominant focus of this book is on more contemporary ruins, I have an elastic definition of ‘contemporary’ stretching back down the twentieth century. Such ruins may not have been aestheticised through classical painting, but, arguably, what modern photography has done for the ruins of Detroit, for example, the brush strokes of Turner or Constable did for

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Tintern Abbey (1792) and Hadleigh Castle (1829) respectively. In the chapters that follow I have deliberately not been shy of using synonyms for ‘ruin’ or ‘ruined’ such as abandoned, dilapidated/dilapidation, decay/ decayed, derelict/dereliction and deserted. Semantically, of course, there are nuanced differences between these words, but they have served my purpose both to acknowledge the lack of fixity in the ruin and to avoid the overly romanticised connotations of representations of ancient castles, theatres, palaces, abbeys and peasant hovels.

My Europe For a long time the emerging structure and composition of the book felt problematic as initially I divided chapters up into overly arbitrary geographical categories and delineations. For a time these made sense to me as they spoke of my often associative and rhizomatic approaches to the where and how of my fieldwork visits. However, when signed as cities or countries through chapter headings, it became clear that these would make little sense to the reader and could only be justified in embarrassingly solipsistic terms. When I had committed myself to fieldwork as the dominant methodological frame, it became almost inevitable that my geographical compass was going to be limited to the continent of Europe. This was circumstantial in terms of the projects, people and sites I had received substantial advice in identifying, and pragmatic in terms of expense, time and other resources. Thus, the performing ruins of Europe became both the object of my enquiry and a way of thinking through and framing my choices for fieldwork. Probably all choices for research are a blend of chance, intuition and rational or deductive planning, and as one is immersed in these activities it is often hard to know which one of these conditions is driving the particularities of the enquiry at any one time. Through the advice of friends and colleagues, I developed what might be described as initial steps in forging a cartography of ruins. It had become clear to me that organising the book on the basis of typographies or genres of performance hosted by ruined locations was never going to produce a generative way of structuring the results of my research. If the title of my book had focused solely on theatre in abandoned places, then organising categories of genre might just have worked, but, given the compass of the whole Performing Landscapes series and the imperatives of performance studies, I needed to accept the porosity of performance modes and the performative. Thus, my case studies encompass projects and activities at

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one end of a continuum which are unequivocally ‘theatre’ (e.g. Epidaurus or Legnica) but at the other which engage with the performative behaviours of art activists occupying sites in Berlin or Athens. Alongside these behaviours, I also encountered the ways in which ruins perform as tourist sites, markers of heritage and spaces for play, love-­ making and remembrance. What my research and fieldwork revealed was that certain categories of ruined location generate or afford the conditions for cultural or activist rituals and behaviours that may seem quite singular, but which actually reveal repeated patterns of performed actions. The ways of seeing, of thinking and of sensing afforded by the perspectives of performance studies allow this account to move across and between some of the boundaries traditionally demarcated in the academic study of ruins. Moreover, the generative heterogeneity of ruin both as material object and as mood, atmosphere and thought, offers a serendipitous relationship with the histories and methodologies of performance studies. Whilst I embarked on the project with this framework firmly planted as methodology, I was regularly surprised—and pleased—by the productive discoveries it enabled as I moved from site to site and from protagonist to protagonist. Having rejected my initial impulse to organise the ruinous practices, projects and events which follow into geographical—urban or nation-­ state—categories, I instead opted for presenting these accounts under broad socio-cultural headings which emerge largely from the drivers that initially propelled the ruination of these different places and locations. Schematically and elastically, material ruination is generated by the following (overlapping) force fields: economic change and decline, warfare (‘hot’ or ‘cold’) or the incipient threat of military conflict, natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and typhoons) and the apparent inevitability of entropic decline and disintegration. Hence, I have identified a number of consolidating frames (signed as chapters) within which to place case studies of cultural interventions in—or occupations of—ruined sites. That these are leaky and far from water-tight categorisations must be obvious. For example, economic forces of ruination may become hard to distinguish from those of warfare. However, whilst accounts of theatre during the siege of Sarajevo self-evidently must be placed within the ‘Legacies of War’ chapter, the extraordinary story of Gibellina’s ruination through the natural forces of an earthquake, and subsequent cultural restitution, might equally have been positioned within ‘Dissonance and Contestation: Ruining Heritage and Its Alternatives’.

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And, of course, the accounts of Zollverein and Landschaftspark, both unusual examples of ‘Heritage’, are absolutely the consequence of economic decline and upheaval. The selection of the frames in which to situate the various activities I visited over a two-year (or longer) period offers an organising perspective—a way of seeing and placing—diverse projects both through the lens of history and through the insights of cultural and performance studies. Chapter 3 entitled ‘Performing the Antiquary: Classical Ruins in the Greek Imaginary’ breaks with these self-imposed protocols identified because, for a study with significant geographical focus in Southern Europe, it seemed perverse not to devote at least one chapter to ancient ruins. Regular visits to Greece generated a palpable awareness of the role that the classical ruins of antiquary play in that country’s identity and in the construction of its collective imagination. Hence, my writings around Epidaurus and Delphi reveal something about how contemporary Greece deals with its ancient ruins—economically, archaeologically and culturally—whilst these sites perform, produce, reproduce and sustain the Greek nation’s understanding of itself, both past and present. The seven countries—Germany, Poland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, Sicily, Scotland and Wales—were chosen for two broad sets of reasons. First, these were countries, or often more specifically towns and cities, where conversations with friends and academic colleagues had suggested I would find some rich and complex examples of ‘ruin performance’. An interesting and curious reflection at this juncture is to note how research methodologies (not methods) may in part be generated through the bonds of friendship and social proximity. A different configuration of these might have led me, for example, to Belgium, Portugal, Estonia or Romania and not to those countries which populate the rest of this volume. Moreover, throughout these exchanges the information I was receiving became suffused with an almost innate consciousness of being ‘European’ and with 50 years of my own embodied memories, a European ‘Habitus’4 perhaps. This is ‘my Europe’. By the end of these interactions—often ongoing throughout the whole project—I had an inventory of possibilities which would have taken decades to explore and investigate. Second, I made crucial decisions about which sites to visit and which artists to seek out for conversation on the basis of different tropes or typologies of cultural intervention in ruins I had already identified, formulated and thought about. Of course, these decisions about location, often borne out of the pragmatics of time and finance, mean that the book has become Eurocentric

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in its content and direction, and this is a source of some regret for a range of obvious reasons. Such Eurocentricity risks that what follows is less culturally and racially diverse than a wider geographical purview might have afforded. Moreover, this is also a limited and fractional mapping of Europe: countries like France, Spain, England, Denmark, the Netherlands, Slovakia (and many others) do not figure in this account. Any one of these countries would very likely have furnished me with multiple examples of cultural work in ruined spaces and locations, but, since this book makes no claim to being statistically representative of modalities of ruin performance across Europe, the lacunae must rest as just that—spaces to be investigated and stories to be told by others at another—future—time. However, in addition to these pragmatic considerations, I also knew that the cost of having a much wider global reach would have opened myself and the work up to charges of tokenism, oversimplification and, moreover, rendered the project unable to pursue the investigative methodologies of ethnography and situatedness which all my impulses seemed to suggest it needed.

Resisting Homogeneity Whilst Seeking Associations: An Overview of Chapters Following the introduction, Chap. 2 (‘Ruins in Context: Context in Ruins’) offers an historical and cultural framework for everything which follows. Here, I briefly survey ruin thinking and discourse from the time of the calamitous Lisbon earthquake of 1755 through to the present day. For philosophers like Rousseau, Kant and Voltaire, the scale of death and material destruction spurred writing around the possibility and limitations of faith and the existence of a deity, the prospects for optimism in a materially and philosophically unstable world and the wisdom or folly of crowding many thousands of citizens into dense urban spaces. Two hundred and fifty  years on from the Lisbon earthquake, the burgeoning field of ruin studies, populated by a range of intersecting disciplines, has offered diverse perspectives on the role(s) which ruin and dereliction have performed from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Within the twentieth century such diverse figures as Walter Benjamin, Albert Speer and Rose Macaulay wrote of ruins as offering allegorical insights into the social and political worlds of their times, whilst Hitler’s architect (Speer) imagined the preposterous legacy of the 1000-year Reich being embodied by the faux classical ruins of Germania. Within these pages I introduce the debate

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around ‘ruin porn’ and examine whether this formulation offers productive insights into how we might approach and respond to ruins, both ancient and modern. The chapter continues by providing a summary of how other art forms—classical painting, literature, poetry, film and photography, for example—have engaged with and represented ruins. With ruination and abandonment as fundamental tropes of both classical painting and Romantic literature, I reflect upon how contemporary ruin thinking represents a significant rupture with the romantic embrace of dereliction. The chapter concludes by arguing that theatre, compared to other art forms, has come late to ruined locations as potential sites for live performance. In contrast to the ruin as host site for theatre, I indicate where extant drama and performance have thematised the ruin through plot, characterisation and mood or atmosphere. Here I focus, unsurprisingly, on Samuel Beckett and the work of contemporary performance company, Forced Entertainment, and its director, Tim Etchells. Chapter 3 (‘Performing the Antiquary: Classical Ruins in the Greek Imaginary’) is in some respects a rogue episode within the volume as it performs to a different score from the others. It breaks from the main drift of the book by investigating the classical ruin of ancient times and does so partly because it seemed perverse to focus on Greece (Chap. 7) without even considering its glorious antiquary, but also, more importantly, the chapter signposts modes of how ruination works in forging the imagination and collective imaginary within a society such as Greece. The chapter notes how in Greece classical ruins play a highly significant role in the country’s economy and tourist trade. As in many countries, but palpably so in Greece, classical ruins perform at many immaterial and material levels. ‘Nature’s Ruins’ (Chap. 4) tells the complex and unfinished story of Gibellina in Sicily. As one of three hill towns in the Belice Valley destroyed by an earthquake in 1968, Gibellina has been memorialised through art, performance and architectural innovation in ways that are as inspirational as they are contested. Land artist, Alberto Burri’s Il Grande Cretto is a huge concrete blanket, inscribed by walkways which trace the streets and alleyways of the destroyed town that lies beneath. Further down the valley, Nuova Gibellina has been built over a 40-year period since the early 1980s to rehouse the survivors of the earthquake and their families. Often in conflict with regional planning authorities, the construction of the new settlement was championed and realised for over three decades by the inspirational and visionary mayor, Ludovico Corrao. Corrao’s vision for Nuova Gibellina was grounded not only in the traditions of the garden

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city but also upon the belief that art and culture should be embedded within the very material fabric of the place as it slowly emerged over this period. Live performance and avant-garde theatre were central to Corrao’s plans, but, as money for construction became scarce, many buildings within the new Gibellina were left unfinished, abandoned and began to fall into dilapidation and decay. This chapter debates and reflects on the double ruination of Gibellina and the redemptive role of cultural projects in rebuilding lives and the material environment. Chapter 5 (‘Dissonance and Contestation: Ruining Heritage and Its Alternatives’) examines three projects which in significantly different ways have been subject to the complex imperatives of the heritage industry. Two of these ventures—the steelworks of Landschaftspark in Duisburg-­ Nord and the coal mine of Zollverein in Essen—lie in Germany’s Ruhr region, whilst St Peter’s ruined modernist seminary is situated in woods above the mouth of the River Clyde, some 25 miles from Glasgow. The Ruhr projects—noticeably different in their own ways—undermine oversimplified and clichéd perspectives on the apparent banality of the ‘heritagisation’ of industrial ruins. Unless the training of young novitiate Roman Catholic priests is deemed as an industry, St Peter’s Seminary at Cardross lies at the other end of a continuum from the Ruhr Valley projects. As a high modernist concrete architectural wonder completed in 1965, St Peter’s only had a functioning life of 13  years and, from the mid-­1980s, as it swiftly fell into ruination, has been subject to a variety of restitution and reclamation projects culminating in NVA’s far-reaching plans to re-animate the site through a diversity of cultural, educational and ecological projects. As challenges to the traditions of the heritage industry, the chapter examines these three stories, reflecting on the ideas and debates which underpinned the projects and the spirit of experimentation which characterised the cultural and environmental practices to have featured on all three sites. The premature closure of NVA in June 2018, and hence its investment in St Peter’s, raises multiple questions about how radical and experimental heritage projects can be accommodated by funding bodies. ‘Legacies of War: Performing Balkan Ruins’ (Chap. 6) is the first of two chapters to frame ruination and cultural interventions in the context of either the brutalities of actual warfare or the insidious threat of military and nuclear conflict over a lengthy period of time, as in Chap. 8 (‘After Communism and the Cold War: A Ruined Inheritance’). Chapter 6 focuses on two cities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mostar and Sarajevo. In Mostar, a city which still bears the visible shell-pocked scars of the Balkan

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wars between 1992 and 1996, I became immersed, if only for a short period, in the Street Arts Festival which, through the energetic but voluntary labour of a shifting collection of young art activists, animates the city through street and performing arts’ events on an annual basis. In its totality, this festival and associated cultural activities constitute extraordinary acts of restitution and repair in a city which is still materially, socially and psychologically ruined from a vicious war that officially ended 25 years ago. Sarajevo, one of Europe’s most historically iconic cities, endured a state of siege from Serbian armies for almost four years between 1992 and 1996. During this time the war theatres of Sarajevo mounted productions under unimaginable conditions and, during my visit in 2017, I spoke to some of the key players involved in this work, and my chapter reflects on the motivations, consequences and effects of these extraordinary acts of cultural resistance. The chapter ends with a profile of American cultural critic, Susan Sontag’s production of Waiting for Godot during the siege in 1993. Here I describe how Sontag approached Samuel Beckett’s play and how the theatre community of Sarajevo responded, both then and now, to this audacious intervention from a New York intellectual. Chapter 7, ‘Ruins of Capital’, focuses on cultural and performance events in ruined and abandoned spaces which were once sites of industry, places where, for example, cars and ships were built, or—more expansively—whole cities, such as Athens or Thessaloniki, wasted by economic and financial austerity originating from the banking crises of 2008/9. The first section of this chapter describes aspects of art activism within Athens and draws upon absorbing conversations I had with performers, directors and curators all involved at different moments in occupations (e.g. Embros Theatre and Green Park) of empty spaces where performance was understood as a tool or vehicle for voices to be heard and angry protest to be articulated. This section also examines and reflects upon theatre performances in Elefsina’s disused olive oil factory and student work in an abandoned barracks in Thessaloniki. The second section moves from the Mediterranean to Wales, concentrating on the celebrated Welsh theatre company, Brith Gof, and its ‘occupations’ of ex industrial sites in urban south Wales (e.g. Cardiff and Tredegar) and at abandoned or impoverished farms in West Wales. Through conversations with Mike Pearson, a founder and one of the artistic directors (1981–1997) of the company, I describe and reflect upon the political and dramaturgical forces which propelled Brith Gof’s work in abandoned workplaces over a 20-year period. I particularly consider Pearson’s use of the word ‘occupation’ in describing

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the company’s interventions in disused locations and the relationship he suggests that Brith Gof had with various host sites. Pearson proposes that performance work in ruins represents a compelling meeting point between the compositional assembling of creative material and the disassembling, the degeneration of the crumbling environment wherein the performance is situated. The chapter concludes by telling the story of collaborations between different artists and organisations working in Govan (Glasgow) and Gdansk in northern Poland. Down the twentieth century, these two locations hosted huge shipbuilding yards which had witnessed celebrated moments of industrial and political upheaval: the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in in 1971 and the birth of Solidarność or Solidarity—the free trade union movement in Poland—in 1980. On brownfield sites where immense centres of marine engineering once stood, groups of artists and academics from the University of the West of Scotland have animated and performed diverse cultural activities, not only to memorialise the struggles which occurred in these places but also to propose alternative sustainable futures, grounded in the communities which inhabit these urban areas rather than in the interests of property developers searching for projects of high financial reward but with little local benefit. The sister chapter to ‘Legacies of War’, entitled ‘After Communism and the Cold War: A Ruined Inheritance’ (Chap. 8) shares a relationship to the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Empire. While for the Balkans the end of the Cold War and death of Marshall Tito signalled a period of murderous and genocidal struggles between the countries that had constituted the former Yugoslavia, for Berlin and a now unified Germany, this was a peaceful moment, uneasily optimistic, but nonetheless marked by economic and political uncertainties and tensions. Chapter 8 considers the legacy of the Cold War for Berlin and provides a profile of two theatre companies in post-Communist Poland. The first section on Berlin offers four diverse examples of ruined spaces and materials which, on the one hand, have afforded creative and imaginative responses to abandonment and dereliction but, on the other, have enabled these ruins to become objects of commodification and generators of private profit. I begin by considering how shards of the Berlin Wall, now distributed across the world, rapidly became commodities to be sold on the open market or bought by galleries and museums as cultural artefacts, memorialising an iconic moment in history and performing ideological tensions enduring well beyond the demise of the Communist bloc. Beyond broken fragments of the Wall, I write about art and

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performance activism in the disused department store of Tacheles in central Berlin and on the ‘Devil’s Mountain’ of Teufelsberg which until 1989 had been the site of an American/British Cold War listening post. I conclude this focus on Berlin by recounting my experience of the disused (in terms of its original purpose) airport of Tempelhof and conversations with actor, director and teacher, Ali Schroeder, around his experience of working with refugees and asylum seekers temporally housed in the empty hangers and terminal buildings. As in other chapters within this volume, these stories tussle with the emancipatory affordances of ruined buildings, but also their propensity to become staging posts in processes of gentrification which ultimately exclude the very people who initially benefited most from such ruinous occupations. The second part of the chapter offers accounts of theatre work in the Silesian towns of Wroclaw and Legnica in western Poland. In Legnica, I was offered generous hospitality and insights into the practices of Teatr Modjeska whose work, led by Artistic Director, Jacek Glomb, for nearly 30 years has been performed largely in abandoned and derelict industrial or civic buildings within the city of Legnica. On the basis of travelling around the city with Jacek and conversations with other members of the company, I describe selected productions, the sites wherein they were located and the dramaturgical and political forces which have sustained the energies of Teatr Modjeska for so long. In Wroclaw, the capital city of the region, I was shown around by theatre academic, Magdalena Gołaczyńska, who introduced me to the practices of Teatr Ad Spectatores which had made work in the abandoned vaults of the city’s main railway station and in a disused water tower. In both Legnica and Wroclaw, I became acutely aware of the lingering shadow and impact of the Cold War period and how the work of Teatr Modjeska in particular was angrily wrestling with the complexities of a country which had enthusiastically embraced free and largely unregulated market capitalism after decades of a top-down command economic system. As a brief epilogue to this chapter, I felt compelled to note the work of Tadeusz Kantor whose extraordinary theatre pieces have seduced me for over 30 years. In Kantor I tasted ruination, or at least a sense of decay, of things being worn out, and a pleasure in the generative power of detritus. For the final chapter I have bowed to the conventions of publishing and offer a conclusion which is not a conclusion, at least in the sense of a neat tying up of loose ends. Here I (re)assemble many of the recurring thoughts which have threaded their way through this volume, but they are far from being immaculately arranged to form a perfect whole. I have discovered

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that ruins are stranded between classifications and that there is no singular or unitary perspective which can capture how they work, how they perform and how they might be understood. Ruins are on the move and perpetually unstable, never finished, never complete in their ruination. The nearest one might hope for in terms of grasping this unpredictability is to develop a sense, in each particular instance, of where context meets human agency, where the material world meets the immaterial and the fleeting. The cultural interventions of theatre and any form of live performance identified in this book represent the human agency needed to reconstruct ruins as laboratories for experimentation and, as Paolo Podrescu intimates in Chap. 8, possible ‘zones of liberation’ (2018).

Questions to Ask a Ruin in Ruined Times Throughout my preoccupations with ruins, and following Elinor Fuchs’ seminal essay, ‘Visit to a Small Planet: Questions to Ask a Play’ (2004), I’ve found it productive to frame my thoughts with unashamedly anthropomorphic questions as follows: how did you arrive here; of what materials are you presently constituted; what do you encourage us to think or feel; what stories do you have to perform; what do you afford; and how might we behave and perform in your ruinous space? These are questions which one might address to a derelict and abandoned space as subject. They have become a kind of mental toolkit and a generative device to consider the materiality and histories of a ruin, and leave questions about meaning until later. Implicitly these questions thread their way through the chapters which follow.

Notes 1. ‘Structure of feeling’ is a rich and generative term coined by Raymond Williams (1977, pp. 128–135) to mean a form of thinking which challenges the separation of the social from the personal—that area of tension between ideology and experience or, to put it another way, ‘social experiences in solution’ (Ibid., p. 133). 2. Phil Smith is an academic researcher, writer and artist specialising in walking, site-specific performance, dramaturgy and mythogeographies. A founding member of performance company, Wrights & Sites, he is also an associate professor at the University of Plymouth.

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3. Tim Etchells is an artist, writer, performer and director whose work shifts between performance, visual art and fiction. He was co-founder of the Sheffield based theatre company, Forced Entertainment in 1984. 4. Habitus, a concept proposed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), concerns our ingrained habits, skills and dispositions. It is the way that we perceive the social world and move around in it. Our habitus shapes the cultural capital we possess.

Bibliography Beckett, S. (1986). The Capital of the Ruins. In J. Calder (Ed.), As no Other Dare Fail. London: John Calder. Davidson, P. (2015). The Last of the Light: About Twilight. London: Reaktion Books. Etchells, T. (2018). Everything is lost (Installation) https://www.meadowarts. org/Installations/tim-etchells-everything-is-lost. Accessed 20 July 2019. Freud, S. (1917). The Complete Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV. London: The Hogarth Press. Fuchs, E. (2004). Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play. Theater, 34(2), 4–9. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks, “Wave of Materialism” and “Crisis of Authority” (English Translation) (New York: International Publishers) pp. 275–276. Hall, S., & Massey, D. (2010). Interpreting the Crisis. Soundings, 44, 57–71. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning. Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Lavery, C., & Gough, R. (2015). Performance Research on Ruins and Ruination 20(3) June. Pearson, M. (2006). In Come I: Performance, Memory and Landscape. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Pearson, M. (2010). Site-Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pearson, M., & Shanks, M. (2001). Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge. Pearson, M., & Turner, C. (2018). Living Between Architectures: Inhabiting Clifford McLucas’ Built Scenography. In A.  Filmer & J.  Rufford (Eds.), Performing Architectures: Projects, Practices, Pedagogies. London: Methuen Drama. Sebald, W.G. (2017). Melancholia; a Sebald Variation (Programme) (Kings College London). Smith, P. (2018). Unpublished conversation with the author, 5 November. Williams, R. (1997). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Ruins in Context: Context in Ruins

A central premise is that the ruin – as a merger of past, present and future and as a material embodiment of change – offers a fertile locale for competing cultural stories about historical events, political projects and the constitution of communities. Equally important is the idea that what a human group does with its ruins – maintain them in disarray, restore them to alternative sites, linger on them with pause, or banish them from view – unleashes compelling social, ethical, or political consequences for the present and the future. (Lazzara and Unruh 2009, pp. 1–2)

Ruin as concrete noun, ruin as verb, ruination as abstract noun. This text engages with all three grammatical usages of the word ‘ruin’, a term with multiple meanings and an ability to shape-shift according to context and purpose. In their editors’ introduction to Telling Ruins in Latin America, Lazzara and Unruh (quoted above) suggest the ruin is not only a site of plasticity and change but also the subject-object of unstable and competing narratives. Drawing on these frameworks this chapter offers an overview of how ruins have been thought, theorised, investigated, represented and categorised, particularly over the last three decades. In addition, I briefly consider how ruin and ruination have been harnessed as thematic, as process or as form, in extant drama and in other modes of performance. All the case studies which follow throughout the book begin with the material ruin: a landscape, a location or a building, but, as the stories unfold, manifestations of ruin and ruination regularly present themselves as felt conditions of being in the world and as metaphors and © The Author(s) 2020 S. Murray, Performing Ruins, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40643-1_2

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allegories. Both the materiality and the immateriality of ruins receive attention in the chapters that follow.

Discourse: Thinking Through Ruins The fascination for ruins is not merely intellectual, but also sensual. Ruins give us a shock of vanishing materiality. Suddenly our critical lens changes and instead of marvelling at grand projects and utopian designs, we begin to notice weeds and dandelions in the crevices of the stones, cracks on modern transparencies, rust on withered “Blackberries” in our ever shrinking closets. (Boym 2011, n.p.)

Svetlana Boym’s ‘shock of vanishing materiality’ echoes reactions to the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1755 which provoked perhaps the earliest reflective and philosophical discourse around decay and ruination. This natural disaster left the entire city in ruins, killed between 30,000 and 40,000 people and prompted intellectual upheaval of considerable magnitude. Figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau,1 Voltaire2 and Immanuel Kant3 all used the event to jolt their thought patterns and as a spur to writing. Voltaire’s Candide (first published in 1759) draws upon the devastating experience of Lisbon’s destruction to attack the notion of a benevolent deity presiding over the world and a Leibnizian4 philosophy of optimism, represented in Candide by Professor Pangloss for whom all is for the best in this ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (Voltaire 2003, p. 12). Rousseau used the earthquake’s devastating impact, due in part, he felt, to overcrowding in the city, to advance theories for a more natural way of life (Rousseau 2018). Rousseau’s use of the word ‘natural’ in this eighteenth-­ century context resonates strongly with contemporary articulations of how to live a more environmentally or ecologically sustainable life. Philosopher Kant harnessed the Lisbon earthquake to develop further the concept of the sublime as a framework to grasp the enormity of this event and its consequences for human life and the built environment (Kant 2012, pp. 327–36). Whilst the picturesque ruin with all its conflicting resonances was one of the key tropes in eighteenth-century romantic fiction and poetry and, of course, regularly provides an allegorical frame for much classical painting, it is not really until the twentieth century that ruins begin to be analysed in cultural and sociological terms. Down the twentieth century until its final decade, when ruin writing begins to proliferate, there are a small

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number of key texts which have sought to position both the ancient and the modern ruin in the European cultural imaginary. German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), in his 1911 essay, ‘The Ruin’ (Simmel 1965, pp. 264–6), places the phenomenon as the ‘natural’ and inevitable consequence of man-made artefacts ultimately disintegrating back into nature. This is a variation on entropy and existentially describes the ways in which ‘culture’—in the sense of humanly constructed buildings and monuments—always finally decays back into the chaos of nature. German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) wrote initially about ruins and their allegorical power and function in relation to the Baroque in The Origin of German Classic Drama (1977). Later in The Arcades Project (2002) he removed the ruin from the arena of romantic aesthetics and, instead, saw it both as process and a critical and allegorical tool to understand the dialectics of history. The ruin in all its fragments bears the mark of history and is most productively experienced, or perceived, for its allegorical rather than symbolic value. Benjamin’s The Arcades Project remained unfinished at his death by suicide in 1940 and is composed of a deliberately ruined collection of fragments. The book is a critique of capitalism, exposing the illusion of this economic system as progressive, and offers an unfinished kaleidoscope of narratives and reflections into the nineteenth-century destruction and rebuilding of Paris and the costs and afflictions of this modernisation process. The ruined fragments which comprise The Arcades Project offer an allegorical montage which speaks of and beyond Paris’ nineteenth-century history. For Benjamin, the ruins of bourgeois shopping arcades as shrines to the allure of the commodity speak paradoxically not only of capital’s inherent drive to abandon and move on, but also of a radical and utopian potential insofar as they embody a lost vision of the future. In an often-quoted phrase Benjamin writes, ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things’ (Benjamin 1977, p. 178). Through multiple lenses, material and immaterial, the Second World War has offered fertile terrain for ruinous thinking and reflection. Two very difficult examples will suffice here. Albert Speer (1905–1981), Hitler’s architect, harnessed ideas about the power of the classical ruin for the fascist project through what he portentously called ‘A Theory of Ruin Value’. In direct contrast to Benjamin, Speer was engaged in the aesthetics of ruin and ruination and how these might serve as a vision to fulfil the 1000-year project of ‘Germania’. Speer and Hitler’s visits to Rome (1937) and Paris (1938 and 1940) were in part to find classical architectural

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models which could be translated into a German context. For Speer the ruins of ancient Rome (the Coliseum and the Palatine Hill) and the neoclassical Pantheon in Paris (itself modelled on the much earlier Roman version) offered models for monstrous buildings which would celebrate, in perpetuity, the glory of the Third Reich. As importantly, however, these monuments to Fascism would ultimately, over a 1000-year span, fall into ruination in the same material and aesthetic manner as the antiquaries of Italy and Greece. The imagined decay and decomposition of twentieth-­ century concrete and steel buildings were aesthetically displeasing to Hitler’s architect and hence the stone and marble plans for Berlin’s monumental Ruhmeshalle (‘Hall of Glory’), and many other buildings, were prepared not only for the immediate present but for the aesthetics of their descent into ruination down the centuries. The Ruhmeshalle was, in fact, never built. Speer’s preposterous ambitions are of interest here because they reinforce, albeit in an extreme form, and in a different context, the ideological role of ruins in a society’s imaginary. I write of this phenomena in Chap. 3 (‘Performing the Antiquary: Classical Ruins in the Greek Imaginary’) but whilst in Greece this is a retrospective ideological construction, for Speer and Hitler what was at stake was the actual design and construction of buildings for their future ‘ruin value’, a preoccupation with how these monuments would finally perform their own ruination. In a very different fashion the Blitz bombing of London in May 1941 by the German Luftwaffe produced a piece of landmark writing by novelist Rose Macaulay. The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), a beguiling, complex and insightful piece of writing provoked by the loss of Macaulay’s home and library in the Blitz, is a book about what it means to write about ruins and is an investigation into how imagery, philosophy, theology, archaeology and literature engage with ruination. Macaulay shrewdly comments that, ‘Ruin is always over-stated; it is part of the ruin-drama staged perpetually in the human imagination, half of whose desire is to build up, while the other half smashes and levels to the earth’ (Macaulay 1953, p. 100). By acknowledging the power of the fragment—the incomplete and partial picture—Macaulay dwells on the fantastical seductiveness of the ruin and so offers a useful link between eighteenth-century Romanticism’s embrace of the ruin and the contemporary critical rhetoric of ‘ruin porn’, to which I now turn.

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Contemporary Thinking and ‘Ruin Porn’ Ruinenlust, an eighteenth-century German term to describe the pleasure allegedly felt when contemplating ruined buildings, has been translated and reinvented in contemporary discourses about decay, destruction and ruination as ‘ruin porn’. Whilst debates around ruin porn (Lyons 2018; Dillon 2014; Hell and Schönle 2010; Lavery and Gough 2015) are not central to this book, in so far as the term leads us into the territory of affect, the issue may have some resonance for performance makers who wish to create work in and for ruined locations. Ruin porn refers to the way that the photographic image often represents—or has been understood to represent—a way of looking at dereliction which induces a charge of pity, sympathy, yearning and even a kind of erotic excitement. Those who feel that the lens of ruin porn is a counter-productive way of approaching the ruin argue that the photographic gaze paradoxically exoticises the ruin as it removes it from critical attention and thinking. A feature of ruin porn, it is argued, is that it rarely includes images of human life within the frame of the photograph, and by so doing objectifies and depersonalises the ruin, suggesting an inexorable inevitability to its plight and that human agency has had no part to play in its destruction. The term has been typically applied to the ruins of once major centres of heavy industry, the decaying remains of pithead equipment, steel mills, car manufacturing factories and the community buildings which once surrounded such places. Beyond the specific feelings that such ruined locations apparently evoke, it is argued that this ‘pornographic’ gaze is also an expression of anxiety about the fragility of our lives (Lyons 2018, p. 10) and the mutability of the built environment. The desolate images of Detroit car factories or the iron and steel industries of the Ruhr Valley with their broken concrete, smashed windows and mangled and rusting steel also speak of the end of modernity and the hopes that it once generated (Wells 2018, p. 26). The ruin porn debate is useful in so far as it asks how we look at ruined places, how we might reflect on the frames we impose on them and what questions we pose to ruins in their material and immaterial states. At its most sterile, the lens of ruin porn pays scant heed to the sheer materiality of the ruin, polices what we ought to think and feel about such spaces, and privileges a deracinated, excessively analytical response over raw feelings and emotions to the detriment of both a more imaginative and holistic response to ruination.

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In their comprehensive survey of ruin writing, Reckoning with Ruins (2012), cultural geographers, Caitlin de Silvey and Tim Edensor, identify research and scholarship across the fields of archaeology, urban studies, literature, art history and sociology. The authors argue, however, that human geography has come slowly to this territory and they attempt to redress this belatedness. Central to their perspective, and indeed as a dominant standpoint today for positioning contemporary ruins, is that the critical force of ruins is not fixed and offers open-ended opportunities for thinking and reflection between and within different disciplines and art forms. Cultural geographer Doreen Massey (1944–2016) productively encapsulates how we might best understand place—any place—in its wider social, political and ‘natural’ landscape. In an interview for 3: AM Magazine, Massey says: Places are articulations of ‘natural’ and social relations that are not fully contained within the place itself. So, first, places are not closed or bounded – which politically, lays the ground for critiques of exclusivity. Second, places are not ‘given’ – they are always in open-ended process. They are in that sense ‘events’. Third, they and their identity will always be contested. (Massey 2010, n.p.)

Massey’s important conceptualisation of place, of course, applies equally and as powerfully to sites of ruin and dereliction and her comment above might serve as an overarching paradigm of understanding for this whole volume. Significantly, although contemporary human and cultural geography increasingly draws upon the insights and processes of performance studies, wider debates about ruins largely fail to draw upon the ways of thinking generated by this discipline. Central to their argument is that contemporary ruins are ‘affordances’ which open up alternative ways of thinking about the past, present and future and which may shed a ‘critical light on the glorification of some historical sites and the neglect of others’ (de Silvey and Edensor 2012, p. 10). A salient rejoinder to the romantic idea that ruins are primarily objects of melancholic and quiet contemplation. Apart from being affordances for thought, ruined spaces may offer spatial and dramaturgical opportunities for multiple events which are strongly performative—and even celebratory—in character. Ruins’ ability to perform may be seen in the following examples, some of which will be explored further in the following chapters:

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• Places which children render into unofficial playgrounds, places for exploration and adventure away from the surveillance of the adult world (Cloke and Jones 2005; Edensor et al. 2011). • Sites for adult ‘play’, including the raves of the 1990s in abandoned factories and warehouses and opportunities for music making and other activities associated with (semi)transgressive partying. • Forbidden and seductively perilous locations for Urbex (urban explorers) and Parkour practitioners. • Erotic ‘theatres’ for love making, both straight and gay. Fiona Anderson writes about the ‘vacant’ and ‘ghostly’ appeal of the abandoned waterfronts in Brooklyn on the Hudson River during the 1970s and 1980s. Here, ruined warehouses, merchant shipping yards and other maritime buildings afforded sensual and suggestive spaces for queer cruising and its attendant pleasures (Anderson 2015, pp. 135–44). • Ceremonies in ruins. The United Kingdom’s National Trust (2019) advertises weddings in ruined locations as do many other websites. • Opportunities for urban horticulture and environmental experiments in re-wilding (see Chap. 5 on the Landschaftspark at Duisburg-Nord). • Educational ‘laboratories’ and workshops to explore both the material and immaterial qualities of the ruin in question. Lorimer and Murray (2015) note the opportunities to be explored in NVA’s rehabilitation of St Peter’s Seminary (Chap. 5): ‘We are interested in the ruin as an operating site for experiment, as a forum for open investigation … surveyed for its scenography; as an already existing performance space’ (Ibid, p. 58). I have not yet identified the ways in which sites of ruination also afford a startlingly wide range of cultural and performance activities: occupations both ‘official’ and more transgressive. The sections and chapters which follow attend to such practices and projects.

A Poetics of Dereliction: Ruins Across the Arts In the penultimate part of this contextualising chapter I note briefly some examples of classical painting, contemporary art, film and literature which have engaged with ruination as imagery, fable, theme, allegory and metaphor and then finally expand the account to consider how ruination

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appears in written drama, dance and other modes of performance. My distinction here is that in contrast to the following chapters, which have a focus almost entirely on performance events and activities in abandoned and derelict spaces or locations, in these cases the actual sitedness of the art has less, or at least very different, dramaturgical importance. I suggested earlier it is largely through the mediums of classical painting and literature that in the West we have assembled our habitual imagery and expectation of what a ruin looks like. Paintings of ruined temples, castles and abbeys abound in the history of art from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries and, as with the picturesque of landscape painting, prefigure a nascent form of the postmodern. These classical paintings carry multiple meanings: preoccupation with time passing, mortality and ageing; a melancholic take on memory; the relationship between nature and culture; biblical or spiritual allegories and parables; the destructive cruelty of warfare; the inexorable pattern of economic failure and industrial decline; and ‘a desolate playground in whose cracked and weed-infested precincts we have space and time to imagine a future’ (Dillon 2014, p. 5). However, the representation of ruin through the visual arts is not confined to pre-twentieth-century romantic and classical painters. Across the twentieth-­century modern ruins—often of warfare—have been imagined or recorded by British painters such as Mary Kessell (Notes from Belsen Camp, 1945), Linda Kitson (Argentinian Pucarás at Stanley airstrip, 1982), Paul Nash (Totes Meer [Dead Sea] 1940), Patrick Caulfield (Ruins 1964), Graham Sutherland (Devastation 1941), John Piper (St Mary le Port, Bristol, 1940) and Ian Hamilton Finlay (Sea Coast, After Claude Lorrain, 1985). Often moving beyond the medium of painting many contemporary artists who have engaged with ruination do so with the intention of troubling and unsettling the historical hegemony of ruin romance, nostalgia and melancholy. Many such artists travel between film, video, installation, drawing, painting and photography to investigate ruination. In this expanded landscape the following are worthy of note: Minty Donald (Glimmers in Limbo, 2009); Cornelia Parker (Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991, Colder, Darker Matter, 1997); Robert Smithson (Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, 1971, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey5 [Essay, 1967]); Ed Ruscha (Blue Collar, 1992, Course of Empire, Eden to Empire, 2018); Milo Newman and Matt Davies (By the Mark, the Deep, 2015) and Jane and Louise Wilson (A Free and Anonymous Monument, 2003, Blind Landings [H-Bomb Test Site, Orford Ness] 2013, Azeville, 2006, Sealander, 2006).

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Within the field of artist’s film the work of Chris Marker (La Jetée, 1962), Tacita Dean (The Russian Ending, 2002, Sound Mirrors, 1999, Kodack, 2006), Mike Kelley (Mobile Homestead, 2010/11, Still Life, 2018), Bernd Behr (Weimar Villa, 2010), William E. Jones (Fall into Ruin, 2017), Willie Doherty (Remains, 2013) and Melanie Smith (Fordlandia, 2015) all bring an oblique perspective through the moving image to ruin and abandonment. Film maker, writer and gay rights activist Derek Jarman (1942–1994) was preoccupied with the experience—social and highly personal—of living amongst dereliction and decay. Two of his feature films, Jubilee, 1977, and The Last of England, 1988, offer a combined backdrop of urban decay in 1970s and 1980s Britain and the AIDS epidemic of those times. Jarman’s film work was informed by his deep interest in medieval poetry’s engagement with decay (Hamer 2015) and he used the ruin as an alternative framework for negotiating personal loss. The ruin threads its way through literature (prose and poetry) from early medieval times and the first known and explicit example is a collection of poems and fragments entitled The Ruin, published in the tenth century. Written by an unknown author the collection was damaged by fire and evoked the glory of ancient Roman ruins whilst lamenting the state of a ruinous present. In English renaissance literature, the ruin imaginary was located more in the destruction of over 900 abbeys, monasteries and other religious houses during the Reformation of the first half of the sixteenth century than in the antiquarian architecture of Italy and Greece. Ruins figure as allegories (both form and content) in the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), but, of course, it is not until the eighteenth century that ruin, decay and dereliction become one of the key tropes of the poetry of Romanticism (1770–1830). Whilst British Romanticism is often associated with nature and the imagination, a preoccupation with decay and decline is equally present. Ideas of ruin shaped Romantic literature through Enlightenment concepts of the picturesque, the sublime and by way of attraction to classical and oriental histories and cultures. Moreover, an increase in travel and travel literature exposed writers and artists to ruins both local and foreign, whilst documentation and archaeological excavation of ancient ruins (e.g. Pompeii, Rome and Greece) fed the cultural and artistic imaginary. In her book, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and National Landscape (1990), Anne Janowitz traces the prevalence of the ruin poem in Romantic literature, noting the importance within this genre of William Wordsworth (1770–1850, The Ruined Cottage, The Old Cumberland Beggar, A Night on Salisbury Plane and Lines Written a Few

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Miles above Tintern Abbey), Jane Austen (1775–1817, Northanger Abbey), John Claire (1793–1864, Ruins of Despair), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834, Kubla Kahn, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), Lord Byron (1788–1842, Childe Harold) and William Blake (1737–1827, Jerusalem). In the same era, Mary Shelley’s (1797–1851, Frankenstein and The Last Man) along with the fictions of Charlotte Bronte (1816–55) and Victor Hugo (1802–85) also engaged with metaphors and materialities of ruin. As an extension of the literary pleasures of Romanticism, Gothic fiction with its construction of atmospheres and a celebration of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime often identified ruined medieval buildings and landscapes as sources of the uncanny, terror and horror. Writers of (British) gothic fiction include Horace Walpole (1717–1797), Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), James Hogg (1770–1835), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Bram Stoker (1847–1912) and Wilkie Collins (1824–1889). To finish this selective and cursory glance at how ruination has featured in and inflected literature and poetry, I consider two very different twentieth-­century writers who have provided a back drop to my writing of this book: W.G.  Sebald (1944–2001) and J.G.  Ballard (1930–2009). Ballard’s dystopian but highly ethical novels project present-day cityscapes and urban architecture into a seductively apocalyptic and politically ruinous future, but a nonetheless tangible future which is immediately recognisable. The world of the Ballardian ruin novel provokes a reminder of Robert Smithson’s 1967 essay, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey where he writes: The zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built, but rather rise as ruins before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-­ en-­scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other “out of date” things. (Smithson 1967, p. 54)

Many of Ballard’s fictions6 offer contemporary decaying landscapes— drained and cracked swimming pools, shopping malls, motorway flyovers, car crashes and high-rise flats. Sometimes these are literally and materially ruined, but always they speak of the wreckage of modernist aspirations and desires: hopes embodied in ubiquitous car ownership, the gated community of a Spanish coastal resort, almost unlimited access to commodities and affluent life styles for the affluent and privileged. And within these

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concrete circumstances human life and behaviour are often represented as tawdry, alienated, excessive, bored, spoilt, complacent and disaffected. Presciently, Ballard’s landscapes speak of twenty-first-century preoccupations with the effect of climate change—drought, scorched earth, concrete deterioration and drowned cityscapes. If Ballard’s fictions project the present into the future, the heterogeneous writings7 of W.G. Sebald are consumed by how the present is inexorably suffused and shackled to the past. Sebald’s texts are models of hybridity, combining fiction, biography, travel writing and historiography, and always at the centre of these texts lies a preoccupation with memory and how it works, with exile, with identity and the mid-twentieth-century catastrophe of the Holocaust. As metaphor, allegory and as material site the ruin is ever present in Sebald through his words and the grainy images which punctuate the texts, but rarely in an illustrative manner. The manifestation of this moves between decaying buildings and landscapes, the ruination of narratives and the reliability (or otherwise) of the story-­tellers, a plangent sense of the ruinous political, psychological, moral and spiritual consequences of the tragedies of the Second World War, and—finally—an often overwhelming sense of loss and melancholy. This latter characteristic, however, is far removed from the nostalgic sentimentality of the ruin fictions and poetry of the Romantics. In a departure from his fictions, Sebald’s The Natural History of Destruction (2003) is dominated by a long essay on post-war German reaction—or lack of it—to the Allied bombing campaign in the final years of the war directed towards the complete ruination of cities like Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden. His essay is replete with hellish statistics of destruction which not only tend to silence and numb the reader, but also, Sebald argues, the German people in the decades following the end of the war. Here, Sebald is presenting us with a narrative of material ruin and that ever—present sense of transcendent ruination which pervades all his writings.

The Allure of Ruination in Theatre and Performance Whilst all the chapters to follow engage with live events in ruined locations and how abandoned sites perform themselves, the final part of this contextualising chapter surveys some of the ways in which ruin as scenography, form and content feature in the imaginary worlds of extant drama and

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performance. This landscape proposes manifold strands and associations with ruination, hinting at what a more in-depth analysis than I have space to provide might offer ruin research and scholarship. The lenses and levels of such scrutiny are multiple. Amongst others, I am thinking of: • Peter Brook leaving London for Paris’ almost derelict Bouffes du Nord theatre in 1974 and his decision to allow the theatre to remain undecorated ever since: a patina of distressed ruination overlaying a now stable structure. • Members of Forced Entertainment setting up their company in Sheffield in 1984, at a time when the city and its steel and coal industries were under assault from the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher’s government. • The ruined landscapes of Renaissance drama in the plays, for example, of John Webster (c.1580–c.1634, The Duchess of Malfi), Philip Marlow (1564–1593, Dr Faustus and Tamburlaine) and in ­Shakespeare (1564–1616, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Henry V and Coriolanus). • The ‘ruins of Europe’ (Müller 1984, p.  53) in Heiner Müller (1929–1995) (Hamletmachine), Edward Bond (1934—Dea), David Greig (1969 —Europe and The Architect). • Material and human landscapes of ruin in Samuel Beckett. • Uncertainty, failure and fragmentation in postdramatic theatre (Fig. 2.1).8 Arguably, Beckett remains the master of ruination across twentieth-­ century theatre and his tireless engagement with—almost a celebration of—the fragments and debris of human behaviour is trenchantly expressed in this conversation with his biographer, James Knowlson: I’m not interested in a ‘unification’ of the historical chaos, any more than I am in the ‘clarification’ of the individual chaos … What I want is the straws, the flotsam etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know … the pure incoherence of times and men and places is at least amusing. (Beckett qtd. in Knowlson 1996, p. 244)

His experience of the Second World War and, in its immediate aftermath, working for the Irish Red Cross in the devastated Normandy town of St-Lo, is always concealed and unspoken, but performs a silent weave or

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Fig. 2.1  Samuel Beckett, London 1976. (Image: Jerry Bauer)

ghosting, often hidden as a deliberate dramaturgical strategy, a result in Heiner Müller’s phrase of the ‘pressure of experience as a precondition of writing’ (Müller qtd. in Weber 1984, p. 15). Environmentally devastated landscapes feature in Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days. The image of a dapper-looking Beckett above was almost certainly taken at the back of London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1976 at a season of his plays which included Endgame. Apparently nonchalantly composed, Beckett leans casually on two industrial rubbish bins against the backdrop of a graffitied wall and other detritus and debris. Here, a connection to the dustbin homes of Nell and Nagg, Hamm’s ‘Accursed progenitor’(s) (Beckett 2006, p.  96) in Endgame, seems palpable and emblematic of

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Beckett’s wry humour. In Endgame ecological desolation is only glimpsed and reported on by servant Clov through two small elevated windows; whilst in Happy Days the world is evidently burning up. Winnie and Willie’s ‘scorched grass’ (Ibid., 138) mound lies at the centre of the set, dominating and entrapping Winnie as she faces ‘Another heavenly day’ (Ibid., p. 138). Godot’s minimalist staging instructions, ‘A country road. A tree. Evening’ (Ibid., p. 11), are often materialised in performance as a ruined landscape. There is, it would seem, almost a dramaturgical imperative to consider the scenography of Godot as a place of desolation, abandonment and neglect. Beckett’s characters seem ruined too; often corporeally derelict, emotionally crumbling, exhausted and tired of life. Not difficult to detect ruination in the circular, repetitive and incompetent waitings of Estragon and Vladimir, the blind and lame bickering trappedness of Hamm and Clov, the legless dust-binned lives of Nell and Nagg, the piercingly painful rememberings of Krapp and the never completed ‘close of a long day’ (Ibid., pp. 435–442), ‘Woman in chair’ (Rockaby) and her almost final two-fingered V-sign ‘fuck life’ (Ibid., p.  442). Beyond landscape and character, Beckett’s characters are often trapped in time, itself ruined, stilled and endlessly repetitive. The trope of repetition, the never-ending cyclical loop where time refuses to be completely exhausted, so central to much of Becket’s writing, presents his characters with an everlasting present. Thus, for example, in Godot and Endgame, in some senses, disintegration or the ruining process is stalled, always threatening and incipient, but never concluded. Although many of Beckett’s characters are often obsessed with time passing, they are trapped within it, never to escape the presentness of their particular circumstances. And this ‘presentness’ lies not simply in whatever slight narrative structure Beckett offers us, but in the theatrical event itself and the demand he makes that what we are seeing and hearing is all there is. Whilst for Beckett’s characters being trapped in time is certainly hell and hellish, it still holds out the hope for release, for escape. We can easily find wretchedness, exhaustion and ruination in Beckett, but such states are constantly inflected and framed by verbal humour, comedic action, acts of resistance, poetry of painful grace, tenderness and that sense of needing to continue, or in the often quoted obligation to ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (Beckett 1983, p.  7). His personae complain, bicker, lose their temper, are miserable, mourn lost loves, are resigned and yet resist and refuse to succumb. And if they do this it is because they and the material world have not ended yet, or quite yet. If time still has a future then

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complete ruination has been postponed, avoided, at least for the time being. This returns us to the devastated town of St-Lo and Beckett’s astonishing hint that even here there are glimmers of hope ‘that inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again’ (Beckett 1986, p. 76). In her book Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (2011), Sara Jane Bailes notes how Performance Studies scholar, Peggy Phelan, described co-founder and director of Forced Entertainment, Tim Etchells, ‘as Samuel Beckett’s “able heir”’ (Bailes 2011, p. 66) suggesting that the mantle of Beckett’s ‘collapsed world’ (Bailes 2011, p. 66) has been reconfigured and recalibrated for the 1990s and the twenty-first century. Forced Entertainment’s relationship to ruin and ruination works at a number of interlocking levels and these may be explicit, or as an ever-present mood, a sense of a world on the brink of destruction and human behaviour trying desperately to prevent this inevitable slide into decay, but failing pathetically (and often comically). Let the Water Run Its Course to the Sea That Made the Promise (1986) offers a performance space of a wooden construction resembling a dilapidated factory. SPIN (1999), an interactive CD-ROM where the action is set in a car wrecking yard. Bloody Mess (2004) described on the Company’s website as ‘an epic for ten performers where disconnected characters, stories and performances collide. As disaster beckons and the “show” crashes into energetic chaos’ (Forced Entertainment 2004). Void Story (2009) navigates ‘one terrible cityscape after another, mugged, shot at and bitten by insects, pursued through subterranean tunnel systems, stowed away in refrigerated transport, shacked up in haunted hotels and lost in wildernesses, backstreets and bewildering funfairs’ (Forced Entertainment 2009). The Last Adventures (2013), ‘We are in the rubble of a story’ (Forced Entertainment 2013). To those who have witnessed the Company’s work over three decades the worlds described above are typical of the circumstances and conditions of a Forced Entertainment production. Within these worlds, Tim Etchells talks of the Company’s working process as one of necessary imperfection and fragmentation, a process of ruining the material they have in front of them. Of rehearsal he says: We have often said and indeed worked with the idea that nobody brings anything finished – it’s a sketch, an idea or half thought. That the halfness, the incompleteness of those things is the thing that allows them to be more effective as creative currency. (Etchells 2017)

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For Etchells and his company—both in rehearsal and in the world— where things go wrong, are incomplete, where materials are ruined or broken is a potentially fertile and generative space. This offers another take on Edensor and de Silvey’s ruins as ‘affordance’, yet of course for a highly politically conscious company there is the inevitable awareness that in terms of actual lives the ruin speaks of tragedy, of grief, of dispossession, of unfulfillment, of misfortune and of heartbreak. In an essay entitled ‘Eight Fragments on Theatre and the City’ Etchells writes: The fascination of ruined places, of incomplete places. It seems unethical to admit – the strange charge of buildings left to run – but they always were the best places to play … No surprise that the sets we made always looked half-­ finished … Always now this work of construction and deconstruction – letting no thing simply ‘be’ – seeing everything as a product, as the fruit of some labour, some desire, some ideology. (Etchells 2010, p. 38)

In my conversation with Etchells we talked about the Company’s durational practice (e.g. Speak Bitterness, 1994, sometimes performed durationally for 6 hours; Quizoola 1996, durational for 6 or 24  hours; Who Can Sing a Song to Unfrighten Me 1999, performed from midnight to midnight) and how their individual and collective ageing having worked together for over 30 years impacts on their sense of identity and future purpose. What particularly interests the company in the course of durational work is the way material, actions and speech begin to decompose and break down, that point where ‘real’ tiredness kicks in, and where ‘real’ (as opposed to scripted or choreographed) mistakes begin to happen. An awareness that this may be the point where the unexpected and unplanned afford a richer and more complex dimension to liveness, experienced both by the performers and their audience. Etchells and other company members are also mindful that their own ageing—they are now in their 50s— offers up different perspectives and feelings when they revisit and revive much earlier work. Today, that sense of their individual and collective potentiality has changed: ‘so the potential space is getting smaller while the actual lived space is getting bigger’ (Etchells 2017). Etchells concludes: The reality of your actuality, materiality, and physicality – all those things are harder to ignore. More and more present as punctuation. Maybe in that way we can think of the ruin as punctuation, something that stops you in your tracks to get you thinking about time, and just by being on stage I think we do that already. (Ibid.)

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I have dwelt a little on Beckett and Forced Entertainment in the sections above since in contemporary Western theatre making from the 1950s these artists have profoundly marked out the territory in which live performance does not simply represent ruination and decay but performs and embodies its reality on stage. This chapter has identified the wider landscapes of ruin and ruination and I have signalled the ways in which the material ruin and experiential ruination have been identified historically, conceptually, politically and through other art forms. The focus of this book is inevitably on performance and performativity and I suggest that despite the historically substantial and complex hinterland of ruinous thinking and research around dereliction and decay, theatre and performance studies have come late to this particular table, a lacuna which this volume hopes in part to remedy. This contextual chapter hints at foundational or preparatory thought for the writing to follow in that while cultural geography and urban studies have developed discourses around the way in which ruins perform, theatre and performance offer their own different but associated opportunities for ruins. The time-based act of live performance in a ruined space animates the location, arresting, if only temporarily, its termination, its demise. The intervention of performance challenges—for the time being—the apparently predetermined narratives which events and decisions have forced upon it. In the space between the liveness of the performance and the materiality of the ruins other possibilities may be imagined and constructed.

Notes 1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a Swiss born philosopher, writer and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic and educational thought. 2. Voltaire (1694–1778), the nom de plume of François-Marie Arouet, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and separation of church and state. 3. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a Prussian philosopher who argued that that reason is the source of morality, and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant has been influential in contemporary philosophy, especially around epistemology, ethics, political theory and post-­ modern aesthetics.

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4. The German rationalist philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was a key thinker within the Renaissance and made significant contributions in fields spanning mathematics, physics, logic, ethics and theology. 5. Robert Smithson’s seminal essay was originally published as ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, Artforum, December 1967, pp. 52–57. 6. J.G.  Ballard’s fictions of ruin include: The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), High Rise (1975) and Kingdom Come (2006). 7. W.G. Sebald’s key fictions—an inadequate term to capture the hybridity of his writing—include The Rings of Saturn (1995), The Emigrants (1992), Vertigo (1990), Austerlitz (2001). 8. Postdramatic Theatre, the title of an influential book by Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006), proposes a number of tendencies and qualities in contemporary ‘avant-garde’ performance since the 1960s. The term signposts performance and theatre which rejects, or is playful with the traditional traits of plot, character, narrative and representation and melds heterogeneous styles and influences, often from other art forms. Postdramatic theatre challenges the hegemony of the play text, often instead foregrounding found texts, imagery, physicality and digital media.

Bibliography Anderson, F. (2015, June). Cruising the Queer Ruins of New York’s Abandoned Waterfront. In R. Gough, & C. Lavery (Eds.), Performance Research on Ruins and Ruination 20(3), 135–144. Bailes, S.  J. (2011). Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure. Abingdon: Routledge. Beckett, S. (1983). Worstward Ho. London: John Calder. Beckett, S. (1986). The Capital of the Ruins. In J. Calder (Ed.), As No Other Dare Fail. London: John Calder. Beckett, S. (2006). The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber. Benjamin, W. (1977). The Origin of German Classic Drama (pp.  177–178). London: Verso. Benjamin, W. (2002). The Arcades Project (H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boym, S. (2011). Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins. Atlas of Transformation. http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/ruinophilia/ruinophilia-appreciation-of-ruins-svetlana-boym.html. Accessed 10 Sept 2019. Cloke, P., & Jones, O. (2005). “Unclaimed Territory”: Childhood and Disordered Space(s). Social and Cultural Geography, 6, 311–333.

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DeSilvey, C., & Edensor, T. (2012). Reckoning with Ruins. Progress in Human Geography, 37(4), 1–21. Dillon, B. (2014). Ruin Lust. London: Tate Publishing. Edensor, T., Evans, B., Holloway, J., Millington, S., & Binnie, J. (2011). Playing in Industrial Ruins: Interrogating Teleological Understandings of Play in Spaces of Material Alterity and Low Surveillance. In A.  Jorgensen (Ed.), Wildscapes (pp. 65–79). Abingdon: Routledge. Etchells, T. (2010). Eight Fragments on Theatre and the City. In N. Whybrow (Ed.), Performance and the Contemporary City. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Etchells, T. (2017, May 4). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Forced Entertainment. (2004). Bloody Mess. https://www.forcedentertainment. com/projects/bloody-mess/. Accessed 29 Oct 2019. Forced Entertainment. (2009). Void Story. https://www.forcedentertainment. com/projects/void-story/. Accessed 29 Oct 2019. Forced Entertainment. (2013). The Last Adventures. https://www.forcedentertainment.com/projects/the-last-adventures/. Accessed 29 Oct 2019. Hamer, R. (2015). A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse. London: Faber and Faber. Hell, J., & Schönle, A. (Eds.). (2010). Ruins of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Janowitz, A. (1990). England’s Ruins. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kant, I. (2012). On the Causes of Earthquakes on the Occasion of the Calamity that Befell the Western Countries of Europe towards the End of Last Year (1756). In E. Watkins (Ed.), Kant: Natural Science (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant) (pp.  327–336). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knowlson, J. (1996). Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. Lavery, C., & Gough, R. (2015, June). Performance Research on Ruins and Ruination 20(3). Lazzara, M.  J., & Unruh, V. (Eds.). (2009). Telling Ruins in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lorimer, H., & Murray, S. (2015, June). The Ruin in Question. In R. Gough and C. Lavery (Eds.), Performance Research on Ruins and Ruination 20(3), 58–66. Lyons, S. (Ed.). (2018). Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Macaulay, R. (1953). Pleasure of Ruins. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Massey, D. (2010). The Future of Landscape. In 3:AM Magazine. https:// www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-future-of-landscape-doreen-massey/. Accessed 3 Apr 2017. Müller, H. (1984). Hamlet Machine and Other Texts for the Stage. New  York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

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National Trust Weddings. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/weddings. Accessed 15 Oct 2019. Rousseau, J.  J. (2018). Lettre de J.J.  Rousseau citoyen de Geneve, a Monsieur de Voltaire, concernant le poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne. London: Wentworth Press. Sebald, W.  G. (2003). The Natural History of Destruction. London: Hamish Hamilton. Simmel, G. (1965). The Ruin. In K. H. Wolff (Ed.), Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics. New York: Harper and Row. Smithson, R. (1967, December). A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. Artforum, pp. 52–57. Voltaire. (2003). Candide. New York: Barnes and Noble Press. Weber, C. (Eds.). (1984). The Pressure of Experience. In Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage (pp.  13–30). New  York: Performing Arts Journal Publication. Wells, K. (2018). Detroit Was Always Made of Wheels: Confronting Ruin Porn in Its Hometown. In S.  Lyons (Ed.), Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 3

Performing the Antiquary: Classical Ruins in the Greek Imaginary

The Role of Antiquary in the Greek Imaginary This chapter is the only one in the book to focus exclusively on the ways in which the ancient ruins of a particular country—in this case, Greece— are currently performed and harnessed for cultural activities. The intricate and contested stories of Greek ruins, both classical and modern, could productively be understood to have a metonymic function in relation to every chapter and case study within the pages of this book. Apart, perhaps, from Italy, no other European country has such an insistent and complex relationship to antiquary and ruin. Along with sea, sun and sand, Greece’s main industry, tourism, is constructed upon the experience and promise of ubiquitous ruin gazing—at temples, palaces, theatres, bath houses, the remains of urban living and countless fragments and shards of broken, though often partially restored statuary, ceramics and other artefacts. Down the decades and centuries, the relationship between contemporary Greece and its ruins and antiquarian past has not only been the subject of national pride, but also of contestation, expropriation, cultural ambiguity, anxieties and incessant political claims and counter-claims. Yannis Hamilakis’ astutely constructed book, The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquary, Archaeology and National Imagination in Greece (2009),1 explores links between antiquity, antiquities and the national imagination. Hamilakis’ analytical and poetic lenses could productively be reconfigured for any quest to understand a country’s symbolic and cultural capital and I draw upon his insights as I offer reflection and commentary on how © The Author(s) 2020 S. Murray, Performing Ruins, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40643-1_3

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Greece’s antiquarian ruins perform an often unstable and contested identity in the country’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century histories. Thus, this chapter serves two purposes: it provides a glance at the materiality of two of Greece’s most celebrated ancient ruins—Epidaurus and Delphi— and, most pertinently for the purposes of this book, offers reflections on the role that these (and other) ruins of antiquity continue to perform in constructing and reconstructing Greece’s collective cultural imaginary. Of course, this has always been an unstable, unfolding and contested imaginary and, as such, might better be employed in the plural form, imaginaries. Contemporary Greek ruins and the performances they have hosted over the last decade feature in Chap. 7 and as such propose a significantly different model for the collective imaginary than those which feature in this chapter. For the purpose of this book, the term ‘classical antiquary’ may legitimately be read as ‘ruin’. Greece’s celebrated classical ruins have always played, and continue to play, an immensely significant role in manufacturing, sustaining and reinventing the nation’s cultural and symbolic capital. Understanding and acknowledgement of Greece as the birthplace of ‘Western Civilisation’ and democracy for both native Greek citizens, and those from outwith the country, is a trope which reappears in many different cultural, aesthetic and social guises. Moreover, as Hamilakis argues, the myths of classical antiquary offer a frame of meaning which serve to construct, revise and endlessly nurture the national imagination. An imagination which Greece has of itself and which we—as outsiders—have of it. Hamilakis explains his project in this way: I have chosen to focus on a single, to my mind important, angle, that is the poetics and politics of national identity. Nation and nationhood as embodied and materialised in ancient things, places and sites, will be my main exploratory axis; but rather than being an exclusive preoccupation, it will operate more like a conduit through which a range of other issues and phenomena will be examined. (Hamilakis 2009, p. 11)

Hamilakis’ ‘exploratory axis’ for his own writing usefully prompts further questions. What role do classical Hellenic ruins play in modern Greece? How do such ruins perform in the world of contemporary Greece? As with any ruined location which is institutionally validated through a range of artistic, academic and cultural criteria Greek classical ruins operate symbolically and as material commodities. In Greece, however, the

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difference perhaps is one of plenitude and ubiquity. At the level of symbolism, Greece’s classical ruins have regularly been invoked by different political regimes as sources of legitimacy and authority, often ascribed a retrospective sanitised coherence and continuity which, in reality, they rarely possessed. Antiquaries have performed a vital role for political leadership in helping to establish its credentials for authority and power in the name of an imagined heroic and glorious Greek past. A past selectively constructed through both myth and material reality to service the missions of different regimes, whether benevolent or malign. As Hamilakis notes ‘archaeology is fundamental to the national imagination … it creates regimes of truth for the nation … a mnemonic landscape’ (Ibid., p. 293). The selectivity entailed in summoning up Greek antiquity to embellish and legitimise the authority of national political projects is partly about the choice of narratives and exemplars—and those to ignore and forget— which most appropriately feed the aims of the mission in question. However, these selections are also determined by absences and lacunae in the material and archival landscapes of antiquary themselves. In his book, RUINS: Classical Theater and Broken Memory (2018), Odai Johnson quotes performance studies scholar, Herbert Blau, who writes that it is ‘what the text does not say that reveals the deepest scars’ (1982, pp. 184–5). Johnson’s scholarly book is about absence and the gaps which exist when the material objects of antiquity are destroyed, removed or ruined through entropic processes and through the inevitable fissures and omissions in even the most rigorous accounting processes of historical documentation and story-telling. Johnson begins his book by describing the panels which wrap around the interior of the striking new Acropolis Museum (opened in 2009) in Athens. Many of the panels contain the original marble remains from the Parthenon frieze, but others are only the imagined (or copied), but equally compelling, ‘outlined absences of the lost pieces, those blocks destroyed, removed (among them the Elgin Marbles)’ and he goes on to say that ‘It is the marking of the missing that remains for me the most potent component of viewing these charismatic ruins’ (Johnson 2018, p. 1). Whilst Johnson’s fascinating account focuses on the classical theatre and ruins of ancient Greece and Rome, the force field of his argument about absence, imagination and memory pose equally valid questions for any material ruin, whether ancient or modern. A ruin by definition is incomplete—slates, bricks, stones, glass, wood, steel, concrete—decomposed, destroyed, broken and missing, but also what is absent is the human life and activity which was once the raison d’étre of the site in question.

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These very absences and non-appearances shadow many of the accounts in this volume and which frame the questions we might want to pose of ruinous location and the possible cultural activities afforded by them. Johnson offers an elegant formulation of the issue: Such accounts remind us (hard lessons for the historian) that memory is a subversive act against the natural status of oblivion. Monuments throw brief redoubts against erasure. Oblivion is the natural order (what Geoffrey Cubitt has called “the mundane coastal erosion” against which monuments face off. (Ibid., p. 16)

Makronisos and Giaros: The Ruin as Political (Re)education An extreme example of the ways in which classical antiquaries can be drawn into service for political ends, but one that is shadowed more lightly in many other contexts and situations, is the case of Makronisos, a 13-­kilometre-long barren island off the coast of Attica and some 45 kilometres from Athens. From its western shore the Temple of Poseidon on the mainland at Cape Sounion can clearly be seen. In Greek mythology, the island of Makronisos was the place of refuge for Helen during the Trojan War and was called Helena in antiquary. It is also mentioned in Homer’s Iliad. Makronisos became a camp for political prisoners—largely communists—from the beginning of the Civil War2 in 1946 until 1949 when the conflict officially ended. Later, between 1967 and 1973 the military junta and dictatorship began again to use the island to confine political opponents. Today, the story of Makronisos is ‘officially’ regarded as a shameful episode in modern Greek history and has been documented to a certain extent by academics and other commentators (Bournazos and Sakellaropoulos 2000; Diaphonidis et  al. 1994; Giannaris 1996; Voglis 2002) and from the accounts of surviving inmates. During this period Makronisos was a place not only of severe oppression, forced labour and torture but also of ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘re-education’. It is these latter practices that are most salient for the purpose of this book. Re-education took the form of obligatory exposure to the narratives and materiality of Greek antiquity. Inmates were required to write and recite poetry, to enact plays which celebrated the spirit of Hellenism, to spend time looking across the narrow strip of water separating the island from Attica so as to gaze at the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, and, most bizarrely of all, to build replica models of the great classical ruins of Greece. The perniciously

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strange performance of (attempted) rehabilitation at levels both material and ideological. The purpose of this purification and ideological cleansing is described by Hamilakis thus: The inmates of Makronisos, by building the replicas of ancient monuments, by experiencing this monumental landscape of classical antiquity, by reflecting on the meaning and importance of the temple at Sounio … by listening to all these speeches on their duties as descendants of classical Greeks, could be helped to discover the ancient Greek spirit (Rodocanachi 1949: 6) and re-enter the community of Hellenism. (Hamilakis 2009, p. 223)

During the Civil War and under the Colonels’ dictatorship,3 the larger island of Giaros (52 kilometres east of Makronisos) was also used to inter political prisoners. In addition to the rehabilitation methods identified above, Greek folk culture through the vehicle of music was used to substantiate and reinforce the Colonels’ ideological programme and to give their authoritarian rule some cultural and aesthetic legitimation. On Giaros, patriotic music was played through loudspeakers as a strategy to make prisoners sign a Declaration of Loyalty, to recant their existing political beliefs and to denounce their comrades. Here, folk music became an instrument of coercion and degradation. Once a year, survivors of Giaros and Makronisos, and relatives of those who died in the camps, visit the islands to perform a ceremony of remembrance at the cemeteries. The buildings used to inter the prisoners are now derelict and ruined. The story of Makronisos and Giaros offers a complex inter-twining between antiquarian and contemporary ruins, nationalism and the task of ideological legitimation. However, these two islands provided a laboratory and lesson for what was intended—in both periods—as a national project. Hamilakis puts it like this: The main purpose of Makronisos was the ideological indoctrination not only of its detainees, but also of the whole of the dissenting population of Greece. Classical antiquity was seen as a key device for that indoctrination. The state attempted to convince the inmates that their destiny as descendants of ancient Greeks was incompatible with ‘foreign’ ideologies such as communism. (Ibid., p. 30)

For the purpose of understanding the role of Greek antiquary in the country’s national myth-making down the centuries the ideological harnessing of these narratives and the aesthetic power of ruins and fragments

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are not peculiar to the far right of the political spectrum. Of course, the brutal quality of the Makronisos and Giaros laboratories are an extreme example of this phenomena, but as Hamilakis points out, the left have also invoked these histories as a way of galvanising support for causes, or for steeling resistance against authority and oppression. Indeed, during the 1950 elections accounts from ‘unredeemed’ and surviving inmates from the islands often drew upon classical references whilst ironically mocking the language, goals and symbolism of those who ran the camps: ‘the Parthenon is over’ and ‘The “Parthenon” cracked. It will soon start falling down’ (Ibid., p. 225). Hamilakis notes the language in a leaflet written by Manolis Proimakis (subsequently a member of parliament for the United Democratic Left [EDA]) designed to draw the West’s attention to the crimes of Makronisos and which explicitly appeals to the heroic histories and the democratic spirit of ancient Greece. He quotes Proimakis who appeals to the ‘consciousness of all civilised men … to save the honour of a small but heroic country which was the cradle of democracy and civilisation – the honour of Greece’ (Proimakis 1950, p. 12 cited in Hamilakis 2009, p. 225). For those on the left, qualities of resistance, rational discourse, justice and freedom are readily invoked from the narratives of ancient Greece. Moreover, it is often claimed that these are dispositions and behaviours manifest in a continuous line down Greek history over 2000 years. Dimitris Glinos (1882–1943) a member of the Greek resistance movement during the Second World War authored the political manifesto for the Communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM) in 1942. We can read: Greeks know how to die for freedom which was not offered to them but which they always, from the time of the Marathon and Salamis to 1821 to the present, earned with their blood and their heroism. (Glinos 1975 [1942], p. 173 cited in Hamilakis, p. 230)

In these contexts the antiquarian ruins of Greece perform a function which is neither ‘innocent’ nor simply a matter of aesthetic and historical wonder. However, it is precisely because the antiquaries of Greece are indeed such objects of wonder and amazement that they have been continuously captured into the service of ideology, national mythology and imagination. Every society constructs, revises—and often contests—the myths that apparently help to

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explain its identity and the cultural character and function of its institutions and its peoples. The ruined buildings, monuments, statuary and artefacts of ancient Greece are spectacles of incredulity, hugely important income-generating commodities and objects which have regularly come to define the country’s heritage and cultural capital. They achieve this both through their sheer materiality, through absence and in the texture and content of the stories they tell of lives led, of love, of beauty, of toil, of conflict, of power, of sexuality, of gender, of brutality, of invention, of heroism and of creativity.

Performing the Classical Ruins of Ancient Greece: Epidaurus and Delphi Sources suggest there are over 125 recorded ancient theatre sites in Greece (www.cycladia.com/) and more beyond in countries such as Sicily, Cyprus and Turkey. This list does not include sporting stadia and other ruins where theatrical or performance events may also have taken place. Since

Fig. 3.1  Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion. Wiki Commons. Upload 2 July 2008 by Dorieo21. (Author: Stell*R)

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this book’s centre of gravity lies in contemporary ruins, the following section undertakes only to focus on the theatres of Epidaurus and the site of Delphi and reflects on their changing roles within the mutable cultural landscapes of Greece. Both these locations have presented live theatre down the twentieth century to the present day, usually under the auspices of festivals. Both Delphi and Epidaurus engage largely with the dramas of ancient Greece, although debates about the shape and content of programming have continued throughout the modern period. The dramaturgical power of these extraordinary sites—understandably in many ways—draws programmers and artistic directors inexorably back to interpreting and to re-interpreting the plays of, for example, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. Theatres of Epidaurus The theatres of Epidaurus lie on the east coast of the Peloponnese, some 75 miles from Athens and 16 miles north of Nafplio. The Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus was designed by Polykleitos the Younger in the fourth century BC and the original 34 rows were extended during the Roman occupation of Greece by a further 21 rows. The main theatre seats up to 14,000 people, has exceptional acoustics which enable almost perfect intelligibility from anywhere in the auditorium and, as was typical of many ancient Greek theatres, has a view from the auditorium across the stage towards a lush Arcadian landscape functioning as a permanent backdrop. This served

Fig. 3.2  Theatre of Epidaurus. Wiki Commons. Upload 27 June 2013. (Author: Ronny Siegel)

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Fig. 3.3  Theatre of Delphi. Wiki Commons. Upload 24 July 2012 (Author: Challisrussi)

as an essential part of the theatre’s spatial dramaturgy. The Little Theatre of Epidaurus is close to the town’s port and could originally seat 2000 spectators, but today has a capacity of about 800. It was only discovered in the 1970s and is still undergoing restoration. The first Athens and Epidaurus Festival was in 1955, although a production of Sophocles’ Electra in 1938 seems to have been the first modern performance. Throughout its history, the Festival, notwithstanding the quality of some of the work performed there, has been a territory for playing out national cultural tensions, disagreements, hierarchies and the extent to which Epidaurus should primarily be the custodian of the canon of the country’s classical drama. For the first 20 years of its life only the National Theatre of Greece was permitted to stage productions in the Ancient Theatre. Later, and over time, all the Greek regional and municipal theatres—the National Theatre of Northern Greece, the Cyprus Theatre Organisation

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and the Regional Theatre of Larissa, for example—have performed work there. The Festival’s own—surprisingly—candid website notes a period of stagnation for two decades from the early 1980s and that from the 1990s the Festival had fallen under the wings and ideological hegemony of the Greek National Tourist Organisation, and as such began to manifest: …many of the negative traits associated with the Greek state, namely its bureaucracy and susceptibility to outside pressure groups … the Festival embraced both major artistic productions and minor, unremarkable projects carried out primarily for reasons of glamour or, occasionally in pursuit of former glories. (Athens and Epidaurus Festival 2018, n.p.)

In 2006 a new director, Giorgos Loukos, attempted to tackle this ‘dire situation’ (Ibid.) by opening the Epidaurus programme to international artists and by inviting renowned theatre directors to present early and late modern works including Shakespeare and Beckett. Loukos pursued a policy of openness to avant garde artists from across the world at the same time offering platforms to emerging Greek performance makers ‘who can speak the concerns of contemporary audiences’ (Ibid.). In April 2016 Vangelis Theodoropoulos was appointed artistic director and the language describing the mission of the Festival now articulates and ghosts the rapidly changing nature of Greek society under austerity and the political governance of Syriza.4 A ‘Note from the director’ speaks of co-­productions of an international, national and regional kind, and, significantly of expanding audiences by ‘opening up’ the city of Athens and Piraeus. Theodoropoulos goes on to say: It is of paramount importance to make sure that the Festival is actively engaged with the production of Greek culture, the goal being to re-­ introduce an aspect of Greekness that is divested of any stereotypical folklore elements. To that effect, the Epidaurus Lyceum, an international summer school of ancient Greek drama, will be launched in 2017. Young actors and drama students from all over the world are eligible to enroll. In these times of social and cultural crisis, it is imperative that the Athens & Epidaurus Festival contributes to social cultivation, encouraging love for high art. At the same time, the Festival needs to actively support contemporary artists. Highlighting contemporary art and paving the road for audiences that are more critically engaged are both instrumental in enabling the operation of a progressive, cultural institution insofar as they promote a better society: a

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society of proactive thinkers rather than a society of helpless people at the mercy of market forces. (Theodoropoulos 2018, n.p.)

Theodoropoulos’ words are worth reproducing at some length here since they bear out Hamilakis’ analysis—examined above—of the ambivalent relationship which continues to exist between Greece’s classical past, contemporary cultural production and the Greek imaginary. This statement is intriguing as he speaks of the current Festival of Athens and Epidaurus seeking to ‘re-introduce an aspect of Greekness that is divested of any stereotypical folklore elements’. An attempt perhaps to strip Greek antiquarianism of the overly romanticised and reverential tones which often accompany such discourses. Theodoropoulos also explicitly positions the work of the Festival in ‘times of social and cultural crisis’ and as an institution which promotes a ‘society of proactive thinkers, rather than a society of helpless people at the mercy of market forces’. To this end the festivals of the last three years have been themed as follows: The Arrival of the Outsider (2017), Polis and Citizen (2018) and Reinventing the Ancient Drama (2019). The melding of the contemporary European avant garde, socio-cultural themes of displacement, democracy, migration, citizenship and reimagining the myths of ancient Greek drama appear to be the signature of the Festival in the current conjuncture. The 2019 Festival will mark the presence for the first time at Epidaurus of ‘celebrity’ directors such as Robert Wilson (Oedipus), Ivo van Hove for the Comedie-Francaise (Electra/Orestes) and one of the founding members of Complicité,5 Anglo-­ Greek actress Kathryn Hunter, in the title role of the Municipal and Regional Theatre of Patras’ production of Prometheus Bound. At the same time, the Little Theatre hosts three avant-garde musical theatre productions performed by the Greek National Opera Alternative Stage: Kassandra (Iannis Xenakis), Anaparastasis I: The Baritone (Jani Christou) and The Day Will Come … (Giorgos Koumentakis). 2019 marks the first return to Epidaurus of the Greek National Opera since its iconic performances of Norma and Medea with Maria Callas in 1961. All three of these music theatre productions—note, not ‘operas’—draw upon ancient texts: Aeschylus for Kassandra and Anaparastasis I: The Baritone and Homer for The Day Will Come … Launched in 2017, the Epidaurus Lyceum is a new project within the larger Festival and is explicitly organised around the practices of heuristic and corporeal actor training and similarly reinforces a goal to create ‘a space where tradition and innovation, ancient and modern civilization will

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share a creative coexistence’ (Epidaurus Lyceum 2018). It is also noteworthy, especially, given the Greek/European Union (EU) crisis of this period that internationalism is particularly invoked both as an ethic and as a cultural/political practice. A video illustrating the 2018 work of the Epidaurus Lyceum, which largely takes place in the Little Theatre, revealingly offers these subtitles to the extracts shown: • Expanded body and collective landscape • Deconstructing the traditional body • Chinese Opera as a paradigm of performative continuity • Aristophanes vs democracy • Antigone, or when I becomes We and We become They • The responsibility of the Polis The Advisory Board for the Epidaurus Lyceum includes Eugenio Barba and Denis Hilton-Reid and in the summer of 2018 the latter ran a two week workshop on ‘Women Victims and violence in classical drama in the age of #MeToo, using the techniques of The Emotional Gesture’ (Hilton-­ Reid 2018). I record some of these details both to provide a sense of the programming of the last three years and to indicate how suffused the Festival today is with the ideas and language, not only of contemporary Theatre and Performance Studies, but also of identity politics. In this respect the cultural landscape of modern day Greece is perhaps little different from any Western society. In this section I have deliberately ignored the Athens dimension of the Festival because I wanted to provide a small case study of live performance in, arguably, the most renowned ancient and ruined theatre of Greece: Epidaurus. The site-specificity of theatre, dance and music productions in Epidaurus is not straightforward, nor is its status as a ruin. As a UNESCO World Heritage site, Epidaurus has received funding from the Greek state, the EU and private foundations. As discussed in the introductory chapter of this book when wrestling with the definition(s) or ruin and ruination, it becomes questionable whether such iconic heritage sites as Epidaurus (and countless others) qualify unproblematically for the status of ‘ruin’. Huge sums of money have been invested—and continue to be spent—in Epidaurus to restore its condition to a particular imagined moment of its history, to ‘freeze’ its ruination and to ensure it remains safe for the thousands of tourists and other visitors who come to watch live theatre, or simply to wander around the site. Epidaurus’ process of ruination is

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constantly arrested so as to preserve the site in a way which secures the wellbeing of its visitors and (broadly) matches the desires and the boundaries of imagination of those who come to this remarkable place. Within the framework of my overarching analysis, Epidaurus and its ilk are both ‘ruin’ and ‘non-ruin’. Excerpt from UNESCO World Heritage Web Page on Epidaurus

The safety of the site is ensured with an adequate and qualified security staff. An upgraded fire protection system has been developed, using both conventional and modern instruments. During the restoration works all the necessary measures for ensuring the stability of the monuments are being implemented and thus the findings in the museum and its depots are adequately protected from earthquake hazards.… The long-term goal is to offer to the public a legible and understandable monumental complex that will reveal the operation of the Sanctuary during ancient times. Through constant care and gradual enhancement of all its monuments, the site will provide a natural, cultural and archaeological park with high level visitor services. (UNESCO World Heritage Site Epidaurus 2018) The site-specificity of theatre at Epidaurus and the relationship between the dramas performed there and the location itself are complex. Such a discourse raises difficult questions around matters of authenticity, heritage, artistic intention and spectator expectation and reception. Unlike many of the sites identified in this account, Epidaurus was built as a theatre and remains over 2000 years later a place where live performance is performed and witnessed. However, few spectators would imagine or claim that the experience they are witnessing is an authentic recreation of ‘how it was’ when the plays of Aeschylus or Aristophanes were first performed. In so far as many of the dramas performed today in either of the Epidaurus theatres were first written and performed over 2000 years ago there is a dramaturgical link between deep past and present. However, given that most of these productions are now framed by marketing and promotional rhetoric which locates their realisation within the pressing concerns of contemporary Greece, what audiences actually hear or see in these theatres is greatly distanced from what we might imagine the

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authorial intentions to be of over two millennia ago. Moreover, the context of watching a theatre production in Epidaurus today, and the horizon of expectations which spectators bring with them, differs in many ways— some obvious, some more hidden—from Greek antiquary. Perhaps the most significant of these is that, like many of the preserved ruins of Greece, engaging with them either as spectators of a live performance or as visitors is within the economic and cultural framework of mass tourism. This fact does not of itself render theatre productions at Epidaurus banal or trivial, but it does provide a particular texture and set of parameters to the expectations and experience of theatre-going at this site. With my family I saw a production of The Bacchae at Epidaurus by the Municipal and Regional Theatre of Larissa in July 2017. We parked in an enormous car park alongside dozens of coaches, many of which had brought visitors from Athens or even further afield. We had a meal in one of the restaurants before the play started and then found our way high up into the seating. It was hard not to be in awe of the material spectacle, the natural landscape of hills and woods behind the stage and the mystique which Epidaurus presented to us that summer evening. The scale of the place and the vistas afforded from where we sat often seemed to overwhelm the actual experience of watching Euripides’ play, first performed 2422  years ago in 405  BC.  This time frame alone induces wonder and speechlessness. The performance was elaborately lit and English language surtitles of the spoken Greek text were projected on to screens either side of the stage. From so high up in the auditorium it was hard to read the surtitles and, moreover, any visual concentration on the actual words took attention away from the on-stage action. As has regularly been attested, the extraordinary acoustic of the theatre allows most registers of the actors’ voices to be heard from wherever one is sitting. However, seated so far from the action it was difficult to pick up visual detail, and with what seemed like a corporeally rather unimaginative production, any actual close engagement with the minutiae of the performance itself was dissipated and difficult to sustain. After the performance finished we drove late in the evening about 20 kilometres back to Mykines where we were staying in the Hotel Belle Helene. We had been here many years before and wanted to anchor our visit to Epidaurus in this remarkable and eccentric place, distinguished not by any of the usual comforts of twenty-first-­ century hotels (no ensuite and untrustworthy showers), but by the roll call of famous guests who had stayed there down much of the twentieth century. It was opened by the current owner’s grandfather and in the 1890s

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the German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who began the excavations of the ancient site of Mycenae nearby, rented rooms here for the duration of the work. Since that time a host of illustrious guests have stayed and each of the eight bedrooms is named after one of them. These include: Jean-Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, Henry Moore, Claude Debussy, Winifred Nicholson, William Faulkner, Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Freya Stark and, most recently, J.K. Rowling. I identify the Belle Helene and our experience as it added a beguiling sense of historical context and legacy in which to place engagement with Greek ruins and ruination by visitors from across the world. The sensations and meanings we took from the whole Epidaurus experience were multiple, but dominated by the material presence and theatricality of the site itself. In such a location this is probably inevitable, but does pose significant dramaturgical challenges—and opportunities too—for the director and actors. For me the total space of Epidaurus seemed to cry out for a more radical approach to staging and spectatorship. One that perhaps abandoned the habitual conventions of acting and audience expectation and reception in favour of either a promenade performance or a Wrights & Sites ‘Mis-Guide’ type treatment of the total site.6 This might productively disturb and fruitfully problematise the site specificity of this remarkable place. The Delphic Idea With Olympia (the site of the Panhellenic Games for over a 1000 years), Mycenae, the Palace of Knossos on Crete, Mystras and, of course, the Parthenon and the Acropolis, sacred Delphi high up on a terrace between the crags of Mount Parnassos, is one of the largest and most dramatic sites of ancient Greece. The excavations of Delphi started in the late nineteenth century and the ‘Great Excavation’ (La Grande Fouille) by a joint French and Greek team began in 1892, lasted for over ten years and was undertaken by a large group of archaeologists and volunteer assistants. Although Delphi has a 5000-seat theatre, along with the Temple of Apollo, the Sanctuary of Gaia, various ‘Treasuries’ and many other buildings, it has rarely been used for performances in the manner of Epidaurus. However, like its Peloponnesian sister, Delphi has been identified as a World Heritage site. The first known use of this location for live performance were two idiosyncratic ‘Delphic Festivals’ in 1927 and 1930 organised by Angelos Sikelianos and his American wife, Eva Palmer. To precis extracts from the programmes, both festivals were utopian celebrations of the human spirit

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committed to further global understanding and world peace. The 1927 event included tours of the site, a choral and orchestral rendering of the Hymn to Apollo, a performance of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, a lecture from Sikelianos himself, a recreation of the ancient Pyrrhic war dances, and other dance and mime pieces, some of which were choreographed by Palmer. At the end of the whole event on the second day, foreign visitors were escorted by athletes with blazing torches down the mountain. The second Festival in 1930 lasted three days and this time included athletic events—the Pentathlon, archery, a tug-of-war, torch relays and equestrian manoeuvres, for example—in the ancient stadium, as well as Kleftika singing and dancing. A sense of the earnestness and ‘missionary’ spirit behind these events is evidenced by this line from the programme about the closing session which was to contain: ‘Brief lectures by Greek and foreign intellectuals on the Delphic Idea’. As before, Hamilakis’ propositions around the role of antiquary within the Greek imaginary are palpable and self-evident in Sikelianos and Palmer’s projects which were directed philosophically and through practice (in sport and the arts) to the revival of the Delphic Idea. Journalist Stella Tsolakidou summarised these ideals like this: ‘Sikelianos believed that the principles, which had shaped the classic civilization, if re-examined, could offer spiritual independence and serve as a means of communication amongst people’ (Tsolakidou 2012, n.p.). Despite their aspirations, neither Sikelianos nor Palmer could raise more funding and there were no further Delphic Festivals of this kind after 1930. Since the Delphic Festivals, cultural activities seem to have been sporadic, but the folk memory of these events has remained firmly in the mythology (and mythologising) of Delphi. In 1977 the European Cultural Centre of Delphi (ECCD) was established under the centre-right government of Konstantinos Karamanlis who founded the New Democracy party in 1974. Invoking the ideas and passions of Angelos Sikelianos and Eva Palmer, but, it would seem from a different ideological perspective, the ECCD was supported by the European Union after Greece joined in 1981. One of the guiding principles of the ECCD is the modest aim to ‘develop common cultural principles that will unite the peoples of Europe’ and, to this end, in 1985 the ECCD hosted an international meeting on ancient drama. Here a symposium, workshops, exhibitions, screenings and theatre performances were organised under the general theme of ‘Ancient Greek Drama in modern Reality’. Over the next two decades festivals or cultural gatherings were organised by the ECCD and themed through art forms or fields such as fine art, cinema and television, dance, ancient

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drama, musicology, sculpture and photography. In 1997 the ECCD organised a special event to mark the 70th anniversary of the Delphic Festivals. In 2012 the Ancient Theatre of Delphi opened its gates to the public on 21 July after a period of 37 years for a programme of theatre, music and poetry. The centrepiece of this event was a recital of extracts from Ancient Greek tragedies. The original theatre had not apparently been used for live performance for safety reasons, but had been restored in this period through the largesse of EU Partnership funding. Delphi is a hugely visited site by tourists but, unlike Epidaurus, live performance is not at the centre of its attractions. Like Epidaurus, however, and many other celebrated sites of ancient Greece, the Delphi project is focused upon the revival of institutions of antiquity and this remains central to Greece’s cultural and economic identity. At the beginning of the book I described this current chapter on the ruins and theatres of ancient Greece, and their continued cultural resonance, as a ‘rogue episode’ within writing which focuses almost entirely on modern ruins. Reflecting again on the apparently ‘roguish’ quality of this chapter I realise that it also serves a valuable purpose within the narrative arc of the book by illuminating how ruins and decay may work culturally and through the collective psyche—the imaginary—of a nation. The first half of the chapter concentrated upon how Greece’s extraordinary antiquarian heritage continues to frame this country’s sense of itself and indeed, as outsiders, our hegemonic perception of the Hellenic landscape. Whilst, of course, that sense of Greek antiquary jostles with other perceptions and feelings about ‘Greekness’, some of which ride in hostility to the negative resonances of antiquarianism, Greece continues to embrace, for a variety of political, cultural and economic reasons, the seductive power of its historical ruination. The second part of the chapter focused specifically upon how the extraordinary sites of Delphi and Epidaurus have been put to work—culturally, ideologically and economically—down the twentieth century and up to the present day. Debates and arguments as to how the theatres of Epidaurus should be programmed reflect deeper feelings, aspirations and anxieties as to how Greece’s antiquarian heritage should be harnessed and used for the twenty-first century.

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Notes 1. I was advised by my friend, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, after reading a draft of this chapter that Hamilakis’ analysis has been subject to much debate within the circles of Greek historical scholarship. Without any detailed knowledge of these controversies I simply record my awareness of their existence at this juncture. 2. The Greek Civil War (1946–1949) had its roots in the political dynamics of Greece between 1939 and 1945 becoming almost the first explicit Cold War conflict in the period following the end of the Second World War. Despite the heroic role of Greek communists in anti-fascist resistance embedded tensions between the Greek government, its security forces and Greek communists erupted into a vicious civil war in 1946. With support from Western Allies, particularly American aid, Greek government forces defeated the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE)—the military wing of the Communist Party—in 1949. The bitter residue of this conflict resurfaced again through the dictatorship of the military colonels between 1967 and 1974. 3. Following a coup d’état in April 1967 by a right-wing group of army colonels Greece was subject to a dictatorship for seven years until 1974. Following pressures from Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in July 1974 the Junta was replaced by the Third Hellenic Republic. 4. The Socialist political party, Syriza, was in power in Greece between January 2015 and July 2019. 5. Complicité (originally Théâtre de Complicité) was founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Marcello Magni and Annabel Arden. The Company, deeply influenced by the teachings of Jacques Lecoq, is now renowned across the word and for its physically imaginative dramaturgy. 6. The term and practice of ‘Mis-Guiding’ has become a signature practice of United Kingdom, Exeter-based Company, Wrights & Sites. Mis-Guides suggests ways to see and experience a city or location and considers the forgotten, the hidden, the ignored, the apparently unimportant and the disguised. An approach from the oblique and an alternative to the typical tourist guided tours or heritage performances.

Bibliography Athens and Epidaurus Festival. (2018). http://greekfestival.gr/history/?lang=en. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Blau, H. (1982). Take Up the Bodies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bournazos, S., & Sakellaropoulos, T. (Eds.). (2000). Historic Landscape and Historic Memory: The Case of Makronisos. Athens: Filistor.

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Diaphonidis, K., Grigorakou-Martha, L., & Lefkaditou-Papandoniou, R. (Eds.). (1994). Makronisos: Historical and Cultural Site. Athens: Filistor. Epidaurus Lyceum. (2018). http://greekfestival.gr/epidaurus-lyceum/epidaurus-lyceum/?lang=en. Accessed 20 July 2018. Giannaris, G. (1996). The Makronisos “Re-education” Concentration Camp in Civil War Greece and the Intellectuals. Thetis, 3, 281–292. Glinos, D. (1975) [1942]. What Is and What EAM Stands for. Selected Writings, 1, 11. (Athens: Stohastis). Hamilakis, Y. (2009). The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquary, Archaeology and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hilton-Reid, D. (2018). https://arts.columbia.edu/profiles/dennis-hilton-reid. Accessed 20 July 2018. Johnson, O. (2018). RUINS: Classical Theater & Broken Memory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Proimakis, M. (1950). I Accuse! Written Behind the Barbed Wire in the Concentration Camp on Makronisos. London: League for Democracy in Greece. Rodocanachi, C. P. (1949). A Great Work of Civic Readaptation in Greece. Athens. Theodoropoulos, V. (2018). http://greekfestival.gr/a-note-from-the-director/ ?lang=en. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Tsolakidou, S. (2012). http://greece.greekreporter.com/2012/07/13/ancienttheatre-of-delphi-opens. Accessed 18 Nov 2018. UNESCO World Heritage Site Epidaurus. (2018). https://whc.unesco.org/en/ list/491. Accessed 20 July 2018. Voglis, P. (2002). Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners During the Greek Civil War. New York/Oxford: Berghahn. Wikipedia. (2018). Lists of Ancient Greek Theatres. https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/List_of_ancient_Greek_theatres. Accessed 3 Mar 2018.

CHAPTER 4

Nature’s Ruins: Gibellina–A Dream in Progress

In early October 2017 I visited Sicily with friend and ex-colleague David Williams. David had immersed himself in Sicily for over 20 years and had written about Palermo (Williams 2014, pp. 21–38) and, more relevantly for my project, on Gibellina in Performance Research: On Ruins and Ruination (Williams 2015, pp. 39–49). During nine days in Sicily, David acted as my guide and translator and was an endlessly stimulating source of knowledge and insight about the histories of Palermo and Gibellina. Writer and art critic, Vito Bonanno offers a proposition about Gibellina which identifies the creative tensions I was to experience during my brief time in Gibellina: a theatre of memory and a work in progress. He writes: Alberto Burri, when called upon to make his own contribution to the city’s rebirth, imagined the ruins of the old city as a theater of memory, a place to be completely formed and, with the Cretto, poetically consigned it, not only to the history of Gibellina, but to that of all humanity that has always succumbed in the face of nature … Thanks to Gibellina, Sicily now speaks a contemporary language. The language of Aeschylus and of Empedocles, of Cilo d’Alcamo and of Pirandello has been enriched by new idioms, signs of today, contemporary values that ferry us towards the future. It is a future that gazes out over the Mediterranean … Gibellina is a work in progress. (Bonanno 2008, pp. 107–8)

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The story of Gibellina—a town destroyed by earthquake in 1968, and Nuova Gibellina, its extraordinary ‘love child’, replacement and re-­ embodiment—does not fit neatly into any of the tropes of theatre in ruins or ruin performance examined throughout the rest of this book. However, the narrative of Gibellina flows and eddies across the various examples and case studies examined within these pages. To reverse this construction, one might equally say that traces, shadows, fragments, dispositions, claims and desires of ruin projects I investigated in Athens, Legnica, Berlin, Essen, DuisburgNord, Sarajevo or Mostar, for example, can all be found here in Western Sicily’s Belice Valley. However, none of these sites propose the same scale, intensity and totality of utopian ambition to be found in Gibellina. It’s as if all the multiple idiosyncrasies and aspirations I had discovered within the other ruinous spaces and projects described in this account had been distilled and condensed into the unfolding work in progress that is Gibellina.

Belice Valley: Earthquakes and the Birth of Nuova Gibellina To provide context I begin with some material and human histories. As with Berlin’s Teufelsberg (see Chap. 8), the ruination of the original town of Gibellina and all the subsequent architectural and artistic restitution around both the site of destruction and Nuova Gibellina itself represent a palimpsest of contested material and cultural complexity. As with Teufelsberg, forms of covering and burial play an intricate role in the practices of memorialising the original town and its inhabitants, whilst at the same time proposing hope and optimism for different futures. The old town of Gibellina with its Arabic and medieval origins was situated in the Belice Valley some 75 kilometres south west of Palermo. The valley’s settlements ran along geological fault lines and had experienced earth tremors and quakes down the centuries, but the most severe of these occurred over 14 and 15 January 1968, with the final shock measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale. Along with Gibellina, the towns of Poggioreale, Salaparuta and Montevago were also destroyed and over 400 people lost their lives across the region, with 100 from Gibellina alone. Most of the traumatised survivors from these communities were ‘housed’ in nearby displacement camps well into the late 1970s. Williams reports that these were gridded temporary communities of tents and then concrete fibre Nissen huts, without electricity, running water and other basic amenities. Ultimately these cramped, leaking, insanitary, barrack-like camps – barracopoli – would

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house the people of Gibellina for more than eleven years as they awaited a promised new town. (Williams 2015, p. 39)

In 1969, Ludovico Corrao was elected Mayor of Gibellina and certainly became the most significant player in guiding the cultural and architectural reconstruction of the town until his death in 2011. Corrao had been a Christian Democrat representative in the Sicilian Regional Assembly in the 1950s, but moved to the left as an independent (but on the Communist Party list) member of the Italian Parliament for Western Sicily in 1963. By all accounts, Corrao was a tenacious, charismatic and tirelessly energetic practitioner-polemicist for the cause of a Nuova Gibellina. Dismayed and fiercely hostile to the conventional rebuilding plans of regional bureaucrats, he proposed a radically different model for a new town to be positioned some 11 miles away from the ruin of old Gibellina in the agricultural plains of Salinella. This site, allegedly owned by two Mafia bosses, was close to a railway and recently constructed motorway. For the next 40 years, in or out of office, Corrao championed a vision for a new town informed by utopian models of the garden city. Inherently challenging the binary of the spiritual and the material, Corrao defined himself as ‘an artisan of culture’ (Sorgi 2015, p.  14) and that ‘knowledge of the hand’ (Angioni [1986] qtd. in Sorgi 2015, p. 14)—what we understand through the senses—was as important as intellectual cognition. For Corrao, Gibellina’s ruination did not begin and end with the catastrophic earthquake of 1968, but was an ongoing part of the region’s deep history of poverty, emigration, hunger, illness, mafia violence and feudal power. It was, said Corrao, the double ruin, let’s say. Because it was the earthquake, which destroyed much of the town. And it was also the insanity of a government that wanted to raze these places to the ground … the wish to declare closed the story of an area that for centuries had been destined to abandonment, poverty, exploitation, and hence to declare the end of any possible illusion or hope of resurrection. (Corrao qtd. in Quaglia 2015, p. 29)

In the months and years immediately following the disaster, Corrao pitted himself against what he single-mindedly believed to be the callous philistinism of the authorities. This was epitomised by their suspension of the ‘two-percent law’ which devolved 2 per cent of the cost of any public works to artistic embellishment. This 2 per cent was removed from the reconstruction of the towns destroyed by the 1968 earthquakes. Corrao’s

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aspirations for Nuova Gibellina united the domestic with the cultural: it was to be ‘a reconstruction that was not a reconstruction of poverty’ (Ando 2008, p. 76). The project that Corrao was to lead for over three decades began in 1971, a project to build a new town for the dwellers of old Gibellina, housed for so long in tents and pre-fabricated Nissen hut structures, and a town where each relocated family would have its own front door in a home where no one domestic building would have the same design as another. The urban plan took the form of a butterfly whose body was a central axis for shops and services, and whose ‘wings’ would provide domestic housing. At the same time as Corrao assembled a team of architects and designers to build the town, he was drawing upon his extensive contacts across the art worlds of Italy, Europe and beyond to participate and share in the creative construction of Nuova Gibellina. The role of these artists was, on the one hand, to work in partnership with local craftsmen (builders and stone masons) and architects in the design of new domestic, commercial and public spaces, and, on the other, to offer material sculptures and installations which would punctuate the common streets, squares, boulevards and communal places throughout the town. A leading figure amongst these was Pietro Consagra, one of the founder members of Forma 1, established in Rome in 1947 with the belief that formalism and Marxism were not irreconcilable and driven by the conviction that political purpose and abstraction might productively be in conversation with each other. Consagra’s La Stella: L’ingresso del Belice (Star: Entrance to the Belice) is an extraordinary 26-metre-high steel star standing astride the main entrance to the town. Stella was collaboratively constructed with local metal workers and welders. Williams describes it as ‘both monumental and delicate, resonantly defiant metaphor and simple graphic outline’ (Williams 2015, p. 42). For Corrao and Consagra, this collaboration with local labour was a deliberate enterprise that not merely provided employment for some of Gibellina’s workers, but was also a political practice designed to unsettle and challenge conventional distinctions between art and craft. Consagra also designed the Teatro Gibellina, a huge and startling edifice which remains unfinished to this day, and a slightly smaller building, the ‘Meeting Hall’, intended as a gathering place for Nuevo Gibellina’s urban population. This was completed, but, at the time of my visit in 2017, it had fallen into disrepair. For Corrao, the role of art in the building of Gibellina was to be far more than the incidental or random placing of public sculptures in a few well-chosen corners of the town, but rather a total integration of material and more ephemeral art into the warp and weft of the civic environment as a whole. Art was not

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merely adornment or decoration to make places more aesthetically attractive, or to please a cultivated bourgeoisie, but in the language of Marxism, cultural projects are not purely superstructural but can become in themselves ‘structures’, ‘a tool for understanding reality, a weapon for survival’ (Fernandez 1988, p. 91). Fulvio Abbate locates Corrao in the tradition of the Italian political thinker and activist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), who proposed a critique of a narrow or reductive Marxist ‘economism’ and who, for five weeks in 1926, was imprisoned on the small island of Ustica off the west coast of Sicily. Abbate writes: Like other civil towns of Sicily, today Gibellina is aware of being a nutshell in the storm, with Saint Rocco1 its star, but it is also aware of its duties so that its germinal course will found the future city. The city dreamt of by Étienne Boullée2 and Antonio Gramsci. (Abbate 1993, n.p.)

The national Gramsci archive is now located in Palermo and one imagines that as a young educated Socialist, Corrao would have encountered Gramsci’s writings, but whether or not his vision for Nuova Gibellina was explicitly shaped by the Italian cultural Marxist can only be conjecture and speculation. I consider in greater detail some of Gibellina’s art projects (dance, theatre, opera, painting, costumes, ceramics, sculpture and land art) in the pages which follow.

Fig. 4.1  Nuova Gibellina: Pietro Consagra’s unfinished Teatro Nova. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

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Fig. 4.2  Nuova Gibellina. Pietro Consagra’s Stella L’Ingresso del Belice. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

Fig. 4.3  Memorial stone for Ludovico Corrao, Nuova Gibellina. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

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Fig. 4.4  Montagna di Sale (Mountain of Salt) Orestiadi Foundation Museum, Nuova Gibellina. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

Fig. 4.5  Il Cretto, Alberto Burri at site of ruined Gibellina. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

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Fig. 4.6  Il Cretto, Alberto Burri at site of ruined Gibellina. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

My lived experience of Nuova Gibellina was brief and partial. I spent three days wandering the streets, boulevards, squares and public spaces of Gibellina under the gentle guidance of David Williams. We drifted, but sometimes walked purposefully, looking directly for sites which David imagined would be of particular interest to me. Over this brief period, I slowly began to embody its rhythms, marvelling at its insane ambition, feeling its tangible sense of hope, trying to understand its moods and observing how this project constructed out of ruination is now—in parts— becoming ruin again. I understand that by the end of its construction, the town could house some 15,000 people, but at the time of my visit apparently only about one-third of domestic dwellings were inhabited. Some closes, alleyways or cul-de-sacs seemed pristine yet abandoned, while others palpably falling into decay, but still others obviously inhabited with children playing, washing, drying on the line and people chatting in patios or on the streets. Quite often what seemed like an empty and deserted street housed small shops and other services. Opposite the apartment where we stayed, there was a superb butchery and delicatessen, which would not have disgraced the bourgeois streets of Rome or Milan, and slightly further away a café restaurant with pizzas, cakes, pastries and

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tortas. Dominique Fernandez, French essayist and travel writer, offers a glimpse of Gibellina from one vantage point: We perceive in the distance an enormous metal star towering up to the sky. This is the gateway to the new village. Long roads that to us look quite empty. Two-floored terraced houses stretch along winding avenues with white or sometimes coloured front walls. One road in two is for pedestrians only and is decorated with large vases of flowers … Is it beautiful? Is it ugly? To pose the questions in such terms would mean condemning oneself never to understand what makes up Gibellina’s originality. (Fernandez 1988, p. 91)

Further away from the more domestic streets, I encountered striking public buildings and sculptures. Significantly, art critic and professor of art history, Giuseppe Frazzetto suggests that These sculptures are not monuments, nor do they expect to become monuments. They were not conceived as forms to be contemplated, but, rather, they are phases of a meditation, which, at the same time, is also the creation of a civic space. These sculptures … want to become space, have a place, ­starting from a place and a space that are still vague and whose history is currently in the making. (Frazzetto 2007, p. 76)

Frazzetto’s comment helps us to understand more deeply what Corrao was attempting to practise with his vision and plans for Nuova Gibellina, and this seems to be about creating an urban community where architecture, town planning and the consequent built environment were crucial affordances for civic participation and responsibility. Whether or not Corrao was consciously and deliberately invoking the idea of central public spaces in the city-states of ancient Greece is uncertain, but the notion of the ‘Agora’ as a gathering place, or assembly, seems resonant with his plans, for example, for the now abandoned Piazza Joseph Beuys. For Corrao this was to have been Gibellina’s centre for artistic, spiritual, cultural and political life. Sadly, at the moment the Piazza is a derelict and abandoned car park, fallen into decay through lack of resources and civic care. Of these public buildings a number were never finished as money and passion became exhausted. These have fallen into ruin like Consagra’s Teatro (see image) or the sculptured lake, now empty and full of detritus and rubbish. Ludovico Quaroni’s Chiesa Madre collapsed in the 1980s, but has since been rebuilt and refurbished and now holds services and other religious ceremonies. One afternoon we borrow an illicit key from

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David’s friend, Nicolo Stabile, to gain entry to Francesco Venezia’s Palazzo di Lorenz, now locked to exclude the public, ostensibly, one imagines, for reasons of safety. This beautiful (intentionally) roofless rectangular structure incorporates the façade of a large feudal building rescued from the old town after the earthquake. Uniting past, present and future, melding disaster and hope, Palazzo di Lorenzo was intended as a place of meditation and contemplation. Slits in one of the high stone walls allow the sun to cast moving shadows as the day unfolds towards twilight. Once inside, access to the ground level is by a wide, palatial and operatic stone staircase. It seems a shame that the citizens of Nuova Gibellina have no access to this handsome building. Nicolo, whose apartment we rent, was born in the old town and spent the first ten years of his life in the hillside camps close to the site of the earthquake. Nicolo divides his life as a curator-­producer in Milan/Rome/Palermo and Nuova Gibellina where he is a passionate advocate/activist for Corrao’s original vision for the town and for the protection and restoration of Alberto Burri’s extraordinary piece of land art, Il Grande Cretto, which covers the site of the destroyed old town. I return to Il Cretto below. Shortly before we arrived in the town Nicolo and a small gang of Corrao and Burri aficionados had repainted a part of Il Cretto against the wishes of the town council. Afterwards, Nicolo had been summoned by local officers to explain his actions and to warn him off further acts of repair and restitution. I sense that Nicolo is relatively unfazed by these threats. David and I debate whether Burri would have preferred Il Cretto to discolour and weather through the exigencies of time. We do not know the answer, but suspect that he would, given the nature of his other work and its recurrent concern for material processes over time. Nicolo and his Gibellina comrades meanwhile fervently believe that, to honour the memory of Gibellina’s dead, Il Cretto should be restored to its original immaculate whiteness.

Il Cretto di Burri My account of Gibellina so far has dwelt on the new town itself, but I now want to attend to some of the projects initiated by artists and theatre makers who had been invited by Corrao to create work which would both memorialise the disaster of the earthquake and signal hope and optimism for the future. If the history of Gibellina is known across Europe and beyond it is probably through Burri’s astonishing envelopment of the ruined town. Burri (1915–1995) was an Italian painter and sculptor and

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considered a key figure in such artistic movements as Neo-Dada, Nouveau Réalisme, Post-Minimalism and Arte Povera. On 25th September 1979 following the advice of its mayor, Corrao, Gibellina City Council, sent an official invitation to Burri which was phrased like this: The merit and significance of your artistic message is considered to be human and poetically inspiring. More than any other it is able to translate for the present generation and for future generations the tragedy, the struggle, the hope and the faith in the land of the people of Gibellina. (Burri 2010, n.p.)

When the Council received no reply from Burri, Corrao went to see him in his home in Città di Castello and offered a personal invitation to be his guest in Sicily. Within a few days, Burri arrived in Gibellina, met local people, was taken to Pietro Consagra’s sculpture, Stella, the welcome gate to the emerging new town, and then to inspect the devastated ruin of the old town. Much moved by this experience Burri committed himself to work on a piece of sculpture which is now perceived, debated and symbolised in many varying ways. Burri (trained as a doctor and held as a prisoner of war in the United States in the mid-1940s) had long been influenced by the mending of wounds in scar tissue and the dried cracked surfaces of Death Valley in California. He wrote, ‘When I was in California, I often visited Death Valley. The idea came from there, but then in the painting it became something else. I only wanted to demonstrate the energy of the surface’ (Burri 2010, qtd. in The Cretto, n.p.). The ambition and scale of his ideas did not become apparent until 1981 when Burri presented a model to the council which revealed the enormity of the project he had in mind. The entire footprint of the destroyed town would be covered by concrete with walkways to the depth of 1.6 metres tracing the streets, alleyways and paths of the original settlement. The army was enlisted to help clear the site, and all the debris of the ruined buildings—stone, bricks, plaster and household goods such as toys, bottles and clothes—were impacted into concrete and covered by white cement. The work began in 1985, but lack of funds halted its completion in 1989. At this point approximately 60 per cent of Burri’s plans were in place. After a further call for funds by Corrao, another 9 acres were added by the late 1990s, but it was not until 2015 that the whole extraordinary sculpture was finally completed. Regardless of how one reads Burri’s Cretto, it is a startling and breath-taking site. It has been likened to a tomb or a shroud covering the

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dead and shattered streets, buildings and lives of old Gibellina. In his elegant and moving essay ‘Terremoto: Utopia, memory and the unfinished in Sicily’ (Performance Research, 2015, pp.  43–46), Williams finds in the Cretto affective and visual associations with Peter Eisenmann’s 2004 Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, and describes both the process and the materiality of this extraordinary place in much greater detail than I can afford here. In one striking passage, he observes that This tactile, organic quality within the material itself gives rise to a certain dynamism and liquidity in its apparently petrified, inorganic fixity, a corporeal lightness in its gravitied, monolithic sublime mass. Wandering in proximity to the weathered distress of the surfaces along these crevasses, emergent shapes seem to drift to the surface of consciousness – ephemeral constellations, landscapes – while all the while one remains hyper-aware of this area of sculpted earth’s openness and connectedness to the overarching sky and the vineyards and orchards of the valley, ribboning away to the horizon. (Williams 2015, p. 46)

Properly, there is no definitive word to be uttered on Burri’s Il Cretto. Perspectives on how this epic piece of land art appropriately performs a just memorialisation of the 1968 catastrophe are conflicted and, almost certainly, irresolvable. The form of Burri’s work is accentuated and made more plangent by the fact that the nearby devastated town of Poggioreale has been commemorated very differently by letting the remains of the settlement fall slowly into further ruination and decay. At Poggioreale, for better or worse, the ruin has not been ruined. Williams records that many local people felt unconsulted over the final destruction of the old town, and the concrete carapace represented by Il Cretto which replaced it. For some, Burri’s work, rather than speaking affectively and poetically for their loss, engineered a silencing and final burial of memories, material, emotional and inevitably poignant. From this perspective, Il Cretto represents a violent muzzling or concealment of recollections and reminiscences. For such people the performance of Il Cretto offers an unpalatable sense of closure, entombment and incarceration to this, their own tragic narrative.

Theatre, Performance and Joseph Beuys It was during the first and main phase of the Cretto’s realisation from the early 1980s that Corrao launched what was to be an annual international festival of performance and music. As early as 1979, Franca Rame and

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Dario Fo had performed Mistero Buffo in Gibellina, but in 1982, the ‘Association Teatro di Gibellina’ was formed to mount avant-garde productions in a space adjacent to the unfolding Cretto in a roughly constructed theatre surrounded on three sides by tiers of scaffolding supported seats. Like the Greek theatres of antiquary—Epidaurus and Delphi, for example—an integral part of the visual dramaturgy consisted of the landscape revealed as a permanent backdrop behind the stage. Instead of Epidaurus’ rolling Arcadian plains, here audiences could use their memories and imaginations to dwell on the devastated town now lying beneath the concrete of Burri’s art and the rising hillside behind. These were festivals—explicitly committed to experimental or avant-garde dramaturgies— of huge ambition and scale, although by the turn of the twentieth century they had become significantly reduced in size. Named the Orestiadi as a tribute to Aeschylus’ classical narratives of restitution and redemption leading from human and material misfortune into the early flutterings of municipal democracy, the festivals attracted a roll call of high-profile international artists, composers and theatre makers such as Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Robert Wilson, Thierry Salmon, Phillip Glass, Christo, Ariane Mnouchkine and her Théâtre du Soleil, and many more. Beuys visited Gibellina at the invitation of Corrao in 1981 and, as Williams testifies, ‘their meeting has become one of the foundational myths in the renewal of Gibellina’ (Williams 2015, p. 47). It is not difficult to understand why Corrao would have wanted to bring Beuys to the emerging new town since they shared a range of beliefs about art’s role within the world: the Fluxus-inspired principles of bringing creative practice into everyday life, the championing of a radical erosion of the boundaries between art forms and a common preoccupation with the material and natural world. During his visit Corrao took Beuys up to the site of old Gibellina, to the old cemetery, and explained to him the emerging plans for Burri’s Il Cretto, the construction of which was not to begin until 1985, a year before Beuys’ death. He apparently was deeply moved by the ruined Gibellina and asked many questions about land formation and geological strata, and above all tried to understand this unstable, earthquake-prone terrain and its nature through a tactile relationship of all the senses. In this he is trying to comprehend the land’s propensity for growing trees. Fulvio Abbate notes the material and mythic importance of trees to Beuys:

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The tree, many times protagonist and centre of attention in the work of Beuys, at Gibellina becomes a necessary presence, a propulsive archetypal centre evoked by its very absence … Observing the works realised by the artist which occupy the sides of the road and the squares of the city Beuys seems to seek something else, maybe the spirit which lies beneath all this. That part of the conscience which has never disappeared in individuals determined to leave a trace of themselves which is not monumentally aleatory, but able to follow each moment of growth. (Abbate 1982, n.p.)

Beuys and Corrao discussed the tree planting project and art installation in Nuova Gibellina and proposed a Bosco Sacro (‘Sacred Grove’). This was to have had an association with another project already germinating when he was present in Sicily. 7000 Oaks was an installation for the 1982 Documenta exhibition in Kassel and contained 7000 trees (not all oaks) planted alongside a basalt stone. The Gibellina project was never realised. Hugely influenced by classical Greek and North African culture, the Orestiadi in the 1980s presented large-scale productions by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Hölderlin, for example, and became recognised as one of the most adventurous events on the European festival circuit during these times. In 1987 an operatic version of the Oresteia by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was performed with some of the cast, dressed in traditional Sicilian costume, drawn from the people of Gibellina. In addition, local children performed a kind of chorus whilst the revving of Italian army trucks provided a sonic score at key moments in the production. Dominique Fernandez noted that rather than a reconstruction of Greek theatre, the Oresteia seemed to me a perfect incarnation of “Sicilianness” … Without knowing anything of the Greek myth, the audience felt quite at home. All the scenes of the Oresteia could have taken place on the village square of old Gibellina. (Fernandez 1988, pp. 93–4)

The following year (1988) young Belgian theatre director Thierry Salmon directed an all-women performance of Euripides’ Troades (Trojan Women) at the ruins of Gibellina and the site of the unfinished Cretto. The play was performed using the original Greek text by a multinational company of 36 actresses with wood, earth and iron as the principle elements of the scenography. The production was particularly notable for the use of gas lighting with 25 fixtures, each individually controlled by a technician on a single console which permitted the execution of complex dissolves,

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cross-fades and subtle changes of intensity. The gas lights not only radiated heat but their flickering flames provided a tactile sensation of movement and sound. The arrangement of these lights, suspended in an overhead circle and reflected by a parabolic mirror, was designed to suggest the feeling of a concentration camp, and a valley almost totally surrounded. In February 1994, American director Robert Wilson came to Gibellina to direct a ten-day workshop in preparation for a performance— T.S.E.—inspired by T.S.  Eliot’s poems. It took as its starting point his poem The Waste Land and other sources which had inspired Eliot in his work. T.S.E. reveals the influence of Greek mythology and myriad other stimuli for the poem whose title obviously resonated with the experience of Gibellina. The work was set to a score by Philip Glass composed specifically for the Gibellina production and was performed again in Weimar in 1996. In Gibellina the work was staged in a huge abandoned granary. Wilson returned later in the year to exhibit a collection of his art works and sustained a strong relationship with Corrao over a 15-year period. Clearly, Corrao found appeal and resonance in Wilson’s work, in general, and T.S.E., in particular, an open non-linear style resistant to singular interpretation and meaning.

Orestiadi Foundation and the Museum of Mediterranean Weaving The theatre in the ruins  – working out mourning. Taking tragedy to the place of the tragedy of the earthquake meant at the same time allowing people to remember and to forget, to be distressed and to recover. The theatre is vital: ruin is its scenography. Performance gives back its future to the place and celebrates its memory. (Collova 2015, p. 89)

As Collova suggests above, live theatre was central to Corrao’s vision for the cultural, psychic and material reconstruction of Gibellina. From the early 1980s, Corrao placed Gibellina on the European festivals avant-­ garde circuit for contemporary performance, music and theatre. Many of these productions were taken from the canon of ancient Greek dramas, but given a contemporary dramaturgical form by directors such as Peter Stein, Robert Wilson and Ariane Mnouchkine. In 1992, Corrao formalised the Orestiades festivals under the umbrella organisation of the Orestiadi Foundation as a stable structure to provide a greater degree of coherence for the multiple activities taking place in Gibellina and to offer a visionary

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framework which would guide future planning. Prior to 1992, the organisation of performance events was driven by Corrao, the energies and commitment of his volunteers and in conjunction initially with the Teatro Massimo in Palermo and later with the Teatro Gibellina association. The Orestiadi Foundation is housed in the Baglio3 Di Stefano which was purchased by the Gibellina Council in 1976. At this juncture it was a ruined site, but nonetheless, a symbol of Sicily’s feudal estates. Corrao expressed his delight in recovering this building—just outside the town boundaries—for the purpose of uniting ancient and contemporary cultures for the Nuevo Gibellina project like this: ‘A fortress recovered to reconstruct right here in this Baglio, a fortress of feudal times, the fortress of contemporary thought rooted in the ancient civilisation of our town’ (Corrao qtd. in Frazzatto 2007, p. 77). On my visit in October 2017, I spent several hours at the Baglio di Stefano, copying extracts from journals and books in the Foundation’s library and enjoying the Museum of Mediterranean Weaving housed both within the building and in the grounds outside. The force fields and ideas which have propelled the Orestiadi Foundation offer a summation of Corrao’s radical and imaginative prospectus for both the institution itself and the new town of Gibellina. Here, through the Museum’s collection, and the continuing projects and other activities driven by the Foundation, we can identify the deep historical and cultural dispositions which characterise the philosophical core of Corrao’s energetic and passionate life. The Foundation’s task was to position the whole Gibellina project within a landscape much wider—temporally and spatially—than Sicily itself. The title of the museum provides the frame: the Mediterranean. Historically, Corrao is seeking to identify Gibellina and the island of Sicily at a cultural and topographical meeting point between East and West. This is a meeting point which has shaped twenty-first-century Sicily over 2000 years, an encounter made manifest through the arts and crafts from North Africa, the Middle East, Greece, the Balkan states and the countries of Mediterranean Europe. Frazzatto encapsulates the work and purpose of the Foundation like this: The core of these initiatives by the Orestiadi Foundation lies in the search for testimonies bearing witness to something which seems to be obvious yet extremely elusive: the “Mediterranean” element […] the search for a “dynamic archetype”, which is revealed in the movement of a hand, which with its work and creativity protrudes externally and traces a sign for the

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world. It is the gesture of the weavers and ceramicists and all those who join work and creativity together. (Frazzatto 2007, p. 77)

The Museum of Mediterranean Weaving, which for several years had a North African presence in Tunis (now closed), contains an extraordinary array of artefacts, costumes, ceramics, books, paintings, sculptures, jewellery and stage sets. The slightly bewildering layout of the collection is deliberately designed as to eschew linear chronological development or spatial relations, and thus emphasises the complexity and porosity of the material influences which together comprise the collection on display. Here artefacts from antiquary jostle up against contemporary art and postmodern theatre scenography. In part, the museum is a three-dimensional archive—through costumes, images and sets—of many of the theatre performances promoted by Corrao and the Foundation. To the left of the main entrance to the Museum, Mimmo Paladino’s extraordinary installation and stage set the Montagna di sale (Mountain of Salt) lies exposed to the elements. The salt mountain (see Fig. 4.4) was designed and built by Paladino for the 1990 Orestiadi production of Friedrich Schiller’s play, The Bride of Messina. Built of sea salt, gravel, stones, resin and glass, this salt mountain has 30 carved wooden black horses placed at different angles of precarity and partly embedded within its structure. It is a striking and unnerving piece of work. On our visit, the Baglio di Stefano is peaceful, quiet and empty, but with Foundation staff working in air-conditioned offices who make appearances from time to time. Lying in an almost triangular spatial relationship with the Cretto and new Gibellina, the buildings and courtyards of the ancient Baglio offer an opportunity for thought and reflection not simply on the 50-year span since the terrible earthquakes of 1968, but also thousands of years of complex history which helps to constitute twenty-first-century Gibellina.

End Words: But Impermanent and Provisional As I prepared this book, and in the two years since my visit to Sicily, I was often uncertain how to position the unfolding and certainly unfinished story that is Gibellina—and its key protagonists—within the larger narratives and structures which frame this volume. The singularity of Gibellina since the earthquake of 1968 renders almost any account compelling and seductively intriguing. Yet, the very distinctiveness of Gibellina presents challenges as to how to site and justify the story within the tropes and

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patterns of ruinous regeneration, some of which this monograph is endeavouring to document and understand. At one level, Gibellina’s inclusion is straightforward and obvious. An impoverished rural Sicilian town ruined by a devastating earthquake, and, in its wake, an extraordinary project of repair and regeneration, driven by the charismatic and forcefully imaginative figure of Ludovico Corrao—‘a Fitzcarraldo [who] knew that those who dream can move mountains’ (Nicolo Stabile on Ludovico Corrao, qtd. in Zohn 2018, n.p.)—until his death in 2011. This is a project which attempts to harness the force fields of myriad art practices to charge (and re-charge) the resilience and the energies of the survivors and their children in their quest to invent a new and very different life. The town of Nuova Gibellina, Il Cretto and the Orestiadi Foundation, singly and together, seemed to me to be sites of puzzling, but energising contradiction, with all the complex ambiguities associated with projects that claim or aspire to be ‘redemptive’ in both principle and practice. Across Europe in Scotland, NVA’s attempts to halt the ruination of St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross and to reinvent it through the medium of community, ecological and cultural experimentation (see Chap. 5) yoke together many similar impulses that can be found in Gibellina’s 50-year story. A recent publication on the NVA/St Peter’s project is subtitled ‘Birth, death and renewal’ (Watters 2016), but, despite the building’s theological history, NVA does not speak the language of redemption for its activities in St Peter’s. Nonetheless, a multidimensional embrace of ‘renewal’ is a material and poetic aspiration common to both projects. Until comparatively recently, Nuova Gibellina seemed to be suspended between the utopian aspirations and heritage of Corrao and a future which one might be forgiven for sensing was doomed to further decay and ruin. For at least two decades, the money needed to regenerate and, in many cases, repair Corrao’s material vision for Gibellina had run out. Many of the art works and unfinished buildings installed and built in the 1980s and 1990s were broken or fast becoming modern ruins, an unfulfilled and melancholy ghosting of the rubble and detritus beneath Burri’s sarcophagus, Il Cretto. However, over the last decade, there have been a number of individuals, organisations and businesses which have sought to articulate and promote Gibellina’s cause with an awareness that unless restorative action is taken, and more resources found, Corrao’s vision will wither and die. A number of academic and journalistic articles (largely in Italian) have attempted to draw the attention of a much wider public to the extraordinary project that is Gibellina. In a recent essay, Patricia Zohn (August

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2018) identifies how disparate projects and organisations have been drawn together by the Centre for Social and Economic Research of Southern Italy (CRESM) in an attempt to develop and implement a coordinated plan for the future of Gibellina. Facilitated and harmonised by CRESM, the municipality of Gibellina, the Orestiadi Foundation, the wine company Tenuti Orestiadi and other local businesses are together promising a more coherent and practical approach to the social, economic and material problems of contemporary Gibellina. This gathering of enterprises with a stake in the future of the town is identifying apparently practical solutions in a ‘New Urban Plan’. If the rhetoric is to become reality, this programme will reinstate Gibellina as a Sicilian art treasure, repairing existing works and encouraging and commissioning new ones, whilst at the same time attending more seriously to the economic needs of farmers and other small industries in the surrounding Belice Valley. Alessandro La Grassa, President of the Centre for Social and Economic Research of Southern Italy (CRESM), argues that ‘the city needs to really become an Art Town’ (Zohn 2018). Alongside these now apparently coordinated and unfolding plans for Gibellina, I discover that as one of the legacies of Palermo’s hosting of Manifesta 12 between June and November 2018, a Fondazione Manifesto has been published and broadcast. Manifesta is a nomadic biennial European festival of contemporary art, launched originally in Amsterdam in the early 1990s. This particular Fondazione Manifesto is an advocacy and campaigning group which has its focus on the Belice Valley and the future of Gibellina. During Manifesta 12, tours were organised from Palermo to the Belice region and these included the Cretto, the ruins of Poggioreale and Nuova Gibellina itself. The tours coincided with an exhibition in the town entitled ‘Manifesto Gibellina Nuova  – Dream in Progress’, and it was around this that Fondazione Manifesto activists made common cause with the Orestiadi Foundation and other organisations on the ground in the town itself. Clearly, the aims and aspirations of the Fondazione Manifesto resonate strongly with the ideas and material vision which Ludovico Corrao had for Gibellina and indeed may have been based upon some of his own writings and public utterances. The Manifesto itself is, of course, strong on rhetoric and invokes Gilles Clemént’s ideas around ‘The Third Landscape’, a summary of which is reprinted in the panel below. At the time of writing, it is unclear what this collaboration between the Fondazione Manifesto and other Gibellina organisations—particularly the Orestiadi—actually means (or will mean) in practice. The intervention

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of Fondazione Manifesto into the future life of Gibellina certainly raises complex questions about how international art festivals like Manifesta relate to communities and projects beyond their own limited lifespan in any one city and for a five-month period. With regard to the purpose of this book, the relational axis between Manifesta 12, the Fondazione Manifesto (see below) and Nuova Gibellina is a very contemporary example of the complex weave between cultural practices and projects and sites of ruin and ruination. David Williams articulates what for him are an intricate web of forces and emotions evoked by Gibellina. For him, the contradictions remain unresolved and—probably—unresolvable; the ruin is not yet ruined. He writes, For all its continuing problems … its unfinished structures and art works urgently in need of restoration, and for all of its haunting melancholy at times, in reality Nuova Gibellina today is far from the state of ‘ruinous abandonment’ that initial impressions and fleeting contact may suggest. … I have become increasingly attached to … this town … for the warmth of human exchanges it affords, and for its moments of startling layered beauty in the everyday. Perhaps above all, for the enduring possibilities it still seems to contain, somehow and despite everything, as an ambiguous, provisional, slowly unfolding work in progress. (Williams 2015, p. 49)

From the perspectives of this project, the history of the two Gibellinas since the 1968 earthquake speaks of many discourses within the fields of cultural and urban studies, the cultural industries, memorialising and the politics of remembering, and the generative force fields bred by and through the enterprises of architecture and art making. And as a corrective to this intellectual speculation, I remind myself that these debates have been consistently embodied, concretised and made manifest through the flesh, blood and social relations of people living in this small south western corner of Sicily for over five decades.

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Fondazione Manifesto: A Dream in Progress

Fondazione Manifesto purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography. Each Fondazione Manifesto project aims to investigate and reflect on emerging developments in contemporary art and architecture, set within a European context. In doing so, we present local, national and international audiences with new aspects and forms of artistic expression. In this way, Fondazione Manifesto aims to create a keen and workable interface between prevailing international artistic and intellectual debates, paying attention to the specific qualities and idiosyncrasies of a given location. Inherent to Fondazione Manifesto’s character is the desire to explore the psychological and geographical territory of Europe, referring both to border-lines and concepts. This process aims to establish closer dialogue between particular cultural and artistic situations and the broader, international fields of contemporary art, theory and politics in a changing society. Therefore Fondazione Manifesto looks forward to expanding its network and building creative partnerships with organizations, curators, art professionals and independent figureheads in Europe and beyond, drafting an interlocking map of contemporary art and architecture. A Dream in Progress has three main sections, each touching on key topics of the curatorial concept: • Archaeology of the Future – Collateral Damage investigates the incomplete and ruins in today’s regime of global flows. • Concrete Utopia is focused on art and architecture in direct dialogue with the city of Gibellina its communities, traditions, and public spaces. This dialogue is embodied and multiplied in various projects which: reinforce community engagement and the beauty of reconstruction and development through collaborations and public interventions in the city’s centre and periphery. Concrete Utopia builds on existing opportunities in the centre and the outskirts of Gibellina Nuova to further develop the existing plans that are stuck somehow and have not been fully realised. Productive collaborations can act as a catalyst and possibly extend into future and long-term initiatives in Gibellina.

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• Uncultivated Garden of Coexistence  – The Third Landscape explores art, plant life and the culture of gardening in relation to the transnational commons in Gibellina Nuova’s Orto Botanico. “The Third Landscape – an undetermined fragment of the Planetary Garden – designates the sum of the space left over by man to landscape evolution – to nature alone. Included in this category are left behind urban or rural sites, transitional spaces, neglected land [...], non-­ cultivatable areas, deserts. Compared to the territories submitted to the control and exploitation by man, the Third Landscape forms a privileged area of receptivity to biological diversity. Cities, farms and forestry holdings, sites devoted to industry, tourism, human activity, areas of control and decision permit diversity and, at times, totally exclude it. The variety of species in a field, cultivated land, or managed forest is low in comparison to that of a neighbouring “unattended” space. From this point of view, the Third Landscape can be considered as the genetic reservoir of the planet, the space of the future.” —Gilles Clément (Fondazione Manifesto 2018, n.p.)

Notes 1. St Rocco is the patron saint of Gibellina. 2. Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728–1799) was a visionary French neoclassical architect whose designs have been greatly influential within contemporary architecture. He particularly played with light and shade and was a significant influence on the work of Italian architect Aldo Rossi (1931–1997). 3. Baglio refers here to a traditional winery building, or manor house, typically on large Italian estates.

Bibliography Abbate, F. (1982). Joseph Beuys: Natale a Gibellina, 1981, Edizioni Museo Civico d'Arte Contemporanea: Gibellina, Sicily, 1982 (unpaginated catalogue, with photographs by Mimmo Jodice). Abbate, F. (1993). Gibellina, Fabbrica Civica (‘Gibellina, the City Factory’), exhibition catalogue from the 45th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, (unpaginated).

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Andò, R. (2008). The Trench and the Enemy: Going Back to Gibellina. Riso/ Annex: I Quaderni di Riso, 1, 53–88. Bonanno, V. A. (2008). Uninterrupted Revival: Making Plans in Gibellina. Riso/ Annex: I Quaderni di Riso, 1, 103–112. Burri, A. (2010). The Cretto. Sicily Art. Unpaginated. http://www.gibellina. siciliana.it/pages/cretto.html. Accessed 20 Apr 2019. Collova, R. (2015). The Gibellina Utopia. In O.  Sorgi & F.  Militello (Eds.), Gibellina and the MUSEUM of MEDITERRANEAN WEFTS (pp.  85–91). Palermo: CRicd. Fernandez, D. (1988). Death and Resurrection. Labirinti: Cultura del Territorio, 1(2), 91–94. Fondazione Manifesto. (2018). https://www.fondazionemanifesto.org/en/fondazione-manifesto. Accessed 20 Apr 2019. Frazzetto, G. (2007). Gibellina, la mano e la stella, (catalogue). Gibellina: Edizioni Orestiadi. Militello, F., & Sorgi, O. (Eds.). (2015). Gibellina and the MUSEUM of MEDITERRANEAN WEFTS: History and Annotated Catalogue. Palermo: CRicd. Quaglia, R. (2015). A Conversation with Ludovico Corrao. In C.  Sorgi & F.  Militello (Eds.), Gibellina and the MUSEUM of MEDITERRANEAN WEFTS (pp. 26–41). Palermo: CRicd. Sorgi, O. (2015). Doing and Representing in the Work of Ludovico Corrao. In C.  Sorgi & F.  Militello (Eds.), Gibellina and the MUSEUM of MEDITERRANEAN WEFTS (pp. 14–16). Palermo: CRicd. Watters, D. (2016). St Peter’s, Cardross: Birth, Death and Renewal. Edinburgh: Historic Environment Scotland. Williams, D. (2014). Performing Palermo: Protests against Forgetting. In N.  Whybrow (Ed.), Performing Cities (pp.  21–38). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, D. (2015). Terremoto: Utopia, Memory and the Unfinished in Sicily. In C. Lavery and R. Gough (eds.) Performance Research: On Ruins and Ruination, 20 (3), 39–49. Zohn, P. (2018). The Art of Recovery: How a Radical Public Art Experiment is Reshaping Sicily 50 Years after a Devastating Earthquake. In Artnet. https:// news.artnet.com/art-world/50-years-after-earthquake-sicilian-regionrebuilds-1323080. Accessed 18 Apr 2019.

CHAPTER 5

Dissonance and Contestation: Ruining Heritage and Its Alternatives

This entire book could have focused on issues of heritage and preservation and the cultural activities invested in such sites and locations. The decline of manufacturing in the Western world over the last five decades has in part been matched by the growth of tourism and the heritage and cultural industries. It would have been possible to fill these pages with accounts and reflective analysis of abandoned, derelict or transparently ruined sites (contemporary and more self-evidently historical) which have played host to myriad cultural events as part of the heritage industry’s mission to preserve the past for the future. Broadly speaking such activities take place either to attract paying visitors to locations already at least partially secured—and materially maintained—for posterity or to function as part of campaigns and crusades to save such places from planned demolition, deliberate abandonment or further entropic ruination. This chapter investigates two huge post-industrial sites in the Ruhr region of Germany: the Landschaftspark ironworks in Duisburg-Nord and the Zollverein coal mine outside Essen. Here, during my German field work, I encountered two equally ambitious, but different in form, examples of how the cultural industries have approached the regeneration of the ruins of heavy manufacturing industry, both closed in the 1980s. Following the coal mine and the ironworks I consider the compelling story of an abandoned high modernist seminary—St Peter’s—outside Glasgow in Scotland and the attempt by an imaginatively ambitious public art organisation, NVA, to reinvent this extraordinary contemporary ruin. © The Author(s) 2020 S. Murray, Performing Ruins, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40643-1_5

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Reactivating Industrial Ruins of the Ruhr: Duisburg-Nord’s Landschaftspark and Essen’s Zollverein My focus on Germany is divided between two very different objects of ruin and their relationship with cultural agency. Whilst Chap. 8 of this book is devoted to the Cold War ruins of Berlin, this chapter offers two models of heritage conservation, very different from the artist-led occupations of, for example, Teufelsberg or Tacheles in Germany’s capital city. Like other industrial heartlands of Europe, the Ruhr Valley was subject to huge decline for approximately two decades from the early 1970s. These changes were neither ‘natural’ nor necessarily inevitable, but were variously the consequence of government policies, a decline in carbon resources (in the case of coal) and Capital’s inexorable drive to relocate and restructure in search of greater productivity, profitability and an ever shifting reserve army of labour (Marx 1996). As elsewhere in the Western world (e.g. the west of Scotland, Teesside and South Wales in the United Kingdom or Pittsburgh and Detroit in the United States) it was the heavy industries of mining, steel making, engineering, shipbuilding and chemicals which were the main victims of such global economic movements. In Duisburg-Nord the Meiderich Ironworks began production in 1901 and throughout its 84-year history produced special varieties of pig iron as well as countless environmentally damaging by-products such as slag, dust, sludge, gases and waste water. At the time of closure in 1985 it was owned by the Thyssen Group of companies. In Essen the Zollverein anthracite mine ceased drawing coal from the earth in 1986, whilst the coking plant finally closed in 1993. First opened in 1847, Zollverein was once the largest coal mine in the world. By the mid-1930s it had become fully modernised with automated work flows and production systems, following the principles of Fordism1 and Taylorism.2 I was interested in visiting both of these sites as they seemed to represent striking examples of projects far removed from others I have described in Greece, Bosnia-­ Herzegovina and Sicily, for example, but were, nonetheless, critically important tropes of the cultural industries’ response to urban and industrial ruination. This is not to say they were typical or representative of such responses since both Zollverein and Landschaftspark are both highly ambitious, large scale and multi-Euro-funded projects supported by national and federal governments in Germany as well as private trusts and foundations. Both are driven by a variety of forces and motives which are

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economic, cultural, historical and political. That both fit squarely into the multiple and sometimes contradictory discourses and practices of the heritage industry does not diminish their interest or appeal as complex, thoughtful and creative responses to de-industrialisation and economic decline. President of Germany (1999–2004), Johannes Rau, articulated the driving sentiment behind both the Zollverein and Landschaftspark projects when he said: There were times when a coal mine site and its pit head towers were considered useless scrap iron, rubbish and torn down. We must not become illiterates of memory. (Rau qtd. in Marth 2018, p. 87)

Zollverein and PACT3 in Essen Across Europe and beyond, the original Zollverein works were regarded as a ‘technical and aesthetic masterpiece of modernity’ (Marth 2018, p.32) and its design deeply influenced by one of the key principles of the Bauhaus, namely that there should always be a close connection between industrial design and architecture. This extended through to the design of door handles, stair railings and lamps and in the symmetrical arrangement of the buildings along two visual axes, all of which spoke to the Bauhaus maxim of form following function. In 2001 Zollverein was awarded the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site and in September 2018 hosted a two-day symposium entitled ‘100 years of Bauhaus in the West’, followed in 2019 by a Bauhaus-inspired festival of exhibitions, concerts, performances, lectures and workshops. Twenty-first-century Zollverein seems deeply aware and proud of its arts and crafts heritage as well as its industrial legacy. I visited Zollverein on 7 May 2018 and had made arrangements to meet with Yvonne Whyte, Head of Production and Project Development at the PACT art centre, and Delia Bosch and Sebastien Scholz from the main Zollverein administrative offices. Before these encounters I had time to wander around parts of this 100 hectare site. It is difficult to convey the scale of both the site as a whole and the various buildings in particular. Most of the plant and the buildings which housed the equipment have been preserved, but require constant maintenance to keep them safe for visitors and employees. Thus the massive coking and mixing plants, the winding-engine house, the miner’s washrooms, the coal washery, the boiler houses, the extraction and compressor hall, numerous workshop

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spaces and many other startling constructions still exist and can be experienced sometimes from within or from safe distances outside. From the closure of both mine and coking plant the 30-year process of turning Zollverein from a working pit into a cultural heritage site and museum seems, as far as I can judge as an outsider, to have been accomplished with considerable skill and ingenuity. Most of the facilities deemed to be essential for a modern museum have been deftly housed or built into existing buildings and plant. Thus the large Ruhr Museum and cafe is sited within the old Coal Washery, the PACT Art Centre within the miners’ washrooms, shops and teaching studios within the Picking Belt Hall, the Red Dot museum of contemporary design in the Boiler House and the restaurant and casino in the Low Pressure Compressor House. There are many more. Bicycles can be hired to tour the site, and while entrance to the overall area is free it costs to enter the museums. The visitor attractions blend events, projects and exhibitions tied thematically to coal mining history and a wide range of sporting and cultural activities which have with little to do with Zollverein’s history per se. Thus in the old coking plant there is an ice skating rink and the Works Swimming Pool, both open only on a seasonal basis. Beyond these in various parts of the site there are a variety of galleries and workshops specialising in ceramics, jewellery and printing. Further still there are spaces for art installations which include an ‘Experience Field’ for the development of the senses and the SANAA building devoted to Japanese architectural practice. And so it goes on. You would need several days to experience all these projects and buildings and I barely scratched the surface. All the above are organised and administered by the overall Zollverein project, but the main focal point for theatre, dance, media and performance is PACT, an independent arts centre located in the miners’ original bath and shower house. I was shown around PACT by Yvonne Whyte and later we had a long conversation. Founded in 2002, PACT inhabits a large and architecturally diverse building where the original structural layout for baths, showers, locker rooms, windows and social spaces have been retained, without, of course, the fixtures and fittings. Although it has a superbly well-equipped theatre, all the internal areas are used flexibly for performance, seminar discussions and as exhibition or screening sites. There is also a large social space with a café which local residents from Essen are encouraged to enjoy alongside visiting artists. PACT is much more than an arts centre devoted only to public performance, rather it likes to describe itself as an ‘artists’ centre’ with a variety of functions and possibilities. From the outset

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PACT’s artists’ residencies and exchanges lay at the heart of the project with an emphasis on sharing and exchanging practice. In a statement about PACT’s aspirations and policies stress is put on relational models of provision: Rather than seeking immediate results, PACT’s work is primarily laid out to make lasting provisions for a plurality of models. It is characteristic of PACT’s concept that all areas of activity are closely linked and mutually enriching. Under the roof of the former pithead bath at the Zollverein colliery, PACT has created a space for lively encounters and exchange between actions, experience and theoretical discourse which supports and forges long term co-operative practices and partnerships. (PACT 2018)

Yvonne tells me that in any single year 30 residencies of up to three weeks are offered to artists across the world and these are as much for research and experimentation as they are for rehearsal and production. An international panel decides on the successful candidates who are given a grant to cover living expenses and travel costs. In addition, resident artists can draw upon dramaturgical and production support, such as technical assistance, project management, as well as press and publicity. The support of artists in this way extends to opportunities for engaging with academics and thinkers beyond the cultural sphere through seminars and conferences. Extensive documentation on PACT’s website reveals a wide range of events which speak, on the one hand, to the present and future of the Ruhr area and its regeneration and, on the other, to global issues such child health, urbanisation, migration, diversity, sustainability, climate change and the promotion of public spaces in cities. The public performance programme places PACT squarely on the European circuit for dance, theatre and experimental performance. The billboard (see Fig. 5.3) during the time of my visit announces imminent performances from the likes of Berlin-based company Rimini Protokoll and Forced Entertainment4 from Sheffield in the United Kingdom. The presence of such companies in PACT’s programmes immediately positions the project as one willing explicitly to promote work from the contemporary postdramatic avant-garde and this disposition raises complex issues about the site and its desired relationship with performance. I was curious how PACT’s profile and working practices, articulated with great passion and cogency by Yvonne, connected to Zollverein’s industrial history and the present lives of Essen’s citizens. PACT receives the bulk of its funding from Germany’s regional

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government, the Ministry for Culture and Science of the state of RhineWestphalia, and, in addition, smaller grants from the City of Essen and other private trusts and foundations. Regional state funding is now on a three-year revenue basis. I sense that PACT is perceived more as a regional and national resource, rather than a local, city-­based one. Indeed, Yvonne was keen to emphasise the centre’s international profile and reputation, whilst at the same time explaining how over the last three years they have begun to take steps to engage more proactively with the local area. Significantly, Yvonne invokes the difficulties of changing local perceptions about Zollverein, particularly in relation to the gendered nature of an iconic site of heavy industry. Her words are salient in respect of the challenges and difficulties faced by those who—for the best of reasons perhaps—wish to transform a former colliery, ruined by loss of original function and use, into a cultural and heritage centre of multiple educational, artistic and leisure activities. In our conversation, Yvonne remarked: We are cut off from the city of Essen which is an area of high unemployment … when it closed in 1986 it was a no-go zone. No women came to the site. It was just for men. It was closed off and not in social consciousness that you could go there, and so for many years remained totally isolated. The redesign of the site had no connection with the local area … an elite site. Fig. 5.1  PACT (Art Centre), Zollverein. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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Fig. 5.2  Coal Washing Plant (Bauhaus) Zollverein. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

Fig. 5.3  PACT Summer Programme 2018, Zollverein. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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Fig. 5.4  PACT Studio Zollverein. (Image: Simon Murray 2018) And we programme largely experimental work which did not appeal much to local people. But three years ago at the height of the refugee crisis there were three camps on the site and kids would come in. So we opened a café where anyone could come and we tried to appeal to old and new families … slowly and surely we are making these connections, but it does not really connect to our programme. Two years ago we took over the disused paint shop and now workshops take place with students – furniture making, language classes etc. … Now we have two people who have outreach and community responsibilities – we’ve never had that before. The kids are the best though – they throw themselves into everything. (Whyte 2018)

In certain schematic respects it is important to separate PACT from the wider context since the former has an administrative and strategic independence from the total Zollverein project. However, spatially and experientially PACT is an inescapable part of this huge colliery complex—you could not enter PACT without being visually and sensually conscious of its sitedness—but yet it possesses many of the qualities, ambitions and dispositions of an urban and cosmopolitan cultural centre. It has connections with several universities in the Ruhr region and actively exploits links with certain student cohorts in these institutions. For me, PACT presents an interesting conundrum, namely the performance and function of a

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cutting-­edge twenty-first-century arts—or artists’—centre located within an industrial museum. If there are contradictions or creative tensions— conceptual or practical—in this relationship they do not appear on the surface to damage or constrain either part of the Zollverein equation. For the purpose of this book my brief encounter with Zollverein and PACT added productively and provokingly to the complex and nuanced task of understanding the range of possible relationships which sites of ruination might have with performance and other cultural activities. Ruined of its original function as a coal mine Zollverein has been reactivated through leisure and cultural projects in a startling way. Landschaftspark in Duisburg-Nord I had been in correspondence with Joachim Mannebach for several weeks before visiting Duisburg-Nord’s Landschaftspark—Landscape Park—on 8 May 2018. The previous day I had immersed myself in the Ruhr’s other massive reclaimed industrial site, Zollverein. Superficially, these are similar projects: a coal mine and an iron works both saved from demolition after de-industrialisation and closure in the mid-1980s, both reinvented as cultural projects and both offering major statements about remembering the past, the value of heritage and the diverse strategies by which the legacies of industrialisation might be re-thought for present and future generations. Identifying, understanding and making choices about these legacies remind us that the heritage industry is always ideological in terms of which narratives and from what perspectives are being presented and reconfigured. Zollverein has UNESCO World Heritage status and a built environment based upon the high modernist principles of the Bauhaus. As a recognised UNESCO site it almost certainly receives greater funding than the Landschaftspark, but is also subject to more regulatory constraints than its sister project down the road in Duisburg-Nord. Joachim, a member of the Events Management team, is generous with his time and takes me to some of the main buildings on the site before I’m given a bicycle to roam freely around the whole park. Whilst both Zollverein and Landschaftspark were propelled by similar ambitions—namely to preserve and re-animate sites of heavy industry—the actual thinking and process by which these respective projects have developed since the late 1980s are significantly different. At one level Zollverein, notwithstanding the remarkable PACT artists’ centre within it, seems to frame itself more as a ‘museum’ than Landschaftspark, whilst the latter has been more

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self-­consciously experimental and rule-breaking in its quest to find new relationships between landscape, ecology and the monstrous constructions which lie at the centre of the park. In 1991 the task of reinventing and redesigning the rapidly decaying and derelict Duisburg-Nord ironworks was awarded to the radical landscape architect Peter Latz and his company, Latz+Partners. Latz’s design plans were to keep the main structures—power station, blast furnaces, blowing house and gasometer, for example—but to enable them to become something other, or beyond their original purpose and function in the making or iron and steel. Rather than to freeze the existing plant and buildings in time and to separate them spatially and conceptually from the gardens and parklands which were being imagined, the different components should invade, blend, juxtapose and embrace each other. Thus a postmodern landscape design permitted gardens to be embedded within and amongst the ruined plant of the steelworks with, for example, clipped hedges, streams, parterres and rose gardens emerging in dialogue with weathered concrete, rusting steel gantries, vertiginous walkways and long since defunct machinery. Joachim puts it like this: The idea was to keep these remaining structures and monitor the process of nature regaining some kind of control over the site, to encourage this wild growing … We support the project by touching the ruins, caring for them, carefully refurbishing materials so they don’t collapse, intervening only when necessary, often leaving things to themselves … In some places you are free just to ignore the past, but in some places you stumble across it and can’t overlook it, you have concrete plates and rusting equipment next to roses. (Mannebach 2018)

For Latz and his team a critical principle of the design lay in an understanding about the relationship between time and memory and a conviction that the act of remembering is a constantly shifting and contingent process. This derelict but reinvented ironworks and the park which surrounds and lives within it are provocations to remember anew and so to perceive and witness the material world—‘natural’ or man-made—in unexpected, challenging and surprising ways. Inspired by land artist Robert Smithson in his essay ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic’ (1967), Latz believed that his designs for the Landschaftspark would be imaginatively generative through an association of juxtaposed material events and sites, enabling memory not to recreate with mathematical

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precision, but to propose new perceptions, perspectives and thoughts. In an earlier, but associated, context Smithson in 1967 writes about the derelict industrial sites of Passaic (New Jersey) imagining them as monuments of and to the future: Along the Passaic River banks were many minor monuments such as concrete abutments that supported the shoulders of a new highway in the process of being built. River Drive was in part bulldozed and in part intact. It was hard to tell the new highway from the old road; they were both ­confounded into a unitary chaos. Since it was Saturday, many machines were not working, and this caused them to resemble prehistoric creatures trapped in the mud, or, better, extinct machines—mechanical dinosaurs stripped of their skin. On the edge of this prehistoric Machine Age were pre- and post-­ World War II suburban houses. The houses mirrored themselves into colorlessness. A group of children were throwing rocks at each other near a ditch. “From now on you’re not going to come to our hide-out. And I mean it!” said a little blonde girl who had been hit with a rock. (Smithson 1967, p.53)

James Corner in a collection of short essays entitled ‘Learning from Duisburg-Nord’ (2009) returns us to the present of the Landschaftspark, and writing how the place performs itself, says: I know of no other park that maintains such a contradictory range of landscape experiences, where the sometime unsettling appearance of post-­ industrial dereliction, decay and entropy sits alongside obviously designed materials, planted gardens and public spaces. Here an extraordinary sense of temporality is so uncannily arranged that one sometimes feels as if the park is a symphony of radically divergent movements, moods and measures. (Corner 2009, p.21)

It takes time and immersion in Landschaftspark to register the subtleties and nuances implied in James Corner’s account and, unfortunately, my visit was too short to engage with these in many of their intricacies. It has only been through subsequent reading and research that my embodied experience of this complex and ingenious site has been remembered in a way that begins to do justice to Latz’s design and how Landschaftspark is activated and practiced today. At the beginning of our conversation Joachim is at pains to remind me that colleagues at both Zollverein and Landschaftspark prefer not to speak of their projects in terms of preserving ruins since, he says, ‘they were recaptured just at the right moment … in

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the northern Ruhr they had not been left alone for long enough to turn into crumbling ruins’ (Mannebach 2018). Interestingly, Joachim points to the paradox that it was only after the closure of the plant—and others like it—that people began to notice what had been taken for granted for over 100  years. Like Zollverein, the Meiderich steelworks had been a restricted site for all except those who worked there, and, like its Essen neighbour, the Duisburg-Nord plant was a hugely gendered space with the presence of women almost exclusively restricted to roles in the canteen and in administration. The devastation of heavy industry experienced by the Ruhr area in the 1980s, the legacy of extreme pollution and environmental damage left in its wake and the rapid social and economic changes which were a consequence of all this invited local people, activists, policy makers, academics and politicians, to take stock of what had been lost and—as importantly—what might be done to acknowledge and remember the experiences generated by these sites. The range of activities offered by Landschaftspark in 2019 is diverse, imaginative and intriguing. On the one hand it certainly functions as a museum and an educational resource, but on the other, the invitation is to treat the whole site as an ‘adventure playground’ (Winkels and Zieling Fig. 5.5  Blast furnaces, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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Fig. 5.6  Water channels, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

Fig. 5.7  Gantry crane and elevated rail tracks, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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Fig. 5.8  Theatre in the old Blowing House, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

Fig. 5.9  Frieze by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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Fig. 5.10  Old Power Station and performance space, Landschaftspark. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

2010, p.88). Latz’s refusal to let the redesigned site simply become a fixed and frozen museum, an artefact to be seen but never touched or experienced sensorially in any other way, is manifested at one extreme in scuba diving (to a depth of 13 metres) in the old gasometer, climbing walls and cross-golf up and around the former ore bunkers, and mountain bike courses across the whole site. Participants in these various activities range from casual daily visitors through professional sports people to training for police, fire fighters and the military. On my visit I watched firefighter rescue teams stage and rehearse the rescue of an accident victim strapped into a stretcher and lowered down the side of a building. Whilst there are, of course, restricted areas, visitors are encouraged to roam around the site and, within the limits of safety, construct playful activities shaped and proposed by its material landscape. Between and overlapping with these different parameters of Landschaftspark there are a wide range of activities and events, either cultural or around the promotion of business and commerce. Joachim took me on a tour of two very different spaces: the 500 seat theatre in the Blowing House and a huge building which was originally the Power Station. The Blowing House complex contains, replete with much of the original machinery, two Pump Houses and a Compressor House. The main Blowing House space is excellently equipped in terms of

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lighting rig and sound technology and has a flexible seating structure. We watched from the back of the auditorium as someone was practicing on a grand piano in this elegant space with walls of the original bare concrete or stone and with graceful original windows. The other parts of the Blowing House contain a foyer, bar and meeting area all intermingled with original pumping, heating and ventilating machinery. The 6000 square metre Power Station building is a startling experience at 170 metres in length, 34 metres wide and holding up to 4000 people. It is used for large-scale theatre, music, opera and installation events on the one hand and, on the other, for conferences, promotional motor shows, gala dinners, lighting and laser spectacles. In addition to these two iconic spaces theatre, dance and performance pieces are often sited in different parts of the whole complex. Joachim informs me that many of the theatre and music events are chosen for their popular appeal and he is honest about the perpetual financial pressures which always require attention to the number of visitors who define the ‘bottom line’ on most of these occasions. Nonetheless, I note in the strikingly produced Winkels and Zieling book that signature theatre directors and choreographers of the contemporary avant garde, such as Alain Platel, Peter Brook, Philipp Stolzi, Christoph Marthaler and Robert Wilson have all had work performed at Landschaftspark. Joachim also tells me that South African artist and installation/performance-maker, William Kentridge, will be presenting work at Landschaftspark as part of the Ruhrtriennale in the late summer of 2018. There is much more to say about the range of activities in this multifaceted place, a location which simultaneously confounds and confirms many of my expectations and assumptions about the heritage and cultural industries. Landschaftspark needs to be understood, experienced and sensed through many different lenses and layers of materiality and context. In terms of context we should position the project within the much wider framework of ideas, imagination, thinking, policy making and financial support which seem to have been characteristic of various responses to the plight of the whole northern Ruhr area over the last 40  years. Landschaftspark’s idiosyncratic and radical re-thinking of industrial heritage and regeneration has been driven by Latz’s plans and sustained and extended by the project team which has been in place ever since. But it has also been the beneficiary of an enabling infrastructure within the wider

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Ruhr region which has been present to support and help finance the venture and to make active connections with the wider cultural world beyond this part of Germany. The Ruhrtriennale5 has been an integral part of this relationship and project. Joachim is thoughtful, honest and reflective as he tells me the story of Landschaftspark so far. We are strangers, but he hints at those particular qualities of the experiment—for that is what it is— which he particularly prizes and would like to see developed further if resources permitted. I sense he is well aware of the difficult balancing act between sustaining the openness and accessibility of the place with an unfolding arts and cultural programme which somehow speaks to and further explores Latz’s radical design thinking. It is also a temporal challenge to negotiate the material force field of the past in the form of the plant, engineering and equipment which refuses comfortable nostalgia and embraces environmental and ecological prefigurations which are open, negotiable and questioning. James Corner summarises the spirit and practice of Peter Latz’s legacy like this: Peter Latz seized the opportunity to work with the deep structures of the site. He did not impose his own will or signature, but instead cultivated the hidden processes and forces inherent to the site itself. It is a profoundly temporal work, essentially growing a new reality from an old foundation, a reality where traces of the old remain, not simply as vestiges but as the alchemic medium within which the new springs forth. (Corner 2009, p.22)

After its closure as an ironworks Landschaftspark become a brownfield site and it is within this context that some of the most rewarding ecological experimentation is taking place. A bio-diversity research and audit day in June 2001 revealed over 1800 species of flora and fauna living within the park, and from 2005 a branch of the Biologische Station Westliches Ruhrgebiet moved into the former sampling building. Here, its role ranges from collecting scientific data, planning for the care of nature reserves to providing expert advice on renaturation schemes. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the Landschaftspark project is as a laboratory in which to explore new relations between decay, ruination, the built and the natural environment and the human and cultural behaviours which might productively intersect with these.

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St Peter’s Kilmahew and NVA6: A Place for Our Times At a seminar organised by NVA during the Venice Architectural Biennale in 2010 to discuss the historical background and possible futures of the ruined St Peter’s seminary near Glasgow, one of the participants, writer and artist, Emma Cocker offered an outline agenda for understanding a ruin. Later she wrote under the heading of Open Poetics: To refer to the poetics of the ruin is not to describe it adjectivally, even pejoratively, but instead signals towards the critical nature of its open-endedness, the unresolved or unfixed relationship between its fragmentary parts. The term ‘poetics’ is not used to evoke the sensibility or quality of the ruin within poetic representation, but rather intimates towards the making and unmaking of the ruin; its construction through processes of de-construction and re-construction. (Cocker 2011, p.93)

Cocker’s words provide context and frame for this chapter. At the beginning of this project I had planned to reflect upon and tell the story of the ruined St Peter’s Seminary through a sequential series of panels which would punctuate this book at various points from start to finish. These panels would mark the unfolding narrative of St Peter’s up to and through the writing of the monograph until its culmination—the day before perhaps—when I pressed the ‘send’ button dispatching nearly five years of labour to the publisher. This book would have been finished, but NVA’s project, I imagined, would continue to reveal itself to the adjoining community of Cardross on the River Clyde, to Scotland and to the world beyond in the years to follow. In the spring of 2019 I decided to relinquish this strategy, partly because I had restructured this book, but, more significantly, the project I am about to consider came to an unexpected end in the summer of 2018. I deliberately use the indefinite article ‘an’ here rather than the more categorical and definitive ‘the’ since the story of St Peter’s has had many apparent endings, only for these to be ruined as yet further plans and strategies for its recuperation have emerged. The St Peter’s story has prompted huge attention over nearly 40 years from the architectural, faith and heritage communities (Watters 2016). In addition, as the narrative has unfolded, it has generated sporadic passion and excitement from a curious general public across the West of Scotland and beyond. For the purposes of this book it offers a compelling, multi-­layered,

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complex and generative case study around contemporary ruin thinking and cultural practice. I explore such multi-faceted complexities below, but as a preface to this section it may be useful to summarise these here. • St Peter’s seminary is a very particular ruin, but it is unequivocally a ruin in the most uncontested and unambiguous sense of the term. No mere dilapidation or casual abandonment here. • Since the Roman Catholic Church finally gave up on St Peter’s in the mid-1980s it has been subject to a wide range of (ultimately) doomed proposals and projects for repair, reuse and restitution. • Few contemporary sites have prompted so much thoughtful and intense debate around the reclaiming and re-purposing of ruins. Such deliberations are epitomised by a published account (To Have and to Hold: Future of a Contested Landscape, 2011) of the conversations of a group of academics, artists, writers and architects at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010. • NVA’s aspirations and plans for St Peter’s constituted an ambitious and radical attempt to offer alternative solutions to the challenge of material ruination with cultural, performative, educational, ecological and community practices at their heart. • The story of NVA’s attempts to ‘rescue’ St Peter’s from its ultimate entropic fate prompts productive questions around what constitutes ‘failure’ and ‘success’ in such ambitious heritage projects. St Peter’s and the Kilmahew Estate: A Brief History The Kilmahew Estate lies in woodland abutting the village of Cardross on the north side of the Firth of Clyde. Half way between Helensburgh and Dumbarton, Cardross is some 25  miles from Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow. The first chapel (St Mahew) on the Kilmahew site was recorded in early Christian times, another was built by the Laird of Kilmahew in 1467 and in the sixteenth century the first castle and keep were constructed on the estate. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a new mansion house was commissioned (1868) and extensive, much admired gardens were sculpted and landscaped. The contemporary histories of St Peter’s and Kilmahew may really be traced to 1948 when the Archdiocese of Glasgow acquired the whole estate and began to house theology students there from nearby St Peter’s College at Darleith. During the 1950s

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the Archdiocese started negotiations with the Glasgow firm of architects, Gillespie, Kidd and Coia for a new purpose-built seminary. Construction began in 1961 and after many delays was finally completed in 1966, although some of the interior fittings were not finished until 1968. With hindsight one has a sense of the fated nature of St Peter’s even before it was completed, since at the closure of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, church policy moved away from the education of novice priests in secluded rural areas into city conurbations and communities. As a result of this policy change St Peter’s was closed in 1980, only 14  years after its formal opening. There followed four years between 1983 and 1987 when the Catholic Church made one final attempt to sustain the building by running it as a drug rehabilitation centre for the city of Glasgow. This closed in 1987. This spare historical account reveals little of why, over the next 30 years, St Peter’s was to become a passionate and complex arena for heritage discourses, conservationists, local councils, activist groups and arts funding bodies. The defining reason lies in the radical nature of the design of the building by Gillespie, Kidd and Coia’s two young architects, Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan who were given the task of drawing up the architectural plans for this seminary above the Clyde. The firm had already been responsible for designing a number of modernist Catholic churches across Scotland, but St Peter’s was soon regarded as one of the most startling and brilliant examples of their portfolio, as these comments testify: • There can be little doubt that the architecture of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia can be considered of international standing (Baines cited in Watters 2016, p.164). • Internationally significant work (which occupied) a central position in the history of Scottish architecture in the latter half of the twentieth century (Duerden cited in Watters 2016, p.164). • St Peters put Scottish architecture in a European league (Watters 2016, p.164). • This most remarkable building is comparable in some respects to the work of Le Corbusier. (Ziedler and Duerden cited in Watters 2016, p.164). • (Metzstein and MacMillan) … arguably the greatest living architects in Scotland today (Benson cited in Watters 2016, p.165).

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St Peter’s therefore is deemed within the world of modernist architecture to be an exemplary building—albeit one which leaked and had other structural problems—deserving of restitution and some kind of salvation. Whilst it is this order of recognition which propelled various attempts in the 1990s and early 2000s to propose plans for its conservation and preservation, interventions into this rapidly decaying building were driven by other forces as well. On the one hand, there is love and respect for an iconic high modernist building as it once—and briefly—was, but, on the other, there is clearly an allure and sense of excitement for St Peter’s as a ruin in its own right. Few of the conservation and heritage schemes for St Peter’s in this period proposed a complete and faithful restoration of the original building—which given the cost were out of the question—but many of the propositions were also justified in terms of discourses around abandonment and solutions which valued uncontrolled space and wastelands in idyllic landscapes (Watters 2016, p.58). Art historian at the University of Edinburgh, Richard J Williams, put it like this: As a contemporary ruin it is more moving than it would be fully restored or stabilised. How to incorporate these views in any discussion about its future is open to question. But as a starting point it is worth admitting that for many, St Peter’s appeal lies not so much in its architecture, as its marvellous decay. (Williams 2006, p.30)

During this period ideas and proposals for St Peter’s never lose sight of its historical value as an extraordinary example of modernist architecture, but increasingly begin to explore other reasons and rationales for re-­ purposing the whole site. Penny Lewis, editor (2003–2008) of the Scottish architectural magazine, Prospect, and a zealous campaigner for St Peter’s, began to suggest that any future for the building and its surrounding estate had to be based in cultural and artistic activities and worth. Diane Watters writes about Lewis thus: She broadened the ruins appeal significantly beyond the narrow bounds of architectural historians. Lewis adapted the Stamp discourse of the tragically misused and abandoned architectural masterpiece into a new narrative of an ‘iconic’ ruin as the locus for contemporary artistic pilgrimage, and for efforts to uncover more abstract values of ‘hidden beauty and meaning’. (Watters 2016, p.158)

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Fig. 5.11  Kilmahew St Peter’s, Cardross. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

Fig. 5.12  Kilmahew St Peter’s, Cardross. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

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Fig. 5.13  Kilmahew St Peter’s Open Doors Event, August 2017. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

NVA and St Peter’s It is in 2008 that NVA first enters the St Peter’s narrative and from this point until 2018 becomes the lodestar for both the debates and the practices which it is hoped will frame and propel futures for both the ruin itself and the surrounding Kilmahew Estate. In 2009 it is awarded a grant of £45,600 from the Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) to explore the potential for temporary and permanent art works on the St Peter’s and Kilmahew sites. But what sort of organisation was NVA? In order to position and understand its approach to St Peter’s it seems important to capture a little of its history and to get a sense of its dramaturgies, politics and aesthetics. Angus Farquhar formally set up NVA in 1992 and long before St Peter’s emerged on the company’s radar it had an appetite for dramaturgies of ruin and decay. From the early 1980s Angus had been a member of an industrial band called Test Dept., a percussion group, furious at Thatcherism,7 the deliberate dismantling of manufacturing industry and the Miner’s Strike8 in particular. Angus says, ‘we used lead piping, hammer handles and sledge hammers fashioned into drumsticks which we rained

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Fig. 5.14  Kilmahew St Peter’s, Cardross. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

down on a variety of metal foraged from countless scrapyards that pockmarked the Thames’ (Farquhar in Watters 2016, p.192). His taste for dereliction, ruin and making art in special locations was evidently forged during this time as the band regularly played in disused factories, empty railway stations and abandoned arches. In 1989 Test Dept. collaborated with Welsh theatre company, Brith Gof and Mike Pearson in Gododdin (see Chap. 7). In this early period Test Dept. and an embryonic NVA also collaborated on a performance called The Second Coming (1990) scripted by Neal Ascherson9 and sited in a disused locomotive building and repair yard (the size of two and a half football pitches) at the St Rollox railway works in Glasgow’s Springburn district. Within the multiple practices of Test Dept., Brith Gof and the emerging NVA we can trace a shared pattern of interest in working at scale and in locations of abandonment, dereliction or in remote rural settings. In 2003 NVA made The Hidden Gardens which transformed an area of industrial wasteland behind Glasgow’s Tramway10 into a sanctuary garden dedicated to peace. This was a critical response to the Iraq war and the garden is now a permanent feature, has a small classroom and offers opportunities to volunteers for growing food and involvement in cookery programmes. Possibly, in The

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Hidden Garden we may discern seeds of ideas to be (re)planted in the early stages of the St Peter’s project some ten years later. For 27  years, often in partnership with other professional or artist-led organisations, NVA produced and curated over 20 projects, many of which engaged with the temporary transformation and theatrical activation of urban and rural landscapes. A full archive of NVA’s activities can be found at NVA.org.uk. Often these attended to issues of ecology and sustainability harnessing different art forms to explode and broaden awareness of contemporary Scotland. I interviewed Angus in February 2015 and again in December 2018. Whilst NVA’s St Peter’s project had been under way for six years when we first talked it was this almost four year period between our conversations which marked the most confident and energetic span of NVA’s active engagement in the Cardross seminary. However, by the time we had spoken again, late in 2018, NVA had announced its decision to close as an organisation and hence had no choice but to withdraw entirely from the regeneration of St Peter’s. In 2015 Angus had spoken optimistically about St Peter’s whilst still acknowledging both the demanding complexity of the project and its tortuous history of failed attempts at renaissance. He said then: I think actions do speak lounder than words because it has been the graveyard of many plans and aspirations. They have been through every single model of standard regeneration and the complexities of the site have spat back out every one of these options. In the end – maybe out of desperation  – the establishment has acknowledged there might be an alternative methodology, and it’s our tenacity and teamwork which has got us to this position … We (NVA) felt it was time to go beyond the one-off. So, this is definitely about what we are going to do in the next 20–30 years. I do like insurmountable challenges. (Farquhar 2015)

When NVA entered into the St Peter’s narrative in 2008 it brought with it the knowledge, skill and experience of generating substantial funding for projects, working at scale, a disposition to work across art-forms (e.g. theatre, performance, music, lighting, design, installation and visual arts) and practices which were always underpinned by a strong ethos of teamwork and an ethical and political commitment. However, as Angus notes above, the prospect of regenerating St Peter’s was in a different league from the company’s previous projects. NVA also entered this arena

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at a time when all the other players who had sought to find solutions to St Peter’s ruination had apparently exhausted their will and energies to continue with the task. From the outset, and in contrast to previous developments, the period from 2009 proved to be a settled one where the interested protagonists (Classical House, Historic Scotland, St Peter’s Building Preservation Trust, Twentieth Century Society, Urban Splash) fell in behind NVA and worked together (Watters 2016, p.174). The 2009 proposition put forward by Angus and Rolf Roscher11 from the landscape architects ERZ was significantly different from all those that had come before. Its basic elements centred on a ‘publicly funded scheme of cultural and local benefit’ (Watters 2016, p.174) with phased plans for development over five years depending upon the success (or otherwise) of funding applications. Apart from the kind of multiple usage imagined by NVA, to be realised in various stages as the building was progressively made safe and basic facilities installed, what differentiated this vision from those that came before was NVA’s approach to the ruin itself. By ‘approach’ I am not simply meaning the material pragmatics of repair and reconstruction, but how to deal with history, heritage, conservation and the meaning and nature of ruination. There can be few ruin projects which have devoted so much time and energy to debating and thinking through the complex issues of how to approach a ruin, of what questions to pose to the ruin. Initially, the main forum for this conversation was the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2010 where NVA had been invited by the Scottish government to organise a seminar with academics, architects, landscape architects, artists and writers to discuss St Peter’s within the wider frames identified above. A record of these debates was published a year later in a book entitled To Have and to Hold: Future of a Contested Landscape (Van Noord [ed.] 2011). This short publication, thoughtful and accessible in equal measure, is a compelling volume raising important issues and considerations around heritage and ruination. If it has a message it is one of the virtues of open-endedness and of a pragmatism informed by, and practised through, public engagement. It also centrally challenges the idea and the wisdom—even if money was no object—of aspiring to restore ruined buildings to an imagined original and foundational state. These perspectives might be encapsulated in this absorbing statement from NVA’s Kilmahew/St Peter’s website: Our vision accepts loss and ruination as part of the history of the place. The imaginative re-use of this great modernist structure reflects the same social

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dynamism and ambition with which it was conceived: a spirit of working to improve things and imagining a better world. Rather than rubbing off the hard edges to create a polished version of the past, the intention is to ­preserve a raw sense of otherness, excitement and revelation. (http://nva. org.uk/artwork/kilmahew-st-peters/)

From my first-hand experience of St Peter’s, through extensive reading around the project and conversations with Angus and geographer Hayden Lorimer12 it seemed that the developing process, although continuously framed within an ethical philosophy of ‘open-endedness’, had constantly to hold in harness highly practical activities of clearance, making safe and repair with critical thought and allowing events and projects to take place. Holding on to an unfolding vision of St Peter’s rooted in public or community participation, education, environmental and ecological research and arts practices at the same time as dirty and dangerous repairs were taking place (e.g. removal of asbestos) was a precarious act of high-wire balancing. As grants and fund-raising began to bear fruit—but at different stages—priority decisions had to be made as to which parts of this huge site should receive immediate or later investment and how much of this resource should be devoted to activities (small or larger scale) with local and West of Scotland publics. In 2011, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) awarded £100,000 to a three-year project entitled The Invisible College led by Hayden Lorimer from the University of Glasgow, in conjunction with the universities of Strathclyde and Edinburgh. The proposal for this emerged from conversations between Lorimer, Angus and Ed Hollis13 and was inspired by the notion of education ‘without walls’ and of models of heuristic learning—knowledge generated through making, through practice and through experimentation. As an institution without walls, ‘The Invisible College’, first imagined and established by seventeenth-century scientist and philosopher, Robert Boyle, was dedicated to furthering knowledge through experimental investigation. The AHRC grant could not be spent on any material repair or reconstruction, but afforded the opportunity to think St Peter’s through and around practice and experimentation. It offered the possibility of playfully experimenting with the still completely ruined St Peter’s as a ‘field station of the future’ (Lorimer 2013) and with participants (local people and students) who Lorimer and Angus chose to imagine as ‘active protagonists’ (Ibid), working in small projects on the Kilmahew estate and—tentatively—within the building

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itself. Philosophically central to these projects was a resistance to the idea (the fiction?) of the romantic and lonely individual soulfully immersing him/herself in the contemplation of the ruin with the hope of experiencing the sublime. Instead, these projects were acts of sociality, conviviality and cooperation with permission to ‘noise up the place’ (Ibid) through playful experimentation. Often with a strong theatrical or performative quality, a number of these projects stand out: dressed theatrically in forensic white scrubs the ‘active protagonists’ investigated and measured the toxicity of the land around the seminary; with miniature figurines they playfully repopulated the estate as a model community, creating an archaeological dig of 9 × 1 metre square areas; and as an historical mapping exercise they were invited carefully to trace and follow traditional paths and tracks across the estate—the ancient routes once walked by pilgrims, drovers, poachers, worshippers and wanderers. With the figurines group what began as a playful childlike exercise in constructing imaginary geographies soon became a serious and practical exercise documenting and performing patterns of access, ownership and land use. A subsequent exhibition of artefacts and figurines was presented at Glasgow’s Lighthouse.14 For the purposes of this book, the role of performance in enabling various publics to invest actively—and practically—in the unfolding future of St Peter’s is significant. Here the tools and perspectives of performance— occasionally shading into theatre itself—afford opportunities for these groups to engage with the St Peter’s project through action, through embodied investigation, through play and through a physicalisation of the imagination. In addition to these more overtly performance projects, other activities such as plant and vegetable cultivation schemes, archaeological digs, physical archiving, debates and a soundscape commissioned by geographer Michael Gallagher were also organised. The Invisible College became, in part, an exercise of thinking through—and out of— practice, a portfolio of creative research projects which signalled in a very material way the directions and ethos which Angus and his team believed that a future St Peter’s must follow. At an event entitled ‘The Next Steps in the Reinvention of St Peter’s Seminary and Kilmahew’ held at Summerhall15 in Edinburgh (December, 2013) Lorimer put it like this: Kilmahew/St Peter’s becomes a place that we actually need, a place where new kinds of story can begin to take root, places that work because they are actually worked, creatively, socially and experimentally. Places where stuff

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gets grown, harvested, and then eaten. Places where bright ideas sprout from collaborative action. Places where opposites are entertained and there’s a willingness to try things on the off chance that they might just happen to work. Places where you visit, not to watch what’s happening, but places where what you do is what is happening. (Ibid)

Lorimer concluded his presentation at Summerhall by citing the American novelist and nature writer Barbara Kingsolver who has written about the environmental and social challenges of the twenty-first century and who suggests that ‘learning to live with broken country’ (Ibid) should be a disposition to be held dear by any of us involved in repair and regeneration projects. Lorimer argued that the philosophy of NVA St Peter’s project was to reject the ‘jewel box’ paradigm for architectural preservation and positively to embrace the idea that ‘places are always on the way to becoming something else’ and that ‘adaptation will always trump preservation’ (Ibid). The AHRC-funded Invisible College provided NVA with resources to carve out necessary time and space to continue thinking through the project, to experiment with prefigurative forms of activity for the future of St Peter’s and to forge contacts and traffic ideas with other organisations across the United Kingdom. Towards the end of the three-year cycle The Invisible College was taken out on the road to tell its story and to learn from other projects engaged with similar challenges. Amongst other encounters, Lorimer and Angus visited Grizedale Arts in the English Lake District to explore its practice and relationship to the Coniston Institute founded by John Ruskin in the nineteenth century. Angus was keen to develop a kind of informal curatorial partnership with Adam Sutherland16 of Grizedale and clearly found many elective affinities of ‘rural radicalism’17 (Farquhar 2015) between the two projects. In conversation with me in 2015 he said: Grizedale has cut an incredible swathe. There are very few organisations that could be in Sao Paolo one week and cooking road kill risotto in the Coniston Institute the next. Never done in a patronising way, but through a profound commitment to hard work and the rigours of just sheer graft. And then a very thoroughly worked through understanding of contemporary art and craft … In the Grizedale sense the artist is someone who uses their imagination and their skill to find solutions for societal problems. (Farquhar 2015)

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Further afield in Norfolk the management of the Sheringham Estate and Park offered models of practice which Lorimer identifies as ‘progressive localism’ (Ibid) and which had obvious associations with the St Peter’s project. During the period between 2009 and 2016, in conjunction with a design team,18 NVA developed a series of unfolding plans for the building and at the same time raised considerable financial support for the project from various cultural and conservation bodies.19 Essentially, the strategy rested on a series of activities: cleaning and clearing; making the building safe enough for public access and participation; repairing and reconstructing parts of the building to make them weatherproof and fit for discursive/educational events and for administration; preparing space within the main building to afford seating for 600 spectators in anticipation of various large-scale events and keeping significant parts of the site in a state of ruination. Angus articulated some of his anxieties around this process: I was worried whether the site clearance would ‘ruin the ruin’. What if the powerfully desolate character which had attracted so many people to visit and make work there over the last two decades was erased? What if in becoming safe it would also become bland? (Farquhar cited in Watters 2016, p. 218)

His concerns illustrate the complex creative tensions within NVA’s vision and plans for St Peter’s: tensions inherent, perhaps, in the paradigm for regeneration articulated by himself, Lorimer and Hollis at the Summerhall event in 2013; tensions between the pragmatics of necessary repair and safety on the one hand—removing vast amounts of asbestos from the site, for example—and that open-ended sense of a field station or laboratory where outcomes were (happily) unknown and unpredictable. For ten days during March 2016 NVA organised what in retrospect we can now acknowledge as the largest and most ambitious event within its ten-year relationship to the ruin of St Peter’s. Hinterland launched the opening of Scotland’s Festival of Architecture and was to be the first large-­ scale public performance on the site. It was preceded and accompanied by considerable press and media publicity across Scotland and the whole of the United Kingdom and attracted a sell-out audience of 8100 which included a free preview attended by over 600 local people. In January 2016 The Observer newspaper ran a lengthy article by the architecture critic, Rowan Moore, profiling St Peter’s and NVA’s role within it, and

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three days into Hinterland on 21 March the Guardian newspaper printed a double-page image of the building lit by lighting designer, Phil Supple. Hinterland was many things, but primarily a large-scale event of considerable logistical complexity designed, unashamedly, to bring public consideration to the past and present of St Peter’s and NVA’s plans and vision for its future. It announced to the world that St Peter’s was an extraordinary ruin that deserved attention in its own right and, through the Hinterland Manifesto, explicitly articulated the philosophy and politics of the whole project. In addition to the immediate visceral and aesthetic pleasure of experiencing the ruin through the media of live performance, sound and light, Hinterland signalled both promise and potential for the future. It also, perhaps, hinted at the challenges ahead for regular large-scale public use of the site. Like many of NVA’s large-scale projects, Hinterland was a masterful exercise in planning and organisation. All participants had to be bussed from Helensburgh to the Kilmahew estate (4.3 miles) having indicated on purchase of their tickets a date and time slot (three or four per evening between 18 and 27 March). My memories of the experience may be summarised like this: at the minibus drop-off point, we are given a glowing light stick (a twenty-first-century version of a pilgrim’s staff perhaps) and walk up through the woods guided by a team of volunteers and along tracks lit by lanterns. At the ruin itself we are obliged to follow carefully roped off and designated routes around and within the main building. We move at our own pace and pause to seep up the environment for as long as interest allows. On the walk up we become aware of a soundscape composed of what seems like tools clanging on stone and metal, punctuated and backed by choral singing. Once within the main hall of the building we can position ourselves at various sites of advantage and here a projected lighting score plays itself through an evolving sequence of colours, tints and textures revealing both the entropic decay of the walls and damaged concrete, and sometimes—as if by monstrous x-ray—the sharply symmetrical lines of Metzstein and MacMillan’s designs. As we stand for 10–15 minutes at one end of the main hall looking down towards where the altar used to be, a suspended, slowly swinging ‘tabernacle’ is moved from side to side by two performers wearing welding helmets, protective boiler suits and safety boots. In her review for the Scottish Journal of Performance Studies, theatre scholar Cara Berger records that Spectators encounter this scene three times, from different angles. Each time the mood changes. The solemn image morphs into an ecstatic one

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when the side-on living quarters above are illuminated in flashes of purple, blue and green. The final encounter exposes the performance’s mechanics: what appeared as an altar is revealed to be a lighting desk. This Dante-esque dramaturgy – in which the spectator ascends from the underworld to knowledge  – mimics religious creed, but does not reproduce it. (Berger 2016, p.147)

Angus is at pains to distance this choreography of light from the kind of commercial son-et-lumiere much exploited in heritage sites. He says, ‘our work has seriousness, purpose and intent. It is not a light show, we are public art with light as one of our mediums’ (Glenday 2016, n.p.). In a different account he adds: Projections expressed the character of entropy, the slow disease of ceaseless disintegration. In contrast we also elucidated the sharply symmetrical lines of the original plan and paid homage to the pioneering Russian abstract artist Kazimir Malevich and the birth of Modernism, referencing his famous Black Square as well as the coloured geometric planes of his later works. (Farquhar in Watters 2016, p. 234)

Hinterland was an invitation for the public to experience viscerally the materiality of the building, to whet appetites for future encounters and, above all perhaps, to embody and make concrete NVA’s philosophy of public art and of the ruin itself. As an integral part of the Hinterland experience NVA published and communicated what it called the ‘Hinterland Manifesto’. This was printed in the programme and invited the 8100 participants to reflect beyond the immediate material experience of St Peter’s, its dramaturgies of sound and light and to position the whole project— and the role of art more widely—within the broken field of contemporary politics and civic life in Scotland and beyond. This manifesto resonates strongly with many of the other ruin projects I encountered across Europe, even if few of them ever articulated their aspirations so elegantly. For these reasons I reprint it in its entirety at the end of this chapter. Before concluding this account of NVA/St Peter’s project I want to refer to other writing and art interventions inspired by the story of this ruin. Like many who have met the ruin of St Peter’s my first encounter was mildly transgressive as a trespasser with two friends from the University of Glasgow. The experience blasted me with sensations, images, thoughts and feelings. One of these was a sense of unsettling incredulity about the

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proliferation of graffiti on almost every surface of what remained of the building. There is hardly a photographic image of St Peter’s from the moment it was abandoned by the Roman Catholic church in the mid-­1980s which is not saturated either by the recognisable vernacular of modern graffiti, copying or critiquing the work of many well-known artists or the darker statements and images of ‘haters and baiters, referencing acts of violence and sexual transgression through crude commentary left in the darkened recesses’ (Farquhar in Watters 2016, p.226). It is tempting to romanticise these images and to read into their texts an overdue and transgressively witty rebuke to the pieties and grandiose pretensions of the ruins’ original begetter and owner. Regardless of intention, I guess, they cannot help but serve this function. Many of these punk and grunge murals, whilst executed with considerable skill, speak of a dark and violent view of the world: a nun wearing a gas mask whilst praying; skulls and crossbones; a giant scabrous inverted black beetle or spider; a black knight figure slumped dead against a wall, machine gun still clasped in his hands and so on. Scripts varying in degrees of animosity and occasional tenderness: ‘PISH’, ‘ROT IN PEACE’, ‘DOOM’, ‘LONG LIVE THE ART FAGS’, ‘BUILDING IS WELL. LIES!!!, VENTILATED’ …, ‘I LOVE CAITLYN’. Of course, the surfaces of St Peter’s are hardly unique in generating such an explosion of graphic imagery and my experience of abandoned buildings in different European cities suggests that street art and graffiti are a near universal response to decay and dereliction. A semiotic paradise, graffiti serves to breathe life back into ruins whilst at the same time confirming and hastening a kind of entropic death wish. The walls, recesses, fissures and crevices of St Peter’s creating an alternative gallery space for raves and untamed trespasser-artists armed with a 1000 aerosol spray paint cans. In June 2015 the journal Performance Research devoted a whole issue to the theme of ruins and ruination and amongst 20 articles 2 were devoted to St Peter’s. Hayden Lorimer and Simon Murray in ‘The Ruin in Question’ (Lorimer and Murray 2015, pp.58–66) responded to the following series of (self-identified) questions which helped to reveal the state of play at St Peter’s in 2015: • How do we let a ruin have its say? • Are you a noun or are you a verb, or both? • How does time work in your ruination? • What is the mood and atmosphere of your ruination?

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• Are you a very singular ruin or like so many others? • Who owns you now as a ruin? • What do you want to be in the future? Taking inspiration from Elinor Fuchs seminal essay, ‘Visit to a Small Planet: Questions to ask a play’ (Fuchs 2004, pp.4–9) we adapted an approach which asks questions about the landscape and world of St Peter’s, attempting to convey the materiality of this ruin and the prospects for regeneration which spring from this reality. In ‘St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross: the ruin of modernism’ scholars David Archibald and Johnny Rodger examine the representation of the ruin through the lens of two experimental documentary films by Murray Grigor,20 Space and Light (1972) and Space and Light Revisited (2009). The first of these was filmed when St Peter’s was a fully functioning seminary and the second, nearly 40 years on, projects both films simultaneously on a split screen. Grigor and both authors are concerned with the generative relationship between architecture and film. Archibald and Rodger analyse how the films might influence the idea that the initial structure and the ruin of St Peter’s can be viewed as paradigmatic of the crisis of modernist regimes of measure and the functional logic of the factory system. (Archibald and Rodger 2015, p.103)

Both these essays offer contrasting ways of approaching St Peter’s and reinforce NVA’s vision that only a plurality of perspectives can begin to do justice to the complex past and intricate futures of this ruined site. NVA/St Peter’s: Pause or Ending; Dotted Line or Epitaph? In the summer of 2018 a press release from NVA announced that it was to close all its operations and with it, the rescue of St Peter’s. For those who had become immersed in the St Peter’s/NVA narrative over ten years, particularly from within the world of Scottish culture and architecture, this news came as a startling blow and reversal of fortunes. For those inside NVA and closely connected to it, we must assume that the decision made public in early June 2018 had been unfolding for many months. Despite the extraordinary achievement of raising almost £9 m over a ten-­ year period, NVA had been informed by Creative Scotland21 earlier in the year

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that it had been unsuccessful in its application for three-year core funding. The Creative Scotland decision did not actually cause NVA’s closure, but certainly compounded the complex matrix of risks and uncertainties associated with the project. Liable for any debts or losses, NVA trustees had reluctantly decided that the jeopardies and hazards entailed in pursuing its bold and ambitious plans were increasingly too much to bear, and that they could no longer guarantee a viable future for the St Peter’s project. A particular setback was that, instead of providing a grant of £1 m, the Scottish government offered a three-year loan for this sum, with the consequence of making the kind of business plan required of NVA impossible. Such bald statements doubtless disguise many tortuous and highly charged debates and conversations within NVA over quite a lengthy period. On 14th December 2018 I recorded a second conversation with Angus. I had always intended to have such a dialogue with him to round off this book’s relationship with St Peter’s Seminary. The encounter would, I imagined, have been a small punctuation mark in NVA’s developing project. In the event, I expected that our conversation might have had a strong valedictory or elegiac quality, although this was not how the experience felt to me as he talked openly and honestly about the ending of this rather remarkable ruinous journey. Angus was keen not to discuss the closure of NVA in simplistic terms of success of failure, for to do so would run counter to both the pragmatics and the spirit or ethos of NVA’s investment in St Peter’s. From 2008 the discourses around both the vision and the concrete plans for the ruin were iterative. The transformation of St Peter’s—and the public’s experience of these changes—was always going to be a graduated one. Within the bounds of practicality public events of varying scale were to happen—and did happen—during the period of necessary restitution and making safe. However, in certain ways it seems that NVA’s achievement of raising millions of pounds of resource and support brought with it a series of expectations and requirements which in part ran counter to the politics and ethos of the project. In addition, the scale of this financial support was increasingly burdensome for a small arts organisation, even one that had had a successful record of funding large-scale projects. The informality and fluidity of a development model based on iterative experimentation and a model of a public, not as passive spectators, but as ‘active protagonists’, ran counter to the big funders’ expectations of creating a heritage centre and ‘visitor

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attraction’ out of St Peter’s. In conversation, Angus admitted to me that in the previous three years much of his time had been spent thinking, for example, about the footprint and capacity of car parks, the kind of café that needed to be built, the positioning of public toilets, whether or not a paywall around the site should be imposed and—most significantly—the minimum footfall of visitors necessary to justify the grants received. All these became tied into a complex conundrum around, on the one hand, the relative inaccessibility of the Kilmahew site and, on the other the ‘progressive localism’ or ‘rural radicalism’ which were such signature qualities of their aspirations. Despite the success of some of the larger grant applications Angus and his team experienced a ‘deep distrust of the arts, and arts’ led approaches’ (Farquhar 2018) to regeneration from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). In conclusion, I felt that Angus was saying that it was not largely the inevitable administrative pressures which accompany large-scale funding, but the pull away from the original and unfolding vision, which ultimately led NVA to make its decision to close between 2017 and 2018. This account of the ruins of St Peter’s on the Kilmahew Estate and NVA’s ambitious programme of regeneration is a compelling one in its own right, but for the purposes of this volume is hugely significant in what it reveals about ruination, salvage, restitution and the cultural politics of heritage. In many ways this story articulates the complexities and productive messiness in the relationship between artistic intervention and sites of decay and abandonment. The thinking and critical reflection—the Venice seminar, The Invisible College and the Hinterland Manifesto, for example—which were generated by the project over ten years offer a propulsive and productive context and frame of knowledge for many of the ruin projects identified in this book. Above all, NVA/St Peter’s story is not one of a radical public art organisation cleverly and sensitively imposing its will on an inert and passive ruin, but instead is one of a material ruin speaking out to its human protagonists and sharing the terms of reference for its regeneration and restitution. Hinterland Manifesto March 2016

Freedom of thought and the capacity to empathise with difference is central to life beyond mere survival. It follows that our society is not static but something we can influence and evolve collectively. (continued)

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(continued) We can determine our own political, social and cultural reality. Sharing our values through public art enables us to confirm our humanity, exchange our ideas and engage our past, present and futures. While art has the capacity to entertain, it also exists to provoke, contest and search for new realities. Locating creativity within democratic processes defines a progressive political system. The Agora was established in Ancient Greece as the public engine for constructive human activity, it was both the forum for debate as well as the physical setting where relevant topics were discussed: business, politics, current events, or the nature of the universe and the divine. Hinterland aims to re-invoke the spirit of the Agora. Our shared human experience is at breaking point. There is widespread failure in our political and economic systems. Internationally we are unable to find peaceful means to resolve disputes or tackle major environmental issues. Mass displacement through war and social breakdown in many countries has never been more acute and we live the magnitude of this every day. In Scotland our recent faltering steps towards resolving disagreements around our future trajectory stand as a testament to the potential for non-violent change. The extension of this debate from the national to the global, the ability to accept what you do not necessarily agree with, is of essential value. (Watters 2016, p.246)

Postscript: St Peter’s/NVA—Another Ending At the end of our 2018 conversation Angus suggested that by the following summer we would know whether Historic Environment Scotland (HES) and the Scottish government might together have found a way to support St Peter’s into the future. HES’ Advice to Ministers on State Care Options published on 27 June 2019 is too long and complex to describe here, but in a press release Angus expressed deep disappointment at what he regarded as a timid response which failed fully to acknowledge the £1 m repair work already undertaken at St Peter’s under NVA’s stewardship. Additionally, he felt, there were other exaggerations around future cost and risk. HES proposed a programme of ‘curated decay’ for St Peter’s

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which would enable the site to be made safe whilst it continued its journey towards complete ruination. Farquhar felt that HES undermined this very strategy by weakly underplaying the reasons why the Scottish government should provide such support. After receipt of the HES report the Cabinet Secretary declined to take St Peter’s into state care citing high cost and risk as the main factors. In his press release Angus also contextualised the situation more widely in terms of what he felt was the Scottish establishment’s failure to recognise and protect the legacy of the Country’s twentieth-­ century built environment. A legacy which Professor Alan Dunlop22 describes ‘as important as Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art’ (Dunlop 2019). Angus concludes by reflecting on the complex and contested politics of heritage and ruination: Today Scotland has turned its back on the 20th Century … It is a politicised decision and demonstrates that dreams of a progressive Scotland, with its aspirations for a ‘Scandinavian-style’ modern democracy, is mired by institutions who too often remain conservative, intellectually mediocre and parochial in their interpretation of cultural policy … Part of our recent built heritage will be erased, how sad that as a nation we can champion countless ruined castles celebrating a history of blood-soaked barbarism and maintain numerous country houses documenting the lives of the rich and privileged in distant times. These state buildings offer little intellectual challenge. But when it comes to the complexities of sustaining the artefacts of recent modernist history of telling ‘our story’, a subjective distaste for modernism comes into play. It is simply not good enough for a modern outward23 looking nation who wishes to remain positioned in the heart of Europe. (Farquhar 2019)

The St Peter’s/NVA story is richly illustrative of many of the themes which run through this book. It remains, like sundry cultural interventions into abandoned and decaying buildings featured here, an unfinished narrative. NVA’s attempts to re-purpose the ruins of St Peter’s in ways that departed radically from more conventional heritage ventures reflect a spirit and disposition also to be found in projects examined elsewhere in this volume. The complex opportunities afforded by St Peter’s in the twenty-­ first century in turn speak of the instability (literal, temporal and metaphorical) of all ruined sites and therefore of the challenges to artists and

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activists who seek to occupy such places with ambitious and often utopian agendas.

Notes 1. ‘Fordism’, after Henry Ford, describes the early automation of manufacturing production initially in the automobile industry from around 1910, based upon the fixed assembly line and the construction of standardised low cost goods. 2. ‘Taylorism’, after Frederick Taylor (1836–1915), invented the ‘time and motion’ study within the workplace under the rubric of ‘Scientific Management’ and as a means of enhancing work flows and human productivity. 3. PACT, an arts centre sited in the old colliery shower and changing facilities opened in  2002. PACT is an  acronym for  Performing Arts Choreographisches Zentrum NRW Tanzlandschaft. 4. As this book goes to press, a communication from Forced Entertainment tells me that the planned premiere of their latest show, Under Bright Light, at PACT in April 2020 has had to be cancelled because of the Coronavirus pandemic. 5. The Ruhrtriennale is an arts and music festival which occurs every three years in late summer/early autumn. 6. NVA, an  acronym for  nacionale vitae activa, a Latin term meaning ‘the right to influence public affairs’, was founded by Angus Farquhar in 1992. A Scottish public art organisation, it closed in June 2018 as a result of funding difficulties associated with  its plans to  redevelop the  St Peter’s Seminary site. 7. ‘Thatcherism’ refers to the political economics propounded and delivered by UK Conservative Prime Minister (1979–1990), Margaret Thatcher. 8. The Miners’ Strike during Margaret Thatcher’s Prime Ministership lasted for 12  months from March 1985. It was a bitter struggle between the Miners’ union (NUM) and Thatcher’s Conservative government over the planned closure of pits. 9. Neal Ascherson (b.1932) is a Scottish political journalist, historian and novelist who has written extensively on Scottish affairs, twentieth-century Poland and public archaeology. 10. Glasgow’s Tramway was originally a huge City Council tram repair shed. Between 1964 and 1987 it housed Glasgow’s Museum of Transport and in 1988 became the only UK venue to host Peter Brook’s seminal production of the Mahabharata. In 1990 it was a key venue for Glasgow City of Culture events and has remained a space ever since for performing and visual arts.

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11. Roscher is a Glasgow-based designer and architect who had originally collaborated with NVA on the Tramway Hidden Gardens project. He subsequently played a pivotal role in the development of the site aesthetic for St Peter’s. 12. For the duration of NVA/St Peter’s reinvention Hayden Lorimer was closely associated with the development and became lead investigator on the AHRC-funded Invisible College research project. During this time he was Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Glasgow, but moved to the University of Edinburgh in the autumn of 2019. 13. Hollis trained as an architect and is currently Professor of Interior Design and Director of Research at Edinburgh College of Art. 14. The Lighthouse is Scotland’s Centre for Design and Architecture in the centre of Glasgow. It hosts a programme of exhibitions and public events, and the building, which formerly housed The Glasgow Herald newspaper, was originally designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. 15. Summerhall is now a multi-purpose arts centre in Edinburgh which opened in 2011. Previously it had been home to Edinburgh University’s School of Veterinary Studies and is now owned by the McDowell family. 16. Adam Sutherland was appointed director of Grizedale Arts in 1999. More information on Grizedale can be found at: https://www.grizedale. org/about/ 17. Rural Radicalism is a term to cover many forms of progressive protest and action within rural areas. Sometimes these have constituted peasant or farm workers’ movements which have contested pay and conditions and often, too, the power structures of land ownership. Scotland has a particular tradition of rural radicalism and such movements have had a significant impact on changing the lives of rural workers and their families in the United States, Latin America and on the African continent. 18. From 2014 the design team comprised Avanti Architects, ERZ Landscape Architects and NORD Architecture. 19. Bodies which contributed funds (or in kind support) to the St Peter’s project during this period included the Heritage Lottery Fund, AHRC, Historic Environment Scotland, Creative Scotland, Argyll and Bute Council and Reigart (a Scottish demolition company). 20. Born in 1939, Murray Grigor is a Scottish film maker, writer and curator who has been director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. 21. Creative Scotland (successor organisation to the Scottish Arts Council) is the public body that supports the arts, screen and creative industries across Scotland. It distributes money from the Scottish government and the National Lottery. 22. Dunlop is an architect and visiting professor at Robert Gordon University, Scott Sutherland School of Architecture and the University of Liverpool.

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23. Angus Farquhar’s reference to a ‘modern outward looking nation’ must be understood in the context of a Scotland which voted overwhelmingly to remain within the European Union (EU) in the referendum of 2016. Associatedly he is positioning his disappointment about the failure to support St Peter’s in the context of the movement towards independence in Scotland.

Bibliography Archibald, D., & Rodger, J. (2015). ‘St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross: The ruin of in R. Gough and C. Lavery (eds.) Performance Research on Ruins and Ruination, 20(3), June,103–111. Berger, C. (2016). Performance Review: Hinterland. Scottish Journal of Performance Studies, 3(1), 143–148. Cocker, E. (2011). On the Ruin’s Future: Keeping Things Open. In G. van Noord (Ed.), To Have and to Hold: Future of a Contested Landscape. Edinburgh: Luath Press. Corner, J. (2009). A Masterpiece. In Learning from Duisburg-Nord. Munich: Faculty of Architecture, Technical University Munich. Dunlop, A. (2019). Quoted in ‘A-Listed Cardross Seminary will be Left to Decay’. BBC Scotland, 27 June. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-48790096 Farquhar, A. (2015, February 11). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Farquhar, A. (2018, December 14). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Farquhar, A. (2019). Press Release, 27 June. Fuchs, E. (2004). Visit to a Small Planet: Questions to Ask a Play. Theater, 34(2), 4–9. Glenday, J. (2016). Hinterland: Seeing the Light, Urban Realm, 22 April. https:// www.urbanrealm.com/features/531/Hinterland%3A_Seeing_the_Light. html. Accessed 20 Jan 2019. Lorimer, H. (2013). Extract from edited transcript of presentation at seminar entitled The Next Steps in the Reinvention of St Peter’s Seminary and Kilmahew. Summerhall, Edinburgh 7th December. Lorimer, H., & Murray, S. (2015). The Ruin in Question. In R.Gough and C. Lavery (eds.) Performance Research on Ruins and Ruination, 20(3), June, 58–66. Mannebach, J. (2018, May 8). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Marth, H. (Ed.). (2018). Zollverein: World Heritage Site and Future Workshop. Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH. Marx, K. (1996). Das Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Washington, DC: Gateway Editions. NVA/St Peter’s website http://nva.org.uk/artwork/kilmahew-st-peters/. Accessed 20 Jan 2019. PACT. https://www.pact-zollverein.de/en/house/about-us. Accessed 20 Nov 2018.

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Postiglione, G., & Norberg Schulz, C. (1997). Sverre Fehn. New  York: The Monacelli Press. Smithson, R. (1967). A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. Artforum, December 52–57. Stamp, G. (2015) ‘St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross – Better off a Ruin?’ Apollo Magazine, 10 October. Van Noord, G. (Ed.). (2011). To Have and to Hold: Future of a Contested Landscape. Edinburgh: Luath Press. Watters, D. (2016). St Peter’s, Cardross: Birth, Death and Renewal. Edinburgh: Historic Environment Scotland. Whyte, Y. (2018, May 6). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Williams, R.J. (2006). The Modernist Ruin. Prospect, March. Winkels, R., & Zieling, G. (2010). Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord: From Ironworks to Theme Park. Duisburg: Mercator-Verlig.

CHAPTER 6

Legacies of War: Performing Balkan Ruins

Bosnia-Herzegovina has had a troubled and highly complex recent history. Following the death of President Tito in 1980, the end of the Communist bloc (1989) and subsequent division of the former Yugoslavia into separate republics, Bosnia and Herzegovina became an independent country after a referendum in 1992. The country is made up of three ethnic groups: Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks). Within a year of independence, apparently under threat, the original Yugoslav People’s Army and then Serbian forces attacked the country and laid siege to its historic capital, Sarajevo. As the war progressed, conflicts also erupted between the Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims, and there were extreme examples of genocide, the most notorious of which was the massacre of 7000 Bosniaks in Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serb army. Bitter fighting between the three ethnic groups lasted for nearly four years until December 1995 when a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)-imposed peace agreement was negotiated in Dayton, Ohio (US). The Dayton Accord ended the warfare and ushered in an unstable and precarious constitution with a president drawn in rotation from each of the three ethnic groupings. Whilst Dayton signalled the end of fighting, its legacy for peacetime has been dysfunctional and, sometimes, toxic. Now named Bosnia-Herzegovina, the country has over 12 political parties. Kosovo apart, it is the poorest of the Balkan countries, and the material, psychological and political scars of war remain vivid and embedded not only in personal and collective consciousness but on pockmarked and ruined buildings. © The Author(s) 2020 S. Murray, Performing Ruins, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40643-1_6

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Mostar: ‘The First Thing You See Are Ruins…’ The ruined landscape is very much present. Not only abandoned buildings, some destroyed by shells, some never restored … but also bullet holes in traffic signs and walls. Signs of exploded grenades in the streets. Not just the buildings themselves but the entire landscape. There are still sniper posts on the hills. Now in ruins but built for the war and still there. A reminder always of what happened. (Peter Lorenz 2016)

I first met Peter Lorenz as an undergraduate student following a Theatre Studies degree at the University of Glasgow. Peter took a course I taught called ‘Performing Memory’ which included a project on ruins and we embarked on a friendship from that point. Peter is an Austrian from Innsbruck, but from 2010 to 2012, at his own request, he attended an international school in Mostar called the United World College (UWC). The UWC movement has 17 colleges around the world and is a global educational project with the mission to make education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and sustainable futures. The Mostar UWC was unique to the city in insisting upon mixed ethnicity—Serbs, Muslims and Croatians—amongst its pupils. Half the pupil intake was from within Bosnia-Herzegovina and the rest, international. Its existence, said Peter, was ‘a highly political act’ (Ibid). Unlike other schools in Bosnia-Herzegovina, all classes are integrated across the three ethnic groupings and Mostar was chosen for hosting a UWC as one of the most striking examples of post-war ethnic division and tension. The UWC is in a visually arresting, almost toy-like building painted in a lurid orange and with some architectural features which pay respect to and incorporate Islamic motifs. It is—deliberately—located on Mostar’s main boulevard which, during the war, was a frontline axis of conflict between the Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks. Straddling this historically plangent route through the city offers an inter-ethnic and cross-cultural statement of purpose and aspiration for the school. Across the boulevard from the UWC is Mostar’s most iconic and visually unsettling ruin, the Staklena Banka (old bank), and further along a side road close by is the Stara Biblioteka (old library). The bank is a dark and disquieting ruin, indeed, built, but never completely finished, in the 1980s and which served as a sniper tower during the war. The library, on the other hand, was once a beautiful stone edifice with classical columns framing its main entrance. Bank and library offer contrasting aesthetics of architectural ruination. Both, however, have been

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used prolifically for cultural, theatre and performance events. I return to these below. Mostar is a city of about 105,000 people and is renowned particularly for the Stari Most Bridge, now a World Heritage site, built originally in 1474, completely destroyed during the 1990s conflicts and rebuilt in 2004. As Peter Lorenz’s comment above suggests, as landscape, Mostar remains at least partially ruined, although the centre has largely been renovated. The medieval centre of the city around the Neretva River and close to the Stari Most (principally Muslim and dating back to the Ottoman Empire) has become its tourist heart. Here you can half close your eyes and believe you are in Prague, Krakow, Rothenberg or Siena. The ‘new’ town has its roots in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is dominated by Catholic Croatians. Throughout the city, I came across a host of ruined buildings, jostling with new builds and concrete structures which had somehow survived the shelling. A number of people I spoke to surmised that it was a deliberate policy of the local government regime to keep a significant number of city centre buildings in ruins as a warning to its inhabitants of the dangers of returning to the conflicts of the 1990s, suggesting that whatever their present discontents, these unnerving and ghostly material ruins spoke of something far worse. Under Tito’s communist regime, Mostar flourished economically (e.g. it hosted a large aluminium factory), was a leading Socialist stronghold in Yugoslavia and had the highest proportion of mixed marriages in Bosnia-­ Herzegovina (Clancy 2017, p. 178). It was difficult to recognise this picture when I visited the country in June 2017. Rhetorically and constitutionally, Mostar is now a united city, but the reality is more complex and nuanced. East of the Neretva River remains a mainly Bosniak (Muslim) community and to the west, a Croatian (Catholic) one. Although people, especially the young, move freely between east and west, lines of division remain a palpable haunting from the not-too-distant past. Actor Ivan Skoko, who walked me around the city, said, ‘I have a Croatian passport, but a Bosnian driving licence. I am stuck’ (Skoko 2017). Ivan is an actor with the Croatian National Theatre in Mostar, but sometimes works on collaborative projects with the Bosniak National Theatre on the east bank of the river. Igor Vidačković, a Croatian actor who works for a Bosniak puppet theatre, tells me that some people are still critical of him for working ‘against’ his ethnic background. Tim Clancy, author of the Bradt Guide to Bosnia Herzegovina, writes, ‘There are two bus stations, two hospitals, two school systems … two of almost everything’ (2017,

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Fig. 6.1  Staklena Banka (Bank), Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

Fig. 6.2  Stara Biblioteka (Old Library), Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

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Fig. 6.3  Stara Biblioteka graffiti, Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) Fig. 6.4  Konak Barracks, Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

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Fig. 6.5  Pockmarked ruin, Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

p. 180). I sense for the young—those who were children, or not yet born during the 1992–1995 war—these divisions will appear increasingly senseless, even if they shadow and frame quotidian life in the city. Igor tells me that his three brothers and sisters have all left Mostar to live and work in Norway, Croatia and Germany, but he says, ‘I love Bosnia-Herzegovina and will never leave’ (Vidačković 2017). I was initially drawn to Mostar as a subject for this book when Peter told me of his involvement in launching the first Mostar Street Arts Festival in 2012, and how it had developed from just five activists at this time to a more ambitious event going beyond street art to include performances, dance, gigs and parties. No one gets paid, but money is raised through embassies to pay for paint and sometimes artists’ travel expenses. I arrived in Mostar early in June 2017 to coincide with the Street Arts Festival and over the next few days met and talked with organisers of the event (Marina and Dino), a journalist (Mirsad) and actors (Ivan and Igor) who worked for the Croatian and Bosniak National Theatres, respectively. I also spent time with John Eames and his cameraman assistant, Dan Kneafsy, who were making a film in Mostar at that moment. With John and Dan, we exchanged contacts, ideas and stories of our respective day’s work.

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Fig. 6.6  Partisans Park, Mostar. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

Marina Đapić (her public name is Marina Mimosa) has been the driving force behind the Street Arts Festival and, for its duration, runs the event from the Abrašević Youth Cultural Centre. In conversation, she told me: We live in some ways in a ruined city. You will have seen ruined and abandoned places all around. And the situation for our art is that art is the first step to build a better society. We can renovate buildings by putting art on them. When every artist arrives here from places outside Mostar the first things they see are ruins and they want to do something with it. So, the first thing we did was the transformation of the old bank and now this year we are working on the Konak Barracks. Here at Konac we have opened a gallery for exhibitions, but it’s not like a normal gallery – you can bring your own art. (Đapić 2017)

Always implicitly and sometimes overtly, the Festival has the deeper purpose of transgressing the geo-political divisions of the city, deliberately dispersing its activities without any attention to ethnic boundaries, disunions or histories. Peter Lorenz acknowledges: It was hard for me to imagine – the simple placing on the map of where you perform can exclude a large audience, simply because they don’t go there.

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It’s the other side – geographically the other side of the river. The location you pick makes a political statement. The city is still divided along the old front line which is the boulevard and the river and a kind of buffer zone in-­ between which is more or less mixed. It’s very much about exchange. So important that local artists have the possibility of changing landscapes, but those from outside Bosnia can bring in more distant perspectives which are less possible from within. (Lorenz 2016)

During my visit, the festival’s two main centres of gravity seemed to be the Abrašević Centre, situated in what was supposed to be the buffer zone between the city’s divides and the ruined and semi-derelict Konak Barracks on a hillside firmly in the Bosnian quarter. Abrašević contained a volunteer run bar, a pleasant courtyard with people eating and drinking, a large space for gigs, parties and performances, and a smaller upstairs studio or office space. The fabric and finish of the building is rough and functional— choices born out of necessity rather than aesthetics—and the social milieu, youthful and, perhaps, self-consciously chilled. The abandoned and derelict Konak Barracks—or the part used by the festival—possessed a number of small, still dilapidated spaces which acted as mini galleries or places for display, performance and socialising. When I was there, a backpacking Argentinian artist and musician displayed attractively hand-painted skateboards, taught the tango and hosted a dance night. I reflect on the perverse and often contradictory dimensions of globalisation and internationalism, recalling a few days earlier when I flew into the handsome Croatian city of Dubrovnik—the ‘Jewel of the Adriatic’ as it is known—witnessing four huge cruise liners disgorging thousands of passengers into the city for, what I learn, a maximum five-hour visit. Such are the numbers, they have to queue to enter this fabulous walled city which suffered significant damage from shelling in the Balkans war. Now rebuilt, it is bestowed with the mixed blessing of World Heritage site status. Two snapshots of globalisation: • Solitary Argentinian carrying four handsomely painted skateboards in his backpack, travelling Europe, performing and teaching the tango. • Multitudes of cruise liner tourists, queueing to enter the partial simulacrum of a medieval walled city. On another day at the Konak Barracks, a group of primary school-aged kids from the local orphanage were painting huge and extravagantly

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coloured posters; on another, a clown workshop; on others, a dance-­ theatre performance and a multimedia piece combining ambient experimental sound, poetry and painting. I spoke with Dino Primorac, a young man who led and organised the Konak Barracks programme of events. He explained: What is great about Konak is that it is a huge space and there are two high schools nearby. This is also a positive thing because there are so many young people you can work with. So many young minds you can help shape up and point them in the right direction – in terms of art. There’s a lot of soil, gardens, so it’s really nice to plant some things. It’s also high up and so generally a bit cooler than down in the city. (Primorac 2017)

In recent years the library, the bank and the Konak Barracks seem to have been the main ruined locations to have regularly hosted performance events. Peter Lorenz has made work in two of these. In the summer of 2015, with his brother (a political scientist), he constructed a sound installation and led an interconnected sonic walking workshop in and around the library. There were two key dramaturgical aims behind the project: one to reclaim and re-animate the building, and the other to create a (temporary) library of the ‘lost sounds of the city’ (Lorenz 2016) within the space. Peter says: We wanted to re-appropriate the site because the ruins of Mostar in general don’t have a good reputation. They are not places you go to. These are places where things happen in the dark. Places where junkies are, places with a reputation for danger. Dark spaces. So on the first day we cleared and cleaned the stairwell as a kind of entrance balcony…. Underneath the layers of dirt there was a marble floor and this is where we decided to have the sound installation. We painted the columns to make it more colourful, more accessible. … We had long discussions about painting the columns. How to respect the building and we had to be very careful to pick three colours which had no nationalistic connotations. It was quite a bold move to paint the building. We were foreigners who don’t live permanently in the city. (Ibid)

To start the project Peter led a sonic walk—live recordings of lost and found sounds from the city being played through headphones—along various routes circling the library. The idea was to explore the rhythm and musicality of the walk. Over three days they created a sound installation in the derelict library, collecting garbage and exploring its sonic potential— bottles as a xylophone, buckets as drums, for example. The painting of the

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columns and the sound workshop/installation opened up the building to passers-by on the pedestrianised street which abutted the entrance. For Peter this was an experiment which drew together his work as a sound artist and his engagement with walking practices, particularly, he told me, the Mis-Guides of Wrights & Sites and from the dérives of the Situationists. It was an investigation to explore how these two practices might come together, whilst at the same affording an opportunity for the people of Mostar to ‘reclaim’ (at least for a moment) a space which has been much loved, used and remembered. Peter’s second project—Time Dust—took place a year later in 2016, but this time was a solo endeavour and one that had its conceptual and theoretical roots in his academic work at the University of Glasgow. Aware that the current preoccupation with ruins amongst some artists and academics was hardly shared by the people of Mostar, for whom such sites are a constant reminder of past atrocities and a riven present, he wanted to ask ‘how can we deal with this ruins landscape? How can we treat this space or this configuration which reminds us of the impossibility of the future?’ (Ibid). The piece, which he describes as ‘abstract’, was durational, lasting for three days. On the first day, the performer (Peter) makes an intervention into the ruin of the ‘Old Bank’, and, engaging with the materiality of this huge and threatening space, he collects pieces of concrete rubble and crushs them to dust so as further to ruin the ruin. Peter’s plans for day 2 were never actually performed as, at the last moment, he had to spend more time than imagined preparing for the third day of the performance. Had the performance happened he would have walked an unusual route around the city, carrying visible fragments of mirrors, zigzagging across the frontline, constantly oscillating between Bosniak and Croatian sides of the city and shedding the concrete dust through a small hole in his rucksack as he walked. For Peter the walk was to have fragmented the town by challenging the quotidian paths of Mostar citizens who would normally stay within their own respective ethnic ‘territories’. On the final day, in the bank again, dressed in a suit clad with mirror fragments, he performed a solo movement piece, part choreographed, part improvised. His choreography was composed of shattered movements and recalled fragments of gestures collected during day 2 of the project. Peter articulated his plans for the performance and provided a theoretical framework for it in an assessed piece of writing he presented in the Performance, Theory and Analysis course he took as a third-year

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student at the University. In this proposal, written before he had actually performed the piece, Peter said: TIME DUST is fascinated by the ruin as a ‘strange instant that displaces us’ (Sleigh Johnson 2015: 173) in the way that the Old Bank fragments our perception of the town and its history with its immanent presence and constant visibility as one of the highest buildings in its surroundings that does not fit the town’s narrative […] TIME DUST sees the ruin’s fragmentariness as a defiance of completion-pursuing narratives and therefore employs a postdramatic form of ‘narrative fragmentation’ (Lehmann 2006: 24) that demands ‘an open and fragmenting perception’ (Ibid: 82). (Lorenz 2015, pp. 1–2)

The work of Peter, Dino and Marina in harnessing these ruined sites for performance and the Street Art Festival offers one frame or perspective on ‘performing ruins’, but I am told these were not the first in the city. I learn that an organisation called Youth Bridge Global set up by Andrew Garrod, an Emeritus Professor of Education at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, United States, has produced several Shakespeare plays in Mostar since 2006. With a team of theatre directors and teachers from the United States and the United Kingdom, Garrod has directed Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night as part of a humanitarian mission ‘ to promote reconciliation and mutual understanding across the dangerous ethnic and religious divides that threaten peace in the region’ (Garrod 2017, n.p.). Garrod’s multilingual production of Romeo and Juliet was rehearsed and performed across the summer of 2006 in the old library with an ethnically mixed cast of teenage schoolchildren drawn from the Mostar Gymnasium, a public (state) high school located in half of the UWC building which Peter attended in 2012. The conceptual and dramaturgical conceit offered a Bosnian-speaking Juliet in love with a Croatian-speaking Romeo. The director’s intention could hardly be more transparent, but, writing about the experience, Azra Hromadžic in her book, Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State Making in Post-War Bosnia Herzegovina, says: Since most of the audience understood both languages, this performance of difference felt excessive to some people in the audience, but to many of the youth who were participating in the event this was a necessary and “natural” public demonstration of ethnic belonging. (Hromadžic 2015, p. 56)

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The employment of a multilingual dramaturgy may seem like an obvious way to make a cultural and political point, but has to be understood in the wider context of continuing formal ethnic divisions within the field of education and other domains of civic life. The three languages of Bosnia-­ Herzegovina can largely be mutually understood between most Bosnians, Croats and Serbs, but employ different alphabets: Bosnian Cyrillic, Serbian Cyrillic and Croatian Latin. Yet, within the Mostar Gymnasium and other state schools, handouts, notes and teaching texts have to be produced in all three languages. The continuous display of these three languages marks a ‘necessary and natural performance of cultural and political preservation’ (Hromadžic 2015, p. 56). Here, 22 years on from the Dayton Agreement1 are the tangible consequences of a deeply flawed and ruinous peace settlement. I return below to a speculative consideration of the director’s intentions behind performing Romeo and Juliet in the ruined library and the affects this might have had on audiences. On my penultimate day in Mostar, I had arranged with Igor to watch a puppet show for children at a theatre in the eastern part of the city. I arrived for 11.00 am when the show was to begin, but by 11.30 only four children had appeared so the performance was cancelled. Igor introduces me to a disappointed cast of puppeteers and other company members and then offers to show me the Partisan Memorial Park.2 As we walk to the Park, I ask him if he has performed in any of Mostar’s ruined spaces and he says, ‘why should we want to perform in ruins? They remind us of the war. People are trying to move on’ (Vidačković 2017). Later, as we talk about the dysfunctional character of the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina— nationally and locally—and the continuing resentment and hostility between political factions, Igor reflects, ‘ruins are in people’s heads, in their bodies’ (Vidačković 2017). I was to hear variations on this theme from several people I met in Mostar and Sarajevo. Mostar’s Partisan Park or Necropolis (built in 1965) fluctuates between architecture, land art and sculpture, but is now a bleak place, a ghostly and broken commons of memories and abandoned dreams. At once, it was the shards of a double memorial to those from the Balkans who fought fascism—at huge cost—between 1939 and 1945 and, in its subsequent ruination, the less honourable struggle of the 1992–1995 war and its legacy. In Sarajevo, I was to be taken to its own Partisans’ Park and I report on this below. Igor walks me around the Park, and we trace overgrown walkways, desiccated fountains, weed-filled water channels, stone flowers and abstract

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sculptures all embedded in unkempt but still intact terracing carved into the hillside overlooking the city. The site, particularly around its entrance, is full of rubbish, broken glass, plastic bottles, beer cans and the detritus of fires, drug taking, partying and drinking. Evidence of political hostilities abounds in spray paint graffiti: Nazi swastikas overscored by anti-fascist slogans. Igor is obviously passionate and angry about the way this place has been allowed to fall into dereliction. This is not just rage about a once beautiful monumental park now decayed, but palpable dismay at the state his country is now in following the conflicts of the 1990s. Igor is too young to have experienced Tito’s Yugoslavia and certainly does not express any political yearning for this regime, but he tells me that he is sad that his two young children are unlikely ever to play safely in this park as he did when he was young. Sad, too, I sense, that he and his family are living in a dysfunctional Bosnia-Herzegovina with little of the stability and (relative) prosperity which existed under Tito’s version of communism: a tangible feeling as he speaks of a country in ruins and not simply its parks and statuary. Some months after my visit to Mostar, Peter alerted me to the website link for a new publication, MOSTARSKA HURQUALYA: The (Un) Forgotten City, dedicated to the architect and visionary behind the Partisans’ Park, Bogdan Bogdanović (1922–2010). Hurqualya means the ‘drifting city’. This lovely book was imagined, put together and edited by Marko Barišić, Aida Murtić and Alisa Burzić and is composed of written fragments, images, diagrams and maps. Fourteen contributors—activists from Mostar and beyond—with various backgrounds and perspectives populate the publication. It is an elegant and eloquent example of performance writing, working in many different registers. The editors’ intentions deserve quoting in full: The publication of this book opens up a new opportunity for a dialogue with fragments of the past, present and future, so that the Partisan Monument can be seen through a broader frame, wherein there would be enough space for different understandings and opinions. We were motivated to write down some of the stories that dwell between an architectural plan, everyday use and official representations. This is a place where emotions and personal memories are hidden, and where political visions clash, proving that the monument’s meanings are more diverse and complex than they first appear. (Barišić et al. 2017, p. 10)

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The Partisan Park is a space for performances of many different hues and forms. At a fundamental level, it offers a stage or arena for the playing out of tensions, disagreements and conflicts which exist anyway in the city and the country as a whole. Ironically, the Park was hardly damaged during the 1992–1995 war; it was only during the ‘peace’ which followed that the destruction took place. The Park is a symptom and expression of the overall disarray of the city itself. Conceptual artist, Yoav Admoni, who has made and performed work in the Park, says, ‘I wouldn’t say that the monument is a reflection of the city. I think it’s kind of a wound of the city’ (Admoni qtd. in Barišić et al. 2017, p. 107). As with a number of ruined sites I visited during fieldwork, Mostar’s Partisan Park hosts varying modalities of performance. Here, the far-right fascists and their foes, the anti-fascists, perform their hostile relationships which are more complex than they might appear at first. The anti-fascists are partly a front for communists remaining in the country, who draw upon a deep and honourable history of opposition to Nazism during the Second World War and throughout Tito’s regime. Of course, many opponents of the far right in Mostar (and beyond) are not communists, but it is important to understand the complex profile of anti-fascist opposition in order to register the ambiguities involved. Here, the drug taking and drinking rituals of the dispossessed young are played out as this piece of cod poetry and perhaps stoned and intoxicated graffiti indicates: ‘So long as we have Partizo and pot we are in crisis not’ (Barišić et  al. 2017, p.  77). Here, for families, children and lovers, the Park, before its abandonment and decay, was a place for picnics and various forms of play (‘a great place for playing games’ [Barišić et al. 2017, p. 21]). For many of the contributors to MOSTARSKA HURQUALYA, there was a feeling of sanctuary about the park. Whether any of this sense remains is perhaps doubtful—for many Mostar people the place smells of danger, whether real or imagined. Here, we can find a space for realising the possibilities of live art and other forms of performance. In 2013, the Street Arts Festival curated a mural called Greeting to the Universe inspired by details from the monument; in the same year Dejan Kosanić undertook a performance on the site, and an image in the book shows him lying semi-naked and spread-eagled in the midst of an abstract stone carving—a horizontal crucifixion; and here with the Mostar City of Lights Festival in 2015, Marina Đapić made a series of light installations. Here, in 2014, as a collaboration with the Mostar City Lab, artist Youva Admonia explored the connections between the waters of the River Neretva and the long dried up fountain of the Park. In doomed attempts

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to revive the fountain, Admonia filled her ‘fishing’ suit with the river’s water only to empty it into the dried-out base of the water feature. To achieve this hopeless task, she made regular journeys over the course of several days between the river and monument. Admonia explains: Bogdan Bogdanović called this fountain the lake, so I felt it would be accurate to connect this lake with the Neretva River which seemed natural to me, and also as a way to explain that the reason why the fountain is not working is not because of a lack of water in the city. There is no lack of water in Mostar, which is obvious. It is more the political situation that keeps this monument in its current state. (Admonia qtd. in Barišić et al. 2017, p. 37)

The Partisan Park is a site of ruinous complexity. It evidently continues to hold fascination for many of Mostar’s citizens. For some, it is a rough and turbulent playground for the youth of the city, for others (usually older) it remains an intricate (and often contradictory) mnemonic of pride, nostalgia, regret and sadness for what Bosnia-Herzegovina has been subjected to during the course of two of Europe’s most bitter twentieth-­ century conflicts. For others, still, it is a provocation for art and performance practices which speak to its history, its present and its possible futures. Bogdanović, the architectural visionary behind this difficult place, wrote, long after the Park had fallen into dereliction and with savage melancholy: And all that remains of my original promise is the gaze between the former city of the dead and the former city of the living, but they gaze at one another with empty, black burnt eyes. (Bogdanović qtd. in Barišić et  al. 2017, p. 76)

Leaving Mostar: Reflections on Dramaturgy This experience of Mostar helped to confirm my existing instincts that engaging culturally with ruins and ruination requires multiple perspectives and a layered approach to understanding the claims, aspirations and practices of the main protagonists. It was clear to me that whilst these cultural and performative interventions in ruined sites were consciously framed and shaped by the ruinous peacetime legacy and aftermath of the 1990s war, none of the work explicitly intended to excavate the war itself. After

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22 years from the Dayton Peace Accord, the material, psychological, economic and political consequences of the war provided a force field for the cultural activities I had witnessed or heard about. The dramaturgical practices of Peter Lorenz and Youva Admonia’s work consciously addressed the post-war divisions of the city, both in terms of material and behavioural affects. Peter’s crushing of dust from the old bank and (in his and my imagination for it was never actually performed) deliberately leaving its traces and residues as he walked across the city’s ethnic dividing lines, and Youva’s hopeless attempt to bring the Partisan Park’s smashed and dried­up fountain back to life again by virtue of transporting the river’s water to the memorial site spoke of performances rich in an edgy and poignant symbolism. In talking about Time Dust, Peter put it like this: It’s about brokenness … With the theme of incompletion, crushing and death the performer will be one of the presences along with the dust. The movement, I hope, will animate the dust. There will be an interplay between the light, the dust and the mirror. (Lorenz 2016)

The work of Marina and, more recently, Dino, through the Street Arts Festival across the city and more specifically in the old bank, the library and the Konak Barracks is, in their terms, ‘anti-political’. Marina said to me in conversation, ‘We are without ideology and want to focus on now and the future. My generation and younger people want to see new perspectives and opportunities’ (Đapić 2017). When I probed Dino a little about the social and political dimensions of the Konak project, he responded quite forcefully in this way: For me the political thing about the army, the war is a story that has been told so many times. So many people already got money just because of that. Maybe there comes a time when they will say we don’t need more war (culture) and give it to young people instead. We can always play that card, but I prefer that we do these kind of things, make projects. (Primorac 2017)

I heard variations on Dino’s position about the war from several people in both Mostar and Sarajevo, and it certainly obliged me to reconsider some of the assumptions I had made about what drove these art activist-­ curators. There is a politics underpinning these activities, of course, but I suspect that for Marina, Dino and their generation the term ‘politics’ alludes to the tortuous and often toxic political relations between the

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national parties and elected representatives of the three main ethnic groups. The (near) stasis of civic affairs at all levels of governance in Bosnia-Herzegovina makes political engagement and activities at this level of the polis singularly unattractive to many citizens, especially the young. For Dino, Marina and many young artists, it is not primarily—or at all— about excavating the war, its causes and consequences, rather to create a multicultural platform of street art in Mostar that takes art to public spaces in the city and brings together artists from Bosnia-Herzegovina and beyond. The legacy of war is ever present, but for many who live and work in this country, there is a boredom and weariness around continuing to mine the conflict. I reflected somewhat ruefully that it is perhaps largely academics, journalists and filmmakers from other parts of Europe who wish to nag away at these preoccupations. Perhaps, too, Mostar’s tourist ‘industry’ needs a little of the palpable manifestations of warfare to remain visible to help support an income stream. Still others need to forget. The dramaturgical relationships between the artists and specific ruined sites—the park, bank, library and barracks—varied considerably. Without performance or any other artistic intervention, these sites speak loudly of the conditions of their ruinous pasts. In different ways, they are all hugely theatrical spaces. As scenography, each offers an almost overwhelming charge without any need for performative or artistic animation. Peter’s relationship with the library was strongly considered through, for example, the painting of the columns and its sonic transformation, likewise the pulverising of concrete into dust in the shockingly ruined bank building. I have no detailed account of Andrew Garrod’s production of Romeo and Juliet in the old library, but Azra Hromadžic’s observation from the evening she saw the production that ‘the atmosphere was dreamlike, with candlelight illuminating the ruins of the building, which also served as a reminder of wartime violence’ (Hromadžic 2015, p. 56) suggests that the space generated a more generalised and otherworldly mood music whilst, of course, acknowledging the building’s dark history. The Partisan Park is saturated with history and political turmoil, and it is hard to imagine how difficult it would be for any art or performance piece there to escape this visual and sensual context. Youva Admonia puts it like this: I think there are some things I like about it as it is now. The monument is a ruin. It’s like a forgotten city, an archaeological site. It’s interesting to me how some parts of nature are coming back to take over the monument. There are some things, in some ways uncomfortable about being there. But

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you also feel the destruction and the violence of the monument. You feel the violence in the space. (Admonia qtd. in Barišić et al. 2017, p. 108)

Admonia’s thoughts about the Partisan Park might stand in for the ambivalence which many artists and indeed citizens have for abandoned places. She speaks eloquently of the immaterial affects of ruins and the force fields which they generate. Her words, however, about decaying monuments ‘coming back’ to nature resonate with the sentiments of the Romantic poets identified in Chap. 2. Here, in Mostar, the temporal pull of ruins is manifest in complex ways: ruin as mnemonic and theatre of memory, and ruin as work in progress towards, perhaps, some more hopeful futures.

Under Siege: Sarajevo’s Theatres Against Death, 1992–1995 I travelled by bus from Mostar to Sarajevo on 6 June 2017. I had hoped to do the journey by train, but the service between Sarajevo and the Croatian coast had been out of action for nine months. Bizarrely, however, during a day of drifting around, soaking up the city and at the end of a tram route, I happened upon Sarajevo’s railway station where a launching ceremony was taking place for a smart new train which was about to undertake its first journey to the Adriatic. Suddenly, I found myself in the midst of a civic ceremonial where journalists and, it seemed, many of the dignitaries of Bosnia-Herzegovina were giving their blessing to this significant investment in state-of-the-art rail technology. The glistening train contrasted strongly with Sarajevo’s trams which looked as if they had been in service since the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. A comment during a conversation from Sanja Burić the next day placed this development in an historical perspective, and the changes which are beginning to occur in the country: ‘The economy does not work. We have abandoned trains. If you play on a railway station which is empty then it is a ruin’ (Burić 2017). Sanja’s proposition here is that any building robbed of its original function, and given no replacement utility, is, in fact, a ruin. Sanja’s astute reflection suggests a strong relationship between lack of utility and function and an encroaching state of ruination. Like Berlin, Sarajevo is a European city redolent with the most signature moments of twentieth-century history. The First World War started

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here with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, and the city experienced one of the longest sieges in history—1425  days— between 5 April 1992 and 29 February 1996 during the Balkans conflict. Larger than Mostar, but nonetheless a small European city, Sarajevo still bears many of the physical scars of the war and, like Mostar, is almost completely surrounded by a rim of hills which afforded the base for Serbian snipers and an artillery battery of unremitting shellfire on the people below. During the siege, live theatre continued to be performed and witnessed in Sarajevo, and it is this story which I attend to throughout the remainder of the chapter. Before this war, Sarajevo had a reputation for performing the values of secularism, religious tolerance and multi-­ ethnicity. Susan Sontag, writing in 1994 after her Sarajevo production of Waiting for Godot, said, ‘I wish it were better understood that it is precisely because Sarajevo represents the secular anti-tribal ideal that it has been targeted for destruction’ (Sontag 1994b, p. 93). Writing about Sarajevo, ruins and theatre became a much more daunting task than I imagined. The Balkans war and the siege of Sarajevo have been subject to extensive debate, analysis, rhetoric and writing (academic and journalistic) over the last 20 years (Glenny 1996; Judah 2008; Maček 2011). However, the role of culture and particularly theatres under the siege has been less considered or, at least, not found their way into English-­ speaking publications. My visit to Sarajevo was short, and although I conducted three productive interviews with key figures (Sanja Burić, Nihad Kreševljaković and Nermin Hamzagić), I was unable to spend as much time on the ground as I had done in Mostar. I heard many stories from these three, and all spoke directly, or associatively, about the enormity of the siege and the role of theatre within it. As in Mostar, there was a certain ambivalence about responding to questions regarding Sarajevo’s experience of the siege and the war of which it was a fundamental feature. On the one hand, it remains an absolutely inescapable quality, not only of each (adult) individual’s particular and painful recollection but also of the city’s collective folk memory and mythologising, and, on the other, a sense of exhaustion and world weariness about telling the stories yet again to—in my case—a Western academic pursuing his own research agenda. As such a figure, then, and at this moment of writing, I am confronted with issues and questions like these: • How to do justice, nearly 25 years on, to the enormity of Sarajevo’s complex and tragic recent history?

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• How to avoid exoticising, or, alternatively, trivialising, the extraordinary stories of the city’s relationship to theatre, culture and warfare? • What ‘job of work’ can theatre possibly undertake within the conditions of siege, warfare and ethnic cleansing? • Can a framework of ruination and ruin offer anything productive in understanding or adding to this history? • As an outsider to Sarajevo, how to avoid allowing a very proper sense of humility paralyse my enquiries and quest for information, knowledge and understanding? In differing degrees and contexts, these were questions, or mnemonics, which suffused my visits to Mostar and Sarajevo and my reflections on what I encountered, and, of course, they were never answerable in any completely satisfactory way. As in Mostar, my initial framing of ruins as a straightforward and relatively uncomplicated loci for performance was further destabilised and rendered inadequate for the task of responding to Sarajevo. Sarajevo’s war theatres3 added extreme clarity to one of the understandings upon which this book is predicated, namely that ruined sites are always in process of becoming, are never fixed and stable, and always signal a future at the same time as marking a past of original purpose. Across four main sites, the total number of performances during the siege numbered over 2000, 180 premieres and 22 theatre workers were killed during this time, whilst many more were wounded (Diklich 2017, p.  13). The fact that these theatres were being deliberately ruined by Serbian shelling while performances were actually taking place pushes habitual conceptions of ruination and ruin performance into new and completely unsettling extremes. I return to some aspects of this story below. Here, I have assembled some of the comments recorded in my interviews with Sanja, Nihad and Nermin and from other sources. I bring these together as they usefully provide a sense of how some key protagonists felt able to apply words such as ruin and ruination both to the wartime experience and to the present day (2017): • We did some art in physical ruins, but the most important thing when talking about Sarajevo was that we were making art in the ruins of the EU and the ruins of the civilisation we live in. Sarajevo is a super stage for the ruins of the world. (Kreševljaković 2017) • Well, Sarajevo is really entirely a ruin. That’s the context. During the war there was something much more extreme, more energy, a rebirth

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in theatre. Relationships were in ruins, families were in ruins. It was not just the physical ruins. I was performing my theatre during the siege and started my studies then too. (Burić 2017) • Yes, the trouble is that Bosnia is ruined as a society. It’s hard for me to speak about it. You have physical ruins and then ruins as society. Physical ruins are not of the same importance. I’m more concerned about social ruins. (Ibid 2017) • In the context of our history I prefer a wider definition of ruins. Post-war Balkan society is in ruins. The library was shelled and rebuilt, but I feel it’s still a ruin. It’s nice that it’s beautiful and people take pictures, but you never forget its state as a war ruin. (Hamzagić 2017) • I made a conscious choice not to talk about it [the war]. Not to think about it. Made a choice not to find anything glorious in it. Anything brave in it. You walk along the street. I believed it could never have happened here and then it did happen here. These thoughts come in small flashes, but it’s my decision not to because I want to be ordinary and I want to be normal. I have to free myself from it. (Burić 2017) • The conductor Zubin Mehta conducted Mozart’s Requiem in the ruins of the city hall during the siege of Sarajevo (19 June 1994). We recall this event in the performance, a Bosnian actor playing the role of Mehta, walks across rubble to the sound of gunfire and shelling, raises the baton and starts to conduct the opening movement of the Requiem. An arc of strings: violins to the right, cellos to the left, woodwind in the centre. Around the orchestra is the choir; almost more performers than audience. The conductor, Zubin Mehta, stands proud at the front. He works himself into a frenzy. The orchestra is framed by ruins. Broken pillars, blown out windows, burnt books. Tonight a concert. Tomorrow a trip to find water, food, shelter, safety. This is a requiem for five million books. This is a requiem for 11541 people. This is the requiem. (Pinchbeck 2018, p. 84) • And then in the middle of the performance, a mortar fell on the theatre: we heard a huge detonation, felt that the entire building was shaking, but after a moment the performance continued as if nothing had happened. (Begić, 2017, p. 47) • Everything we do today, personally and institutionally is coming out of the ruins of the war. (Nihad Kreševljaković 2017)

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• Thank you for not letting me go insane. (Woman audience member, qtd by Dino Mustafić 2017b, p. 265) In the rest of this chapter I shall reflect on the phenomenon of theatre under the siege of Sarajevo, Michael Pinchbeck’s play, Bolero, and my visit to the Sarajevo Partisan Park with Nermin Hamzagić. In each of these related accounts I am engaging both with the materiality of ruins and its consequences for making theatre during and after the siege of Sarajevo, and the psychic and emotional costs of what Sanja calls ‘social ruins’, or Nihad ‘the ruins of the EU and the ruins of the civilisation we live in’. A few weeks into the siege of the city on 17 May 1992, representatives of Sarajevo’s existing theatres—all of which had gone dark at the start of the war—agreed that live theatre should somehow continue despite the menacing conditions and then proceeded to give over 2000 performances throughout the rest of the siege. Usually to the sound of shellfire, without power or lighting, and at huge personal risk, the Sarajevo War Theatre4 (hereafter SARTR) performed to packed houses. In January 1993, SARTR with its catch-cry of ‘theatre against death’ was officially recognised by the Sarajevo City Assembly as a public institution of special significance for the defence of Sarajevo. Despite limited resources, the SARTR continues to operate today. SARTR was born in extraordinary circumstances but with the desire to allow actors and theatre makers to undertake what for them were quotidian, ordinary and normal tasks—namely to make and perform theatre. Librarian and journalist, Dragan Golubović writes: The war lasted almost four years and we could not let destiny take over because our destiny was insanity. Therefore we created within and in spite of that insanity, a “normalcy” for ourselves that was very often more normal than today’s “normalcy”. The war “normalcy” happened spontaneously because we had to continue living our lives and there was an urgency to live them in the best possible way. (Golubović 2017, pp. 111–12)

A few weeks into the 1425-day siege, in May 1992, the war theatres continued to make and perform theatre, organise cultural events and create art. Whilst the geographical heart of these activities lay in the centre of the city, actors, filmmakers and musicians went 200 times to the front lines to perform for soldiers and to kindergartens, schools and shelters in outlying and cut-off parts of the city. Towards the end of the war in 1994,

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Fig. 6.7  If you are looking for hell … Contemporary Art Gallery, Sarajevo. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

director Haris Pašović was invited by Peter Brook to take two of his International Theatre Festival (hereafter MESS) productions—Silk Drums (based on Noh plays) and an adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel In the Country of Last Things (a collaboration with Vanessa Redgrave and Maurice Benichou) to the Bouffe du Nord Theatre in Paris. The conditions in which these performances and other cultural events within the city took place are hard to imagine. Apart from an almost total absence of material resources, all those involved risked death or wounding when travelling between their homes and the theatre, were malnourished and were subject to multiple anxieties about their families, friends and loved ones. All in all, debilitating circumstances in which to exist, let alone to make and perform theatre. Most of these plays were performed with makeshift props and often on an empty stage. Here, theatre was stripped to what many believe were the bare essentials of performance: actors and their spectators. For the actors this could present a surprisingly fortuitous and unplanned opportunity to re-think their relationship with audiences. Actor Admir Glamočak expressed the possibility like this:

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Somebody who wasn’t a part of all this could hardly understand this unbelievable binding and the fullness of the relationship we had with our audience. I had the good fortune to feel that personally throughout almost all those four years of war and that every person in the audience was truly my partner in the performance, but in the best possible way. (Glamočak 2017, p. 91)

It is hard to imagine more striking examples of theatre made and performed in extremis than those under Sarajevo’s siege conditions. Diklich’s edited collection of writings, often transcribed from interviews, offer first-­ hand testimonies to the experience of the war theatres by those who were some of its main protagonists or supporters: actors, academics, audience members, a retired army general, a journalist, an orchestra conductor, dramaturgs and directors. All these contributions do, at least, two things: they tell the story of personal experience—how it was for them—and they offer reflections on the role theatre can play in a city under siege and increasingly in ruins. In terms of telling the story these accounts variously identify the conditions under which the actors and all those involved in a particular production had to endure. These, on the one hand, were those of making and performing theatre with hugely limited resources—no electricity, candles for light, no heating, props and set constructed from rubbish and borrowed furniture and personal possessions, and, on the other, the perilous experience of moving from home to theatre and back again under insistent shelling and sniper fire. Director Dino Mustafić’s adaptation of Sartre’s The Wall (1993/4) required a wooden wall that could be moved around the stage as different representations of dividedness and oppression required. Mustafić explains: It was impossible to find wood for the set. Then I decided with my set designer to go to the firms ‘Pokop’ and ‘Bakije’, because at that time only funeral homes had wood. They became sponsors of our production by giving us wood with which coffins were made and with which we made our wall. In that sense our daily reality … people being killed and buried … was completely mixed up with the reality of our play. (Mustafić 2017a, p. 185)

Beyond these accounts of ingenuity, persistence and resolution in the face of extreme hardship and danger, it is possible to identify a weave of thoughts and feelings generated by all those involved as performers or spectators as to what the experience meant for them both on a personal level and as an act of resistance to the Serbs who were attempting to

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destroy the city and its citizens. Close scrutiny of these stories suggests a range of responses which might be clustered under the following themes, and which I go on to explore in more detail below: • A pragmatic need to find and perform a sense of normality within extremely abnormal conditions. • Within significant constraints and limitations, a feeling that the protagonists—whether actors or audiences—were performing an act of resistance in a wartime situation. • That this activity bestowed a sense of dignity, freedom and existential worth on all those involved. • That the choice of productions, often from an explicitly avant-garde repertoire—derived from play texts, adaptations or devised practices—could speak of the experience of Sarajevians at war and under siege. Normality Renowned and prolific theatre director Haris Pašović returned to Sarajevo shortly after the siege began. He later produced Sontag’s Waiting for Godot and went on to direct MESS and transformed it into an International Theatre and Film Festival before the war ended. In Diklich’s collection, Pašović is at pains not to exoticise or over-romanticise the war theatres, pointing out that thanks to our soldiers we had theatre … If it wasn’t for those who defended our city, we wouldn’t have been able to perform because those on the hills would have physically come into the city … The theatre wasn’t more important than the bakery, or than those young people on the front line. (Pašović 2017, p. 195)

Pašović conducts a rhetorical debate with the reader about what constitutes normality. Writing or recording his contribution, he asks whether the expensive commercial theatre in peacetime and where people don’t like each other are any more ‘normal’ than during the siege when ‘people truly, deeply do their jobs in the best possible way, try to perform a play that the audience appreciates, loves it and because of this comes to the theater’ (Ibid., p. 195). Of course, he admits that the circumstances were extraordinary, but once an actor had decided to stay in the city, then it

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became utterly normal to go to work in the theatre. ‘Let’s not mystify it’ (Ibid., p. 196) he says, adding that, of course, people were bored, there was rarely any television because of power failures and so theatre was one of only a few forms of entertainment available. For Pašović, what happened in Sarajevo’s siege theatre was not because its citizens possessed superhuman or saintly qualities. He argues that in similar situations, such as, the besieged Leningrad or the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War, comparable phenomena occurred. In Sarajevo it was the duty of theatre makers and other artists to do what they knew best, but they were no more virtuous than doctors, firefighters or frontline troops. Perhaps, it was the liveness and communality of theatre as an art form which offered specific succour. Pašović writes: The extreme crises obviously didn’t contribute to the awakening of something special in the citizens, but that extreme crises created the circumstances in which those citizens had the opportunity to demonstrate their own creativity  – there was more initiative, people were more active, we fought more, which was obviously a question of survival. (Ibid., p. 199)

It seems important to record Pašović’s cold-eyed realism here, if only to anchor and provide context for the heartfelt claims that many other contributors make in the book. Pašović’s pragmatism is particularly interesting coming, as it does, from someone of his stature in the theatre world of South East Europe. His words serve to reveal and emphasise the multivocal quality of Diklich’s collection. Whilst all in their different ways acknowledge the enormity of the experience, each writer offers a nuanced perspective on what sort of psychic, social, political, spiritual and existential job of work their theatre making generated in such ruinous circumstances. Resistance In an elegant and reflective essay (‘The Crisis of Theatre? The Theatre of Crisis!’), Sarajevian-born theatre scholar, dramaturg and cultural commentator, Dragan Klaić offers a nuanced reading on the limits and possibilities of theatre’s intervention or engagement in social and political crisis. He writes: Theatre in all probability cannot stop war or correct injustice, but can show how power and might lose the firm moral ground, how fantasies of ­omnipotence cause blindness, how supposed winners turn into losers once their triumphant phrase begins to sound shallow. (Klaić 2002, p. 159)

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These complexities have been examined in an AHRC5 funded research project entitled In Place of War at the University of Manchester led by James Thomson (Professor of Applied and Social Theatre). The project was to consider what artists do in war zones, how they define their work and what agendas they follow. It began in 2000 and spawned an international activist and campaigning organisation with the same name as the original research project (https://www.inplaceofwar.net/). My book does not allow me to unpack this highly salient In Place of War project but its findings resonate with commentators and participants on the siege of Sarajevo. In her essay on the cultural contribution that the arts made to Sarajevo under siege between 1991 and 1995, Jelena Hadziosmanovic (2014) responds to the question of whether such activities could provide an effective tool for peace building and reaching consensus towards ending the conflict. Unsurprisingly, her answer is negative, but Hadziosmanovic argues that in enabling creativity, theatre’s activities during this period certainly acted as an affirmative force of resistance. She quotes historian Robert Donia who, in turn, reinforces Pašović’s perspective outlined above. Donia argues that those who remained in Sarajevo throughout the war demonstrated ‘a determination to preserve trappings of normal urban life’ (Donia 2006, p.  317) and that this very act of normality under extreme danger significantly contributed to a spirit of resistance. The paradox, perhaps, of a pragmatic acceptance of living and working in ruined circumstances at the same time as resisting the consequences of that very ruination. In the context of warfare, resistance, of course, takes various forms, from physical action with or without weaponry, personal or collective psychological and emotional strength, and the performance of quotidian behaviours which have been prepared and rehearsed long before they are tested in terrifying and life-threatening circumstances. Whilst we learn that front line soldiers often attended afternoon performances in Sarajevo’s war stages, it is the second and third of these modes of resistance which were most practised by the war theatres’ players and spectators. In a postscript to the testimonies in Diklich’s collection, director Dino Mustafić remembers the Theatre of War as ‘a true urban ritual of resistance to Fascisms’ (Mustafić 2017b, c66). Significantly, Mustafić pays tribute to the Diklich project which illustrates ‘the force of words to reconstruct the atmosphere of civic and artistic resistance to wartime destruction’ (Ibid., p. 265). Quite how conscious and in the moment was this spirit of resistance it is difficult to discern. That staging theatre under siege was largely

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constituted as an act of resistance after the event does not diminish the validity of the conclusion. Many of these testimonies and other sources suggest that the strength to sustain psychological and emotional resistance to the Serbian forces was almost always generated through the act of cooperation. Making and performing theatre constructed and sustained a creative commons. When I interviewed Nihad (currently Director of MESS and during the siege a video maker and member of Sarajevo’s professional fire brigade) in June 2017, he spoke persuasively of how he measures success in theatre making then (during the siege) and now: I believe the main thing about artistic work – it’s very difficult you know – is interaction. You can measure the level of interaction between us on the stage and the audience. I can say that the best performances I have seen during my life are those that I watched in the war. If we saw them now we might feel they were shitty performances, but the level of interaction was extremely high. I remember feeling safe inside those buildings, even though we were being shelled. It was a perfect experience you know. (Kreševljaković 2017)

Dragan Klaić says that he learned from Haris Pašović how the siege and the war situation ‘fosters self-composure rather than panic and disorientation’ (Klaić 2002, p.  156), and he goes on to echo Nihad’s sentiments above: I learned that under these extreme circumstances a performance matters less artistically and more as a form of communion. It is a short intensive, reinvigorating gesture for the benefit of the community, which is in turn rebuilt, recomposed and strengthened by the sense of solidarity and common values, becoming united in suffering but also in the desire to resist. (Ibid., p. 156)

‘Communion’, common values, reinvigoration and interaction resound as conditions of resistance generated by the work done through theatre under the siege. One of the most iconic and theatrical images of resistance or defiance to come from the siege was of professional cellist, Vedran Smajlović, playing the cello at ruined sites across the city. Known as ‘The Cellist of Sarajevo’, his example was followed by Karim Wasfi, conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra playing the cello in the debris of sites of explosions across Baghdad in 2015. Smajlovic’s gesture of defiance followed the moment when a mortar hit a breadline, killing 22 people, many of whom were the cellist’s friends and neighbours. He honoured

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the dead by playing for 22 consecutive days in different locations of the city, usually in ruins, the streets or cemeteries. In an interview for the New York Times, Smajlovic said: My mother is a Muslim and my father is a Muslim, but I don’t care. I am a Sarajevan, I am a cosmopolitan, I am a pacifist. I am nothing special, I am a musician, I am part of the town. Like everyone else, I do what I can. (Smajlovic 1992)

Symbols of Dignity and Freedom Many of the testimonies in the Diklich collection speak of people’s experiences, both in practical terms of recreating a sense of everyday normality by simply turning up and performing theatre, and of a symbolic universe which aspires to transcend the other reality of shelling, mortars, snipers, death and material destruction. For these contributors this does not seem to be an unbridgeable binary, but each having symbiotic relationship with the other. In his introduction, Diklich writes that ‘the expression “spiritual rebellion” simplified and diminished the value of their activities’ (Diklich 2017, p. 13). On the evidence of the encounters which find their way into the book, the contributors largely did not explain or justify their work in transcendent or spiritual terms, even if they might use such language almost as an afterthought, or addendum, to what they had articulated in the interview. Diklich suggests that these theatre workers became obsessed with working at what they had been trained to do ‘in order to prove to themselves and others that they exist, living on the stage in front of their audience’ (Ibid., p. 13). But he also ascribes to theatre a creative power which helped to forge a different reality. So, the accounts seem to move back and forth between acknowledging a grounded and material reality, or need, which framed and drove their work and something more elusive and ineffable. Both, it appears, can easily cohabit. Actor Zoran Bečić felt that the extraordinary support from audiences can be explained by ‘a need for spiritual relief’ (Bečić 2017, p.  32). In another testimony, film director Aida Begić speaks of the sensual lucidity with which she experienced the material world around her: I looked at the sky, for instance. I will never forget the sky in the Summer-­ Fall of ’93. That was the most beautiful sky that I have seen in my life. Maybe that sky exists today, but I simply don’t look at it. Today, I simply

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either don’t have time or interest because I am preoccupied with many things that I didn’t think about during the war. (Begić 2017, pp. 41–2)

The force and focus of Begić’s ‘beautiful sky’ prompt recall of the words of writer (for television, film and theatre) Dennis Potter who spoke in a television interview with Melvyn Bragg (15 March 1994, Channel 4), as he was dying of cancer, of how the knowledge of his impending death enabled him to see the world—particularly the natural world—with a degree of intensity and clarity he had never before experienced. Potter’s words seem to resonate with many of these testimonies which speak of a curious melding of the humdrum materiality of surviving in Sarajevo under siege and an acute transcendent otherworldliness. Potter put it like this: We tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense … Below my window in Ross the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying “Oh that’s nice blossom” … I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. (Potter 1994, p. 5)

Potter’s plangent words also echo strongly with Nihad who, at the end of our conversation, noted that ‘war brings intensity. Everything is more intense. We see the people we love more intensely’ (Kreševljaković 2017). Director Dino Mustafić captures this duality by suggesting that the statements in Theatre in Sarajevo during the War testify to apparently paradoxical feelings and experiences. He writes of how they created a ‘parallel reality’ and that theatre under the siege was ‘a true space of freedom’ (Mustafić 2017b, p. 266) and recalls how one audience member thanked them in a book of impressions for preventing her from going insane. From this remark, he concludes that, amongst many other functions, the theatre had an almost medicinal or therapeutic quality. It was ‘a true sanctuary’, he writes, adding that ‘Theatre was a sanctuary for the soul. It ennobled our lives’ (Ibid, p. 265). In a similar vein, retired Bosniak and Herzegovina army general Jovan Divjak talks of the theatre, on the one hand, providing personal ‘spiritual nutrition’ for both creators and audiences, and, on the

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other ‘a strong cultural, spiritual and moral resistance to the aggressor’s intention’ (Divjak 2017, p.  61). In terms of the preoccupations of this book, it is the complex juxtaposition of the material (shelling, sniper fire, dead or wounded bodies, rubble, food shortages and burning/ruined buildings) and the immaterial (fear, loss, anger, sorrow, mourning, feelings of solidarity and grief) which generate and nurture the kind of sentiments expressed by Mustafić, Divjak, Bečić and Begić. In these circumstances, ruin is both material reality and psychological or emotional condition—the order and disorder of things. These passionate feelings and recourse to the language of the ‘soul’ and the ‘spiritual’ are hardly part of the vernacular of Western theatre criticism or analysis, but they deserve to be recognised as a deeply serious and thought-provoking response to the ruins of warfare which most of us in the West are unlikely to experience. That we are rarely likely to summon up this vocabulary to describe our theatre-going experience connects not simply to the absence of siege conditions in our lives but also to the conditions of peace. Both Diklich and Nihad, for example, cannot but compare unfavourably the conditions of making and receiving theatre today with those of the mid-1990s in Sarajevo. Of course, they are not yearning for ‘war theatre’ and its deprivations, rather lamenting what they see as the tired, tawdry and crude qualities of twenty-first-century commercial theatre. Diklich deplores the negative connotations of ‘popular’ market-­ driven theatre: ‘unhealthy competition, vanity, jealousy, ungrounded discreditation, lack of quality, petty arguments, maliciousness etc.’ (Diklich 2017, p. 14). Whilst for Nihad it is the state’s manipulative and opportunistic embrace of cultural programmes which distresses him, ‘sometimes the problems start when the politicians begin to show an interest in culture’ (Kreševljaković 2017). The complexities and hard paradoxes of theatre under war and in peace are acutely articulated when we learn that one of the most energetic and visionary directors during the siege, Haris Pašović, has given up making theatre entirely. In a melancholy but thought-provoking vein, Dragan Klaić describes Pašović’s situation by the beginning of the new century: Haris could not imagine returning to theatre directing as merely a profession, a job, a regular artistic pursuit, going from one play to another, stacking premieres, tours and prizes on top of another. After the exceptional period when theatre mattered so much to him and his collaborators and especially to his Sarajevo public, theatre as business as usual lost all attrac-

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tion, all appeal to him, especially in the midst of nationalist politics and NGO-aided wild capitalism, dominating the post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina, with its unfinished war and underachieved peace. (Klaić 2002, p. 157)

Here, again, the feelings of Pašović, Diklich and Nihad seem to offer complex and difficult reflections on the generative—alongside the destructive—force fields enabled by material ruins and psychological or social ruination. The extremities of ruinous experiences afford, perhaps, a multifaceted depth and richness of feeling and creativity less accessible in safer, less turbulent times. Texts of War in and Beyond Sarajevo From the variety of accounts, it seems clear that the repertoire of the war theatres was wide ranging through the classical canon of Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ionesco and Beckett to contemporary writing by Bosniak playwrights (e.g. Safet Plakalo and Dubravko Bibanović’s Shelter) which sought to address the war in its various manifestations. In addition, there were adaptations of novels which offered salient readings of the siege situation and—perplexingly perhaps—the staging of the 1960s anti-war musical, Hair. Hair was originally conceived as a protest against conscription in the United States during the Vietnam War. Mustafić makes the crucial point, however, that whatever the production life inscribed such a strange dramaturgy that was much more dramatic than any theatrical construction, than any performance could capture and present. Therefore we could speak about a very special form of theater that was developed during the siege of Sarajevo. It had a specific, stylistic, dramaturgical, directorial and acting signification. That was a lapidary style of expression … a clear, compressed, condensed reality captured in a moment. (Mustafić 2017a, p. 184)

Aida Begić, a student in the Academy during the siege, writes about a production of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata which she directed—‘we worked on this play for three months in impossible conditions’ (Begić 2017, p.  42)—and of working with Bread and Puppet Theater director Peter Schumann, who, like Sontag, had come to Sarajevo from America as a gesture of solidarity. Begić performed for Schumann in the Resurrection

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Oratorio which, from Handel’s original, he had transformed into a piece of theatre about the irregularities of US politics. Begić wryly observes, ‘Peter Schumann knew very well what and why he was doing it’ (Ibid., p. 43), and later she joined Schumann again for a theatrical circus production performed outside the National Theatre. Clearly, a significant amount of the repertoire was chosen for its ability to speak allusively, associatively and symbolically for the plight of Sarajevo and its citizens. Mustafić adapted Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, The Wall, a story about the Spanish Civil War containing many analogies with the Balkans’ conflicts of that period. Mustafić explains: When I chose that text, I understood one more thing: with the demolition of the Berlin Wall, Europe was uniting into one space, whereas here, in our space, everything was divided; the country was divided, the beds were divided, the city, the entranceways to buildings, streetcar lines and everything was reduced to a Sartrian absurdity. (Mustafić 2017a p. 185)

Mustafić directed two other productions during the war: Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Sławomir Mrożek’s On Foot. Rhinoceros was performed with 19 actors and On Foot was almost the last production under siege in Sarajevo before the war ended. Both plays contained strong political messages about acquiescence under oppression—‘We knew a lot of those rhinoceroses, we knew their biographies, of those who were completely different the day before and then became all that makes a human being inhuman’ (Ibid., p. 186)—and disorientation after wars end, ‘people who aimlessly roam the war zones in the after-war period’ (Ibid., p. 187). In the final section of this part of the chapter, I consider three examples of performance work which engage with the siege of Sarajevo and its ruination during two decades following the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement. Performing Memory (1): Sarajevo Red Line On 6 April 2012, 20 years exactly from the start of the siege, Haris Pašović conceived and designed a commemorative and performative installation of 11,541 red plastic chairs. The number represented those killed during the siege and the chairs stretched 800 metres down Marshall Tito Street leading to Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Presidency building and the Ali Pasha Mosque. About 625 smaller chairs marked the number of children killed

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in the siege and all were lined up, side by side in 825 rows. Pašović described the event, which also consisted of music and poetry readings, as a poem of remembrance to the Sarajevo citizens killed during the four years of the siege. In addition to the installation, a classical music orchestra and 750 strong school choir also performed and, at the end of the ceremony, lined up amongst the chairs and sang John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’. The concert started at 2.00 pm, entitled A Concert for Nobody, where instrumentalists and singers played to the 11,541 empty chairs. By the end of the day, the chairs, initially unoccupied, became bedecked with flowers, children’s toys and other objects of memory as Sarajevo’s citizens performed their own personal commemorations. Performing Memory (2): Bolero Two years after Pašović’s Red Line, UK theatre maker and director Michael Pinchbeck conceived and directed a multilingual devised performance which engaged with war, conflict and music. In preparing and researching the piece, Pinchbeck consulted with Pašović about the Sarajevo Red Line and, indeed, Pašović appeared as a ‘character’ and is described as trying to get into the city while everyone else was leaving. Pinchbeck and his company were interested in exploring, through theatre, the points of encounter between commemoration and performance across Bosnia-Herzegovina, the United Kingdom and Kosovo. The cast was multicultural, consisting of German, British and Bosniak actors and—when performed in the United Kingdom—20 community performers drawn from around the city of Nottingham. The piece is constructed out of a rich series of associations and linkages. The sonic spine of the work is Ravel’s Bolero, composed in 1928, ten years after the end of the First World War. Ravel’s music offers dramaturgical tissues of connection between Sarajevo as the site of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination, the city as host for the 1984 Winter Olympics where Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won ice skating gold medals performing to the Bolero, Pinchbeck’s minor accident as a child slipping on the ice outside a fish and chip shop in Nottingham and being comforted at home whilst watching Torvill and Dean’s triumph on television, SARTR’s siege performances and Pašović’s Red Line installation in 2012. Although I never saw Bolero, I have a vivid sense through Pinchbeck’s accounts of how the piece was constructed conceptually, how it was transformed into performance and how the whole project aspired to engage

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with Sarajevo’s history and with those people who performed and lived through the siege. Pinchbeck comments of Bolero that ‘It is a litany for a city, a verbal memorial of loss, a roll-call for three years of lost life’ (Pinchbeck 2018, p. 85). He continues: this agitates the troubling and troubled axis between the performative and the commemorative. It provokes questions such as; was this performance as a commemoration of normalcy? A commemoration of peace? A commemoration of silence? A commemoration of safety? A commemoration of what might be yet again? (Ibid., p. 85)

Pinchbeck’s questions resonate strongly with much of the performance work examined in this book which has been sited literally or contextually in ruined locations, or political, social and psychic spaces of ruination. Like Sontag’s Godot—discussed in detail below—Pinchbeck’s Bolero productively complicates and problematises categories of sited performance. It was performed in Sarajevo and Nottingham, several thousand miles apart. Is it more site-specific in Sarajevo than in Nottingham? Perhaps, the usefulness of site-specificity begins to dissolve a little when we consider Bolero as a dramaturgical exchange of stories, sites and voices over time. To describe his process, Pinchbeck likes to invoke Eugenio Barba’s notion of a ‘weaving together’ (Barba 1985, p.  76) of ‘found and fictional texts about music with musical motifs’ (Pinchbeck 2018, p. 91). Pinchbeck’s reflections upon some of the ethical aspects of his devising and dramaturgical process echo questions that are implicitly or explicitly posed in other performance or cultural work which engages with places and sites of trauma, loss and ruination. Provoked by Klaić’s essay in Delgado and Svitch (2002), Pinchbeck writes about the Bolero project as follows: I ask what licence we have to tell other peoples’ stories and what agency devised work gives people to narrate personal experience. Simply put, I ask: what permissions do we have to tell other peoples’ stories when they cut across histories, cultures and memories beyond our own? (Ibid., p. 80)

Performing Memory (3): Vraca Memorial Park, Nermin Hamzagić and Copenhagen On my final day in Sarajevo I met with young director Nermin Hamzagić. We learned a little about each other over coffee, and he offered to drive

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Fig. 6.8  Partisans Park, Sarajevo. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

me up to the Vraca Memorial Park on the hills above the city. Like Mostar’s Partisan Park, this is a large, overgrown, partly wooded and derelict space, evidently planned and commissioned before Tito’s death in May 1980. It commemorated the citizens of Sarajevo who had died in the Second World War and was opened in November 1981. In 1996, the park was systematically destroyed by withdrawing Serbian forces following the signing of the Dayton Agreement. In 2005, the park was declared a National Monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Vraca bears many similarities with its Mostar equivalent, but seems significantly larger. As with Igor in Mostar, Nermin expresses passionate feelings about Vraca, its original commemorative purpose, its ruination in and from 1996, and what these periods symbolise for him and Sarajevo. Like others in Bosnia-Herzegovina, he is much less interested in material ruins, more in ruin and ruination as cultural and political metaphors for the state of his country, a condition which has been little dissipated since the 1990s war. Significantly, though, he talks about the ‘ghosts’ of material ruins, force fields which survive renovation and rebuilding. Nermin says:

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The library of Sarajevo was shelled, and then rebuilt after the war, but I feel it is still a ruin. It’s nice that it’s beautiful now and people take pictures, but you never forget its state as a war ruin. (Hamzagić 2017)

In 2008 Nermin directed and produced Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (Kopenhagen) in the Vraca Park. Copenhagen imagines and reconstructs a meeting in the Danish capital between the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941. Bohr had left Germany to live in Denmark in the late 1930s, but Heisenberg remained in Germany throughout the war, and his reputation was subsequently tainted by an association with Nazism. Frayn’s play explores the reasons for Heisenberg’s visit and the disagreements that took place between these renowned physicists. Nermin chose the play as he felt that its cultural and ideological dynamics shadowed Sarajevo’s recent history. His production of Kopenhagen was a promenade piece which took its audience around both the open spaces of the park and through its ruined buildings. It is a space, he says, that is ‘stuck between two ideologies. I wanted to connect the space to the subject matter, and the site was crucial and very important to me’ (Ibid., 2017). For Nermin, animating the space of Vraca through performance and the debates in Frayn’s play would help generate productive (folk or personal) memories of what the Park’s original intentions were. Here, then, is a dramaturgy of memory through association, harnessing the visceral and sensual materiality of a brutally devastated site for an act of restitution and commemoration. Before we part company, Nermin tells me that he had also directed a production of Antigone when he was a student in the Performing Arts Academy. This was performed in the basement of the shelled Bosnian parliament building. It was here that the war started, he tells me, the font line of the conflict, a ‘symbolic ruin where our Antigone could fight for justice, for an ethical universal principle that helps us to preserve the idea of humanism’ (Hamzagić 2019).

Waiting in Sarajevo: Sontag’s Godot The twentieth century began in Sarajevo. The twenty-first century has begun in Sarajevo too. (Sontag 1994a, n.p.)

American cultural critic, essayist and theatre director Susan Sontag (1933–2004) became heavily embroiled in the fate of Sarajevo under siege and her comment above suggests that she was acutely sensitive to the city’s resonant deep and present history. Sontag’s production of Waiting for

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Godot premiered on the afternoon of 17 August 1993  in the Sarajevo Youth Theatre. It was produced by Haris Pašović and remains an emblematic—if sometimes controversial—signature for the city’s cultural resistance during the siege. Sontag’s visits to Sarajevo (nine in all during the war) and the production itself have been the subject of much writing by academic commentators and Sontag herself over the years following the Dayton Peace Accord (Sontag 1994b, 2009; Kotecki 2016; Jestrovic 2013; Diklich 2017; Toole 2001; Erenrich and Wergin 2017; Baudrillard 1994). A significant amount of this writing has focused on the cultural politics of Sontag’s interventions and statements and less on her production of Godot itself. In this short section, I want to make connections between Sontag’s Godot and how we might position Beckett’s work more widely in relation to pessimism, optimism and ruination. Beyond the work itself, I shall consider how the criticisms and defence of her work in Sarajevo mirror debates about ruin porn and the politics of spectacle. Whilst Sontag’s project in Sarajevo has attracted most debate, she was far from alone in being the only cultural figure to make an artistic incursion into the city’s life under siege. Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, Irish musician Bono (lead singer for band, U2), folk singer Joan Baez, conductor Zubin Mehta and the ‘Three Tenors’ were amongst those who managed to enter the city and perform during this time. Actors Vanessa Redgrave, Daniel Day-Lewis and Jeremy Irons also apparently tried, but were prevented from doing so—allegedly—by the British government. At a later point, however, Redgrave was able to enter the city with Sontag. For Sontag, an understanding of Sarajevo’s place in European history and its record as a plural, secular and multicultural community was crucial both in her campaigning for UN intervention against Serbian aggression and genocide, and in her choice of Godot as a ‘great European play’. Indeed, she felt that Sarajevo had specifically been targeted by the Serbs for performing this very multiplicity of cultures. In her own account after the production, she noted: ‘Beckett’s play, written over 40  years ago, seems written for and about, Sarajevo’ (Sontag, 1994b, p. 88). For her, Bosnia represented ‘the secular anti-tribal ideal’ of Europe (Ibid., p. 93), and Godot was a play that spoke allusively about such qualities. Kristina Kotecki, in a perceptive essay, ‘The Future of Europe: Susan Sontag’s Sarajevo Publications, Paper and Production Waiting for Godot’, reflects on the extent to which Sontag idealised and romanticised the notion (and the practice) of a cultured and civilised Europe. She writes that for Sontag ‘Sarajevo was a cultured urban centre for whom Europe was both its norm

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and an ideal in need of legitimating: it was already European but needed to be acknowledged as such’ (Kotecki 2016, p. 653). However, to suggest that Sontag was oblivious to other, less Panglossian dimensions of European history is absurd. Sontag observes, ‘When I replied that Europe is and always has been as much a place of barbarism as a place of civilisation, they didn’t want to hear. Now, a few months later, no one would dispute such a statement’ (Sontag 1994b, p. 90). Sontag had, of course, seen various performances of Godot and indeed had found a Berlin production excessively and—for her tastes—overly comical. Accounts of her own production testify to its bleakness, and it seems that she felt compelled to offer something that spoke to and of the despair experienced by Sarajevo’s citizens. She echoes many of the comments recorded in Diklich’s collection of testimonies from those actually involved in SARTR and other theatres under the siege when she writes: Culture, serious culture from anywhere, is an expression of human dignity – which is what people in Sarajevo feel they have lost, even when they know themselves to be brave, or stoical or angry. (Ibid.)

Sontag’s production broke with Beckett’s original in a number of ways, and it is unclear what the Beckett estate thought about these transgressions. Certainly, one imagines that if this formal revisioning of Beckett’s text had been performed under less extreme conditions, the guardians of his work might have been exceedingly displeased.6 Sontag undertakes three major changes from the original: she dispenses entirely with the second act, insists on gender-blind casting and has three pairs of Vladimirs and Estragons. The reasons for removing the second act are variously described as being practical and pragmatic—too little time to rehearse the full-length play and that it would, in any case, have run for too long—or creative and conceptual. As longer plays than Godot were being performed under siege conditions, the reason that the play in its entirety would have been too long does not really stand up to examination. However, her motives for offering Act 1 alone are dramaturgically interesting. Sontag argues that Godot ‘may be the only work in dramatic literature in which Act 1 is itself a complete play’ (Sontag 1994b, p. 97). However, once she had made the decision to cast three Estragons and Vladimirs, thereby significantly lengthening Act 1, it was perhaps inevitable that she would excise the second act. Of course, she is not claiming that Act II is superfluous since matters do change for all the fictional protagonists. She points out that in Act II:

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Not only has one more day gone by. Everything is worse. Lucky no longer can speak, Pozzo is now pathetic and blind. Vladimir has given in to despair. Perhaps I felt that the despair of Act 1 was enough for the Sarajevo audience and I wanted to spare them the second time when Godot does not arrive. Maybe I wanted to propose, subliminally, that Act II might be different. (Ibid.)

There appears to me to be a generative association here with Beckett’s experience in the ruins of St-Lo (see Chap. 2) and the palpable sense that out of the ruined lives of his characters there is always a hint or suspicion of hope. Beckett, of course, was not alive to have known the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s, but part of his unbroadcast text (written record in University of Reading Beckett Archive) for Irish Radio in 1945 is worth repeating here. For St-Lo we might easily substitute Sarajevo: Some of those who were in Saint-Lò will come home realizing that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and a sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again. These will have been in France. (Beckett 1986, pp. 75–6)

Maybe Sontag reads this ‘inkling’ into her Godot, and the material devastation of Sarajevo and Beckett’s ‘time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins’ seems no less appropriate for Sarajevo in 1993 than it did for St-Lo in 1945. Removing the existential certitude of waiting, which Act II reinforces, exposes the possibility that things may—just—get better. We may also be reminded of Beckett’s disposition to embrace the contingency of ‘perhaps’. The ‘perhaps’ which underpins that glimmer of optimism, lying, often disguised, in Beckett’s texts, in Sontag’s gender-blind casting and her curious decision to offer audiences no less than three pairs of Vladimirs and Estragons. We can only speculate as to what Beckett’s response might have been to these aspects of Sontag’s production, but in the context of the siege, and what we know about his lifelong support for humanitarian and progressive causes, it is not a forgone conclusion that he would have censured Sontag’s radical casting and staging decisions. Sontag arrived in Sarajevo knowing that she wanted to experiment with gender-­ blind casting, having already seen an older actress Ines Fančović, whom she imagined in the role of Pozzo. The decision, however, to reconstruct

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Godot with three Estragons and three Vladimirs only emerged through the audition and casting process. Impressed with the calibre of acting during auditions, and the enthusiasm of the actors, she made a rapid decision to have two men as the central protagonists, flanked, as it were, by a man and a woman and two women as the other pairings. Whilst Sontag was obviously making an explicit statement about gender roles, she claims that the goal of a multi-ethnic cast was not intentional and was simply an inevitable product of Sarajevo’s embedded multiculturalism. When asked by a foreign journalist whether she had a multi-ethnic cast, Sontag responds: But of course I did – the population of Sarajevo is so mixed, and there are so many intermarriages, that it would be hard to assemble any kind of group in which all three “ethnic” groups are not represented – and without ever inquiring who was what. (Sontag 1994b, pp. 92–3)

Each pairing had distinct characteristics: the central duo were classic ‘buddies’; the two women became a bickering mother and daughter— ‘affection and dependence are mixed with exasperation and resentment’ (Ibid., p. 96), and the mixed couple a ‘cranky husband and wife, modelled on homeless people I’d seen in downtown Manhattan’ (Ibid.). Thus, the pairings acted as a kind of Greek chorus, and the ethnically blind casting, she hoped, would mirror quotidian life in Sarajevo itself. Sontag and Beckett scholars (Kotecki 2016; Boxall 2011) have also examined the possible homoerotic charge in the relationship between Estragon and Vladimir, and the traces of bisexuality and lesbianism which underscore much of Sontag’s writing. This whole area of discourse is not particularly relevant to my enquiry, but the possible range of sex and gender interactions evinced by these three pairs of protagonists again, perhaps, suggests the utopian plurality of relationships towards which Sontag’s life and writing gestured. At a more literal level, the waiting for a Godot who never comes seemed to mirror Sarajevo’s and the Bosniaks’ anticipation that US President Clinton would—at last—intervene proactively in the conflict on the side of the beleaguered Bosniaks. This did not happen until the summer of 1995. Examining the evidence behind criticisms (Baudrillard 1994; Toole 2001; Myers 2005; Bradby 2001) of Sontag that she undertook Godot, and made nine visits to Sarajevo, as solipsistic acts of bad faith, self-­ promotion and aggrandisement is not for this volume, except in so far as

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they seem to bear similarities with debates about ‘ruin porn’. As we have examined earlier, discourses around the perplexing seductiveness of ruined locations and the aesthetic thrill generated by thousands of images of unpeopled derelict factories, industrial plants and bombed-out buildings focus upon the claim that such image-making engenders a superficial trivialising of such spaces and their economic, social and psychological histories. The camera’s gaze, it is argued, exoticises and disguises places which have sad and contested histories, and serves to distance the viewer from the often-harsh human realities which are hidden by the dust, debris and mangled steel of the ruined site. Consider the parallels in Baudrillard’s castigation of Sontag, and other intellectuals or celebrities who offer solidarity with peoples devastated by warfare and poverty. For Baudrillard, Sontag and Godot are indulging in ‘cultural soul-boosting’ (Baudrillard 1994), and her involvement in Sarajevo is merely a societal instance of what has become the general situation whereby toothless intellectuals swap their distress with the misery of the poor, both of them sustaining each other, both of them locked in a perverse agreement. (Baudrillard 1994, n.p.)

The essence of the ‘ruin porn’ critique is that makers (largely photographers) and the consumers of their work are performing (in the more obvious theatrical sense) sympathy (rather than empathy and a sense of disturbance), distress and indignation from a safe distance. In this way, nothing changes and any in-depth examination of the ruinous situation is ignored or downgraded in favour of an easily and swiftly manufactured gesture of compassion. There is little reason to believe that Sontag herself was under any illusions as to what her appearance, armed with a Beckett text, could offer the besieged citizens of Sarajevo. Early in her essay, ‘Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo’, she writes: I was not under the illusion that going to Sarajevo to direct a play would make me useful in the way I could be if I were a doctor or a water systems engineer. It would be a small contribution. But it was the only one of the three things I do – write, make films and direct in the theatre – which yields something that would exist only in Sarajevo that would be made and consumed there. (Sontag 1994b, p. 87)

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Later she is at pains to emphasise that her contribution was predicated upon an attempt to normalise some particular aspects of daily life in Sarajevo under siege. Working with theatre professionals in these conditions ‘allows them to be normal, that is, do what they did before the war; to be not just haulers of water, or passive recipients of “humanitarian aid”’(Ibid., p. 91). Significantly, this is precisely what many of the contributors to Theater in Sarajevo during the War 1992–1995 say in Diklich’s collection (2017). Of course, the ‘normal’ of mounting Godot under siege conditions is relative, and this Sontag explicitly acknowledges: The main obstacle, apart from stage lighting, was the fatigue of malnourished actors, many of whom, before they arrived for rehearsal at ten, had for several hours been queueing for water and then lugging heavy plastic containers up eight or ten flights of stairs. Some of them had to walk two hours to get to the theatre, and, of course, would have to follow the same dangerous route at the end of the day. (Ibid., p. 95)

Far from being ‘parachuted’ in as a well-heeled New York intellectual, Sontag’s Godot project only emerged after meetings with Sarajevian theatre director Haris Pašović, discussing possibilities and agreeing his role as producer of the play. Toole (2001) and Bradby (2001) both make the factual error of suggesting that Sontag and Godot were inserted into a Sarajevo bereft of cultural life. Bradby writes, ‘The siege of their city had brought normal theatre life to a standstill and so they were only too keen to become involved in the project’ (Bradby 2001, p.  65). Of course, Bradby is right if we only focused ‘on normal theatre’ life (my emphasis), but as Pašović, Diklich and Nihad (amongst others) all testify (see above), there was a proliferation of live theatre under extraordinary and debilitating conditions in the city during this period. However, Bradby is perceptive when he argues that we should not approach Sontag’s Godot primarily to examine her dramaturgical and staging solutions, rather to consider it as an event framed, driven and given shape by hugely challenging circumstances and contexts. A final word—or gesture—here may productively lie with the people of Sarajevo and the accord which was given to Sontag and her presence during the siege. In 2010, the square outside the city’s National Theatre was renamed ‘Sontag Square’. Haris Pašović, quoted in the United Kingdom’s national paper The Observer, said, ‘This Square is the centre of the city so Susan’s Sontag’s name will be written in the heart of Sarajevo forever, where it belongs’ (Carter 2009, n.p.) (Fig. 6.9).

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Fig. 6.9  Susan Sontag Square, Sarajevo. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

Twenty-Five Years on: The Sarajevo War Theatre (SARTR) When marking the 25th anniversary of the formation of SARTR in 1992, its current director Aleš Kurt addressed a public gathering in Sarajevo in 2017. Before speaking of the siege, he began by quoting Jean-Paul Sartre: You must be afraid my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen. Let’s go back to Sarajevo in 1992. Although I know you don’t feel like listening to war stories anymore. But really one should be brave to establish a theatre in the middle of the war. If you think about it carefully, you’ll realise there are insanely fun elements there. It is so much less fun to set up a theatre today than it was back then … There was no better idea in the chaos of

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the war to establish a theatre. And five months after, to stage the first performance – the one that come directly from the heart of a man under siege. The War Theatre is one of Sarajevo’s miracles which do not need a monument because they are, miraculously still alive. (Kurt 2017)

Kurt’s words return us to the heart of this book and the stories I have been telling. This lies in the apparent contradictions between ruins as destructive and desolate places generating commensurate damaging emotions and behaviours, on the one hand, and such locations and experiences having the capacity to lift the spirit(s) and to engender hope-full, lifeaffirming actions and projects, on the other. If the contradiction remains, it is at best a most creative one.

Notes 1. The Dayton agreement or accord, brokered by the United States in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, and confirmed formally in Paris a few weeks later, was supposed to bring an end to the bitter Balkans war in Bosnia-­ Herzegovina and to heal the wounds of ethnic division. The agreement, whilst ending the warfare, signally failed to provide a long-term solution to the country’s ethnic rivalries. 2. The Partisan Park in Mostar—there are others in Europe too—celebrates the courage of the Yugoslav Partisans or the National Liberation Army. This was the Communist-led resistance to the Axis powers in occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War. 3. Six organisations constituted the war theatres of Sarajevo: International Theatre Festival (MESS), the Academy for the Dramatic Arts, Chamber Theater 55, Sarajevo War Theatre (SARTR), Youth Theatre and the National Theatre. 4. In this section I refer to both ‘war theatres’ and the War Theatre (SARTR). The former usage indicates that there were several theatre stages in Sarajevo during the siege, but the War Theatre/SARTR refers to one institution. 5. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is a UK government-­ funded research body which supports and enables university-based projects within the Arts and the Humanities. 6. Samuel Beckett’s estate has the reputation of being reluctant to give permission to productions which break with staging of his plays as laid down by the author in the original text. Although we can only speculate as Beckett’s reaction (had he been alive) to Sontag’s radical restructuring of the original text, we know that Beckett was habitually supportive of progressive causes and resistance to tyranny.

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Bibliography Barba, E. (1985). The Nature of Dramaturgy: Describing Actions at Work. New Theatre Quarterly, 1(I), 75–78. Barišić, M., Burzić, A., & Murtić, A. (Eds.) (2017). MOSTARSKA HURQUALYA: The (Un)Forgotten City. (On-line version only) http://nezaboravljenigrad. com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Nezaboravljeni-grad_s_korice.pdf. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Baudrillard, J. (1994). No Reprieve for Sarajevo. Liberation. January 8. http:// ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/no-reprieve-for-sarajevo/. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Bečić, Z. (2017). Testimony. In D. Diklich (Ed.), Theater in Sarajevo During the War 1992–1995 (pp. 31–38). Sarajevo: MESS. Beckett, S. (1986). The Capital of the Ruins. In J. Calder (Ed.), As No Other Dare Fail (pp. 73–76). London: John Calder. Begić, A. (2017). Testimony. In D. Diklich (Ed.), Theater in Sarajevo During the War 1992–1995 (pp. 39–49). Sarajevo: MESS. Boxall, P. (2011). Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism. London: Continuum. Bradby, D. (2001). Beckett: Waiting for Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burić, S. (2017, June 8). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Carter, I. (2009). Desperately Thanking Susan. In The Observer Newspaper 5 April. Clancy, T. (2017). Bosnia & Herzegovina. Chalfont St Peter: Bradt Travel Guides. Đapić, M. (2017, June 5). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Diklich, D. (2017). Theater in Sarajevo During the War 1992–1995. Sarajevo: MESS. Divjak, J. (2017). Testimony. In D.Diklich (Ed.) Theater in Sarajevo During the War 1992–1995 (pp. 61–65). Sarajevo: MESS. Donia, R. (2006). Sarajevo, a Biography. London: Hurst and Co. Erenrich, S., & Wergin, J. (Eds.). (2017). Grassroots Leadership and the Arts for Social Change. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Garrod, A. (2017). Youth Bridge Global http://www.ybglobal.org/ accessed 20 September. Glamočak, A. (2017). Testimony. In D. Diklich (Ed.), Theater in Sarajevo during the War 1992–1995 (pp. 86–98). Sarajevo: MESS. Glenny, M. (1996). The Fall of Yugoslavia. London: Penguin. Golubović, D. (2017). Testimony. In D. Diklich (Ed.), Theater in Sarajevo During the War 1992–1995 (pp. 108–112). Sarajevo: MESS. Hadziosmanovic, J. (2014). How is Culture Used as a Tool for Dissuasion of Conflict and Consensus (1992–1995). Epiphany, 7(1). http://epiphany.ius. edu.ba/index.php/epiphany/article/view/83/85. Accessed 16 June 2020 Hamzagić, N. (2017, June 7). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Hamzagić, N. (2019, June 13). Unpublished Correspondence with the Author. Hromadžic, A. (2015). Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State Making in Post-War Bosnia Herzegovina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Jestrovic, S. (2013). Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Judah, T. (2008). The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. London: Yale University Press. Klaić, D. (2002). The Crisis of Theatre? The Theatre of Crisis! In M. Delgado & C. Svitch (Eds.), Theatre in Crisis: Performance Manifestos for a New Century (pp. 144–160). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kotecki, K. (2016). The Future of Europe: Susan Sontag’s Sarajevo Publications, Papers and Production of Waiting for Godot. Interventions, 18(5), 651–668. Kreševljaković, N. (2017, June 10). Unpublished Conversation with Author. Kurt, A. (2017). Press conference to announce programme of celebrations to mark 25th anniversary of SARTR. DEPO portal. https://depo.ba/clanak/160752/sartr-obiljezava-25-godina-rada-pripremljen-bogat-progam accessed 12 May 2019. Lorenz, P. (2015). TIME DUST. Unpublished writing, Theatre Studies, University of Glasgow. Lorenz, P. (2016, March 3). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Maček, I. (2011). Sarajevo under Siege: Anthropology in War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mustafić, D. (2017a). Testimony. In D.Diklich (Ed.) Theater in Sarajevo during the War 1992–1995 (pp. 182–190). Sarajevo: MESS. Mustafić, D. (2017b). Urban Ritual of Resistance to Fascism. In Theater in Sarajevo during the War 1992–1995 (pp. 265–266). Sarajevo: MESS. Myers, K. (2005). I Wish I had Kicked Susan Sontag. Daily Telegraph, 2nd January. Pašović, H. (2017). Testimony. In D. Diklich (Ed.), Theater in Sarajevo During the War 1992–1995 (pp. 195–201). Sarajevo: MESS. Pinchbeck, M. (2018). Making Bolero: Dramaturgies of Remembrance. In M.  Pinchbeck & A.  Westerside (Eds.), Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration (pp. 79–93). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Potter, D. (1994). Seeing the Blossom. London: Faber and Faber. Primorac, D. (2017, June 5). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Skoko, I. (2017). Unpublished conversation with author, 4 June. Smajlovic, V. (1992). The Death of a City: Elegy for Sarajevo – A special report: A People under Artillery Fire Manage to Retain Humanity. Interview with John F. Burns. New York Times, 8 June. Sontag, S. (1994a). Spring in Sarajevo. Open Society News Winter. Box 47, Folder 2. Susan Sontag Paper, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Sontag, S. (1994b). Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo. Performing Arts Journal, 16(2), 87–106. Sontag, S. (2009). Where the Stress Falls (pp. 299–322). London: Penguin Classics. Toole, D. (2001). Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflection on Nihilism, Tragedy and Apocalypse. London: SCM Press. Vidačković, I. (2017, June 4). Unpublished Conversation with the Author.

CHAPTER 7

Ruins of Capital

A word of personal context before formally beginning this chapter on performing the ruins of contemporary Greece: I grew up in a family of Hellenists, my father had taken a Classics degree and learned ancient Greek before training to become a doctor, and my maternal great-­ grandfather (Gilbert Murray) was steeped in Hellenism, a renowned classicist and prominent translator of poetry and drama from ancient Greece. Much less fashionable today, Gilbert Murray was admired as a leading classical scholar and Hellenist in the first half of the twentieth century. This background helped to construct a Hellenic habitus and disposition within me that has remained throughout adult life and manifested itself— predictably—as a regular tourist (largely in Athens, the Peloponnesian Mani and Zakynthos), and an enduring interest in contemporary Greek culture and politics. My decision to place a significant focus on Greece for Performing Ruins was shaped by this background and driven particularly by the present conjunction between Greece as the quintessential topos1 of European ancient ruins and the contemporary ruination of modern Greece since the financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the subsequent austerity imposed on the country by the ‘debt bailout’ enacted by the European Union between 2010 and 2018. Euphemistically and obliquely, these ‘bailouts’ were formally called ‘Economic Adjustment Programmes’.

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Ruination and Performance in Contemporary Greece A recent call (November 2018) for contributions to a special issue of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies to be entitled ‘Ruins in Contemporary Greek Art, Cinema, Literature and Public Space’ notes that ‘The metaphors of ruins and rebuilding have been central in the Greek and foreign media during the crisis’ and identifies a series of prompts for potential contributors. These are some of them: • Can ruins help shape alternative narratives of modernity, of the Greek nation or of the crisis? • What affects are produced in contemporary encounters of subjects with ruins? • What relationship take shape between the materiality of ruins and decaying objects and residents of these spaces who squat, reside and interact with ruins? • What kind of new collectivities and social practices emerge from ruins and fragments? • How are ruins – ancient – and modern commercialized, aestheticized, fetishized or appropriated by national narratives, political discourses, the cultural or tourist industries? • How might images of ruins exemplify shifting notions of the nation state and national identity? • Do ruins of the present – literal or metaphorical – challenge established perceptions of the Greek past and its ruins? • How does the discourse around ruins in Greece differ from similar discourses in other places (for instance ruin photography in Detroit)? (Journal of Modern Greek Studies 2018, n.p.) I only came across these questions since completing fieldwork in Athens and Thessaloniki, but they share many of the underlying themes and ethos of my own enquiry, even if differently articulated. The first section of this chapter focuses on the relationship between contemporary performance, ruins or ruination and the experience of artists and activists living in Greece during the current period of acute deprivation and austerity. As my research (as opposed to holiday) visits to Greece unfolded during 2017–2018, I became aware that conversations with directors, artists, actors and activists were tracing an undercurrent of response similar to my experiences in Mostar and Sarajevo. Variations on ‘of course, the whole of

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Greece is a ruin today’ were multiple and expressed with a blend of anger, sorrow and weary resignation. Indeed, I had long since dispensed with the naive expectation that I would only encounter copious coherent examples of theatre and other performance events designed, constructed and performed in ruined spaces, whether contemporary or ancient. I did come upon such projects, but, as significantly, it was stories of occupations and protests within or around disused and (semi) ruined locations that began to engage my attention. These either enabled performances of various kinds or had a strong performative dimension. All of them, of course, were driven by the politics of the times, but also embraced an explicit programme of cultural and educational activities. This section, for obvious reasons perhaps, largely attends to the city of Athens, but I also identify and reflect briefly upon projects in Thessaloniki, Elefsina (a suburb of Athens on the coast) and in the Argos-Mycenae area of the Peloponnese. As a postscript to these introductory words and prompted by a later conversation with Demosthenes Agrafiotis, I became aware, too, that many of the projects and artists with whom I engaged were influenced by European approaches—often conceptual—to art making and cultural production shaped by influential French theorists of the last decades of the twentieth century. Demosthenes gently pointed out to me that there are other contemporary Greek artists who are more critical of these historical frameworks and whose work is not anchored in these particular traditions. The Mavili Collective, Embros and Green Park On the wall of the disused but now occupied (reactivated) Embros Theatre in Athens in November 2011, artist Alexandros Mistriotis has written in Greek: I am writing to you, because I know these days will be forgotten.

Mistriotis’ elegiac words hint at the ephemeral nature of performance and, perhaps too, political protest. They are quoted in a short essay by Gigi Argyropoulou entitled ‘Precarious Structures: Passing thoughts on forms and encounters’ (2015a, n.p.), where she reflects on the actions of the Mavili Collective during its occupations of two abandoned sites in Athens. One of my first conversations in Athens was with Anestis Azas who currently works with Prodromos Tsinikoris as a joint director of the

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Experimental Stage at the National Theatre in Athens. Trained in Thessaloniki and Berlin, Anestis has been a freelance director working with Rimini Protokoll (Berlin 2010) and on a number of documentary theatre projects, all of which have engaged with the social and economic ruination of Greece since 2009. This documentary performance work has particularly engaged with the privatisation and disassembly of the Greek railways (A Journey by Train, 2011), contemporary Greek immigrants in Germany (Telemachus- Should I stay or should I go? 2013) and immigrant cleaning women in Athens (Clean City, 2016). At the Experimental Stage, Anestis and Prodromos have removed the proscenium arch in order to foster a more intimate relationship between actors and audience and make their commitment to a theatre which speaks to the contemporary predicament of Greece: Our objective is an outward-looking theatre in dialogue with the broader social, political and economic environment, on which it will pass judgement and by which it will be judged. Our desire is for the theatre to operate as a platform for dialogue about the historical, political and ethical issues that concern society, and to maximise its aesthetic, educational and social function. (National Theatre – Experimental Stage 2017, n.p.)

Anestis tells me about his involvement in the Mavili Collective which was formed during the summer of 2010 by a group comprising largely of theatre artists who had been part of the emerging experimental scene over the last decade. The Collective’s initial focus was to respond to and re-­ think the calamitous cultural conditions of the time, and one of its early actions was to send a letter (countersigned by 500 people) to the Minister of Culture regarding cultural policies. At its first public event in January 2011, the Collective organised a conference entitled ‘Cultural Policies and Contemporary Production’. Themed strands entitled Cultural Policies, Artistic Research in the Arts, Connections/Networking with the International Scene and Legal Status and Funding were dominated by papers and presentations around forms of experimental theatre and their possible relationship(s) to the crisis, funding and cultural policy. In addition to these scheduled seminar-based activities, there were five site-specific performances situated within the urban landscape of Athens. These performances engaged with themes of re-use of city spaces and Athenian terraces and strategies to re-imagine public space. On 11 November 2011, members of the Collective occupied or ‘reactivated’ the Embros Theatre.

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Embros had originally been a newspaper printing works but functioned as a subsidised, although privately run theatre in the 1980s until it closed in 2005. In 2011 all government funding to hitherto subsidised theatres ceased. Immediately following occupation, the theatre was reconstituted as a public space for debate, performance and exchange. Mavili’s Re-activate Manifesto stated the following: We act in response to the total lack of a basic cultural policy on the level of education, production and support of artistic work as a national product. We act in response to the general stagnation of thinking and action in our society through collective meeting, thinking and direct action by reactivating a disused historical building in the centre of Athens. From 11/11/2011 until 22/11/2011 an open, intense daily program will run throughout the space with an emphasis on access and action. Emerging dance and theatre makers will share tactics and methodologies for development, panels will be organised by scholars as public debates on urgent issues, we will archive live the currently undocumented and unknown “Greek new work” inviting artists themselves to present “live” parts of their archival material. Artists, theoreticians, practitioners and the public will “meet” and try out models beyond the limits of their practice and the markets’ structural demands of “the artistic product” … We challenge our own limits and understanding and we propose and operate this space as a constantly re-evaluated model by both ourselves and the public – an open system that might offer the potential to re-think relations between people and possible roles for art in society. (Mavili Collective, Re-activate Manifesto 2017, n.p.) Talking with Anestis and also with Gigi Argyropoulou, another founder member of the Mavili Collective, it becomes clear that the group’s approach to the occupation of the Embros Theatre and four years later (June 2015) the abandoned and semi-derelict Green Park Café had significant dimensions to it beyond the purely political statement of taking over empty buildings as a form of protest. Green Park, built as a café and small theatre space, is located on the side of one of Athens’ largest parks, the Field of Mars, only a kilometre from Omonia Square and close to the Polytechnic University. Gigi tells me a little of Green Park’s history:

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It was a café and restaurant in the ’30s and was the first club in Athens in the ’60s. It’s been a place for popular entertainment and people from the neighborhood would go there for meals, weddings and social events. It was also a place for political satire and always very much part of the Athens imaginary. The park itself has different ecologies from inhabitants, to kids, to refugees, to drug users. (Argyropoulou 2017)

In November 1973, during rule by the Colonels’ Junta, Polytechnic students barricaded themselves into the building in protest against the dictatorship. Within four days of the occupation on 17 November, troops and tanks were sent in and 23 people were killed in the ensuing siege. The uprising was put down, but the Junta was irreparably damaged by the popular outcry and fell the following year. Every year 17 November is now celebrated as a day of freedom and democracy, and universities and schools remain closed. The proximity between the Green Park Café and the Polytechnic gave the Mavili occupation an added and acute historical resonance. The ‘reactivation’ of both sites drew upon and translated the energy and ideas from the mass protests and occupations of nearby Syntagma Square2 between 2010 and 2012. At Embros, hundreds of people and groups flowed through the building to debate and perform the responses that art could make to the crisis. Vassilis Noulas, another original member of Mavili with Anestis and Gigi, said, ‘We want to create another paradigm of occupation, an artistic occupation … one that is more open’ (Noulas qtd. in Davis 2015) to which Gigi adds (quoted in the same article), At Embros we could feel the pressure from outside, of people saying “what are you?” “Are you a squatter institution?” “Are you doing the post-political thing?” We have at least learned to say that we won’t reply to this question, and we won’t feel guilty that we don’t know. It’s like an art project; you think you know what to do. But, in reality, you just have methods of dealing with problems. (Argyropoulou qtd. in Davis 2015, n.p.)

Perceptively, Ben Davis, writing in Frieze magazine on 2015, says in response to Vassilis and Gigi as follows: I read this as a hard-won lesson about political art spaces: that they function best when they are not too political, when they can serve as a meeting place for different projects, instead of becoming the project itself. (Davis 2015, n.p.)

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There are clear resonances here with Mostar’s Street Art Festival (Chap. 6) and the Teufelsberg and Tacheles occupations in Berlin (Chap. 8). What seems noteworthy about the Embros reactivation in particular was the centrality of what we might prefer to call performance rather than theatre. Although the distinction is fluid and porous, it does point to crucial differences between the work we can identify in the ancient sites of Epidaurus and Delphi and those in Embros and the Green Park Café. At Embros, although details are difficult to come by, it is clear that the performance events were devised responses to the Greek political and cultural crisis and the predicament in which most artists and groups found themselves. It also seems apparent that the Mavili project saw the close alignment of performance, debate, cooking and eating, dancing, political and theoretical analysis as a completely unproblematic conjunction of inter-­ related activities, a form of praxis, a methodology for conviviality and friendship, appropriate for the tumultuous times in which they were situated. Throughout its activities, and with increasing coherence, the Collective became preoccupied with the multiple practices, and theoretical underpinnings, of the term performance, exploring relationships between performance and institutions, and building on the premise that institutional power structures are formed through repeated sets of practices, patterns and relations (Fig. 7.1). Emerging out of the Embros and Green Park occupations and the conference of 2011 (Cultural Policies and Contemporary Production), the Collective organised two more ambitious and sizeable events: Institutions, Politics, Performance (24–28 September 2015) and Performance Biennial NO FUTURE (1st edition) between 23 June and 4 July 2016. Both were anchored in the Green Park Café building. The former was an intense and busy five-day event with speakers, artists and performers drawn from Germany, Scotland, Switzerland, England, Singapore, Spain, Portugal as well as from all over Greece. The mission of the unfunded Performance Biennial NO FUTURE (1st edition) was encapsulated in a statement made by the organisers, Gigi, Vassilis and Kostas Tzimoulis, and was to consider not only the role theatre and performance might play within these ‘reactivation’ projects but also how performance might reflect critically on its own conditions of existence. They write: This event seeks to critically interrogate the role of performance, historically and in the present, in relation to political and social materialities and imaginaries. Playfully subverting the term ‘biennial’ into a self-organised practice,

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Fig. 7.1  Green Park Café, Athens. (Image: Simon Murray 2017) the event will test self-instituted forms of culture and politics … The event will bring together both conventional and non-conventional investigations including: performances, talks, lecture-performances, workshops, discussions, interventions, city walks, community works, actions and screenings. (Performance Biennial NO FUTURE 2016, n.p.)

For the first seven days NO FUTURE took place in the Green Park Café, but then decamped by ferry on 1 July to the island of Cythera, on the south eastern corner of the Peloponnese. For 11  days an intense programme of events, largely given titles around the term ‘performance’ (e.g. lecture performance, sound performance, instruction-based performance, durational performance, video performance and mere ‘performance’), took place with over 100 participants—mainly Greek but from other European countries too—flowing in and out of the proceedings. By 2015/16 the park itself had become an uncared-for site where refugees, the Greek homeless and drug addicts could find temporary, if highly precarious, refuge. On 28 September 2017, a mass rally of thousands of people gathered to protest about the abandonment of the park, calling upon the regional authority and the Greek government to solve the chronic problems of safety and cleanliness in one of the few remaining green sites in the capital.

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When I interviewed Gigi and Anestis in July 2017, they both, in different ways, conveyed a sense that a cycle of activities which had lasted with varying degrees of intensity for over seven years had come to a point of pause, contradiction or exhaustion. After the Embros occupation, Anestis had invested his energies in documentary performance projects and then been appointed co-director of Experimental Stage. Reflecting on the Embros experience, he said: It was at the same time both the best and worst experiences I have ever had. In order to have impact you needed a vibrant community around these actions and activities. And that at the same time was the end of the story. We had too many people and decisions had to be taken in assemblies. It became totally crazy and disorganised. (Azas 2017)

Anestis’ feelings, perhaps, speak of the frustrations entailed in decision-­ making within forms of participatory democracy and a desire to be more involved in the actual practices of theatre making. Gigi’s energetic involvement continued through into the Green Park activities and the two ambitious conferences of 2015 and 2016. At the same time, she was giving papers at academic and activist events across Europe and making her own performance work between these demands and those of being a key organiser within the Mavili Collective. Argyropoulou’s writings (2015a, b, 2017) variously provide her with a vehicle for reflection on the occupations and associated activist events. Particularly in ‘Critical Performance Spaces: Participation and Anti-Austerity Protests in Athens’ (2015), which was written and published before the end of the Green Park ‘reactivation’, she offers an account which suggests that the Mavili Collective was at the centre of a kind of heuristic laboratory (my word) for innovative political and performance practices, a space—often messy, confused and tempestuous—which sought to open and explore how participatory democracy might work in and through practice. An intersection between radical modes of participatory democracy and questionings around experimental performance practices. To sign this as a ‘laboratory’ is not to suggest that either Embros or Green Park were crucibles of dry and distanced academicism with little personal investment from the participants. In fact, the impulse for engagement in the Collective and its subsequent projects was usually propelled out of material need, the absence of funding and the difficulties entailed in finding studio, rehearsal or performance spaces. At Embros, during performance events, drinks were served for a voluntary

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donation and audience members brought food, drink and other resources to share. Beyond this, there was the continuous preoccupation with the privatisation of public and social space and civic behaviour and opportunities within such rapidly diminishing locations. Throughout Embros and Green Park, there was always an attempt to suggest that the models of participatory practice being tried out in these projects were potentially generalisable to wider structures of participation amongst all cultural workers. Towards the end of her essay, Gigi reflects somberly but generously on the work of the Collective and associated projects, whilst posing questions around the limits of participatory models of democratic practice, how they might resist incorporation by vested interests and the associated challenges of sustainability in times of great personal hardship. Gigi notes how the initial drive to establish Embros as a site for experiment and risk-taking in theatre and performance became replaced by other force fields and preoccupations. She writes:

Embros gradually transformed from an experimental performance space to an emergent ‘unpredictable subject’, giving rise to new public forms of self-­ management, participation and co-existence. The open, unstructured participatory format of the assembly appeared fruitful at first, as the decision-making and organisation of the space became a public matter of debate and contestation amongst participants. However, even though participants in the assemblies rejected time constraints and organisational rules as hegemonic, the free, open and unstructured form of the Embros assembly eventually created a field of potential manipulation. … Many artists and cultural workers including the Collective that initiated the occupation withdrew from Embros after instances of violent assemblies. Repeatedly confronted with the impossibility of finding common ground, they left space for those more experienced and organised in alternative political groups to gain precedence. (Argyropoulou 2015b)

Anna Tzakou: A Geopoetic Response to Ruination In a different corner of the Greek performance landscape, Anna Tzakou is a theatre maker, performer and researcher based in Athens. Anna completed her PhD in performance practice, employing a body-landscape methodology, at the University of Exeter in 2017, and I met her for a conversation in Athens during June 2018. She tells me that like for many Greek artists the economic and political crises her country were subjected to through the EU imposed strictures of austerity and privatisation raised important questions about collective identity at a time of huge national instability. The protest movements between 2011 and 2013, often located

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in and around Athens’ Syntagma Square, prompted Anna to question her existing performance practice and to shift its centre of gravity away from the studio to the outdoors. She locates her practice within the territories of contemplative dance, devising techniques and meditation, a creative process, she writes, ‘which concentrates on working without knowing, exploring the hidden as well as the impulsive and performing [more] from a place of responding than doing’ (Tzakou 2019a, n.p.). In 2012, she founded the performance group, ‘Geopoetics’, a cross-disciplinary arts collective for her practice-based doctoral research. Her website identifies the group’s practice as ‘environmental and site-specific walking performances in rural and urban landscapes to explore sites and places as collective experiences and reveal them as mythical narratives in the present moment’ (Tzakou 2019b, n.p.). However, the term also identified a methodology for her research and a frame for creative practice which Anna continues to work with today. Integral to this ‘Geopoetics’ paradigm is an exploration of what it means to be present in place and time and, for her, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness is critical to her site-specific performance practice. I was interested to understand how Anna’s performance work was shaped by the Greek crisis and the ruination of the Greek economy. She explained that her practice did not engage explicitly with either the narratives of the crisis or political responses to them, nor was she drawn specifically to abandoned or derelict urban sites in their own right. Rather, she said, because the macro events of the crisis […] were not giving me answers to the big pending narratives … I am interested in revealing through the experience of the body, hidden, buried, untold narratives of the place, demonstrating through the landscape of Athens a perpetual ruination of the city. (Tzakou 2019c)

In 2013, Anna created a piece of participatory and immersive walking performance in Athens which she called Topophilia and which elliptically, and ambiguously, given the state of this distressed and degraded city, means ‘love of place’. In 2016, a version of the piece was reprised for the Benaki Museum’s OUT[TOPIAS] event. The initial performance of Topophilia took a group of 15 participants along a route that traced the now buried path of the River Heridanos. The journey began at the Monastiraki metro station where they took the train to Thisseio and then followed the buried course of the river on foot until Iera Odos with participant-­spectators being asked to walk in silence between ten marking

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points along the route. For Anna, the walk aspired to evoke memories and feelings about a much loved city, but one which—at the time of the event—was now marked and wounded by anxieties, struggles and material decay. ‘It evolved’, she said, ‘into a practice of discovering loveliness amidst distress’ (Tzakou 2018b, n.p.). Topophilia engaged with the ruination of Athens by inviting participants, not to think about or to analyse the causes and contours of Greece’s currently desperate situation, but to engage directly, although without a forcing of attention, to the materialities and sensualities of the urban landscape they were passing through. Anna writes about Topophilia and other performances in an essay entitled ‘Walking as Meditation or How to Walk in Places of Emergency’ (Ibid.). The essay is a reflective meditation on a practice which interlaces the internal and external worlds of landscapes by ‘wandering through these sites of calamity, anger and despair’ (Ibid.), and, by so doing, reactivating connections with a city which most of the spectators had present cause to dislike and mistrust. It seemed productive to identify Anna’s practice over the last eight years as it offers a formally different response to other Athenian or Greek narratives presented in this chapter. Whilst eschewing a direct or transparent response to the crisis of Greece, her work seems to provide an opportunity for a more gently nuanced performative rejoinder, a dramaturgy which invites a visceral and unmediated connection to the landscape of the city and thus to unlock memories which had long been closed down. For Anna these walking practices provide ‘a performance container within which the spectator is enabled to process and re-examine her political, perceptual and emotional present’ (Ibid.). Elefsina, The Old Oil Mill and the Promise of European ‘City of Culture’ Elefsina (modern Greek) or Eleusis (ancient Greek) is a town and municipality in West Attica, about 20 kilometres from Athens at the northernmost end of the Saronic Gulf. In reality, it is a suburb within the wider Athens conurbation. The ancient Temple of Demeter, becoming the Sanctuary of Eleusis, was one of the great shrines of antiquity, its practices based upon the two goddesses, Demeter and Persephone. As a shrine, it was active between the seventh and fourth centuries BC. Much later, the Romans used the site until 395 AD when it was destroyed by the Visigoths. Since 1975, Elefsina has hosted the Aeschylia Festival which is held at

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‘Palaio Elaiourgeio’, a former soap factory, opened in 1875—often called the Old Oil Mill—by the seafront and overlooking huge oil refineries. The factory closed in 1960, and the site is now owned by the National Bank of Greece. The festival is organised in honour of the poet of tragedy, Aeschylus, who was born in Eleusis, and includes stage productions, art exhibitions, installations, concerts and dance performances. Surrounded by industry and post-industrial ruins, ancient Eleusis is rather off the tourist track, but the whole town and its environs are an absorbing meeting point between ancient antiquary, the modernity of twentieth-century industrialisation, the ruins and detritus left by Greek austerity and the radical mobility of global capitalism. Notwithstanding Greek austerity and the consequences of post-industrialisation, Elefsina is still an industrial area and the place where most of the crude oil in Greece is imported and refined. There is also a military airport a few kilometres east of the town. In July 2017, I had a stimulating conversation with actor and theatre director Simos Kakalas in an Athens café near the Acropolis. Simos had performed in the ancient Agora in Thessaloniki, but also told me about a theatre piece he directed in the derelict Oil Mill in Elefsina in 2010. During a visit to the site in 2017, I was shown around by an initially suspicious construction worker who then helpfully explained the original and present functions of the buildings. The site today is an example of many hundreds of fixed and frozen ruins, where the ongoing process of dereliction has temporarily, at least, been halted, made safe and ‘ruined’—ruining the ruin. It is palpably an empty shell of a once vibrant and productive work place, but now abandoned to a different order of working environment devoted to performance and other cultural activities. You would be unlikely to recognise this as a space which once processed olive oil and made soap. It is gutted of machinery, fittings and furnishings, leaving only bare floors and apparently stable walls and roofing. Although the empty buildings are all used for performance in different ways, on a bare area of land, there are also recently constructed banks of seating, three sides around a slightly raised stage area. The scaffolding type structures supporting the seating are evidently semi-permanent. Simos’ reflections on why and how he realised this work in a ruined factory building are revealing, not simply for what they say about his own dramaturgical intentions in this particular spatial context but for their resonance with many other theatre and performance projects in ruined locations. In 2010, he worked on the dramatisation of a fifteenth-century Venetian-Cretan poem, Apokopos by Bergadhis. Apokopos draws on Greek

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heritage, both secular and religious, with some inflections from Dante, and Simos’ vernacular adaptation was performed in Crete (Rethymnon) as well as Elefsina. Of the original poem and his Elefsina production, Simos notes: It’s an early Renaissance poem about someone falling asleep and having this dream about descending into the underworld and meeting dead people. Very beautiful. It was shot for video but was performed for a live audience … We had live music, walked through the spaces in the factory and used all the spaces there. … We needed a space that would enable or carry the ritual. We all had photos of our dead ancestors and everyone involved in the performance brought images of his or her dead grandmother or great grandmother. (Kakalas 2017)

Simos tells me that he was looking for a deserted factory which had been stripped of all machinery, ‘where nothing is there anymore’ (Ibid.), and this was because the poem and the subsequent performance is about the dead and the rituals we undertake in trying to remember them. For Simos this was a place of ghosts, although he is at pains to assure me that he does not actually believe in them, rather about what the human imagination and mind can create. He said: And that’s fascinating for me because ghosts are created like this, by the mind. It’s fascinating because if people believe in something then something is there. It’s an atmosphere. We hope that the audience will feel this presence. … Sometimes we tend to miss the mystic side because everything is explained. The magic of things. The moon is not cheese, but it would be great if it was. This is the surreal environment that art can create. If I go to a site-specific performance there has got to be a strong reason for the choice of site. … You are trying to breathe some life into the site, the building. It’s like the dead celebrate with you. I was searching for the ghosts in the rocks, in the ruins, in the dirt. (Ibid.)

I asked Simos if, when working with actors in the Old Oil Mill at Elefsina, he found himself directing them in a way which particularly related to the space. He replied: You always have to. You must relate to everything. It (the site) effects everything. You have to coordinate, to synthesize with the atmosphere, the sound is different in each place. So, yes, first of all we had to try to find the place of the sound, then work out how to use it. We found some really old tables and chairs and we made it our set. (Ibid.)

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At the end of our conversation I asked him why he thought there was a trend—a fashion—to make performance in ruined spaces. Despite the close attention Simos had paid to the dramaturgical choices enabled or proposed by this ruined factory, he wryly remarked that he felt it was something to do with the never-ending but increasingly desperate search for newness, to find somewhere or something untried and original: ‘a restless desire to make theatre different, spectacular, unusual … an exhaustion, too, perhaps, with current forms … but perhaps a trite exhaustion, a giving up’ (Ibid.)—an interesting conjunction between the potential novelty and freshness of the performance dramaturgy and a ruined site’s dereliction and loss of function, as if the very ruination of the location in question might enable and generate innovative and inventive dramaturgies of site relationships. Significantly, Mike Pearson says something very similar in the section which follows in this chapter. As a postscript to this example, subsequent to my visit to Elefsina, and conversation with Simos, I learned that in 2021 the town will become joint European Capital of Culture with Timișoara (Romania) and Novi Sad (Serbia). If the publicity hype and rhetoric are to be believed, this accolade has been received with great excitement by the citizens of Elefsina. The narratives around this announcement, and the plans for 2021, make for interesting reading in relation to the whole issue of cultural regeneration, ruination and the Greek imaginary, dissected so astutely by Hamilakis (2009). Without apparent irony, the programme leading up to 2021 has been signed as ‘Eleusis: the Living Museum … aspires to transform the entire city of Eleusis into a living and under constant renewal museum’ (Eleusis 2021 2019, n.p.). In close cooperation with the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens, over 500 students ‘supported by 13 professors’ (Ibid.) in the academic year of 2018–2019 made Eleusis 2021 their field of study and presented dozens of projects to change and rehabilitate the sea front, original quarries, the ‘Iris’ paint industry complex, the oil mill and the ancient archaeological shrines. Here, Eleusis 2021 has become a case study and laboratory for academics and their students in which to imagine, propose and plan an alternative future for the town and its surrounding environment. It is not explained if the existing inhabitants of the town are sharing in this process and how their voices and hopes are being heard. Whilst it is churlish not to wish Elefsina well in this ambitious project, it appears—from the outside at least—to be a case study, a concentrated experiment in twenty-first-­ century tourism and heritage management and planning. Here the

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Fig. 7.2  Old Oil Mill (performance space), Elefsina, Greece. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

perceived solution to the ills which have befallen Elefsina over the last few decades lies in the cultural industries. Maria Korachai writing for the website GREECE IS summarises the cultural, social and economic reasons behind Elefsina’s claims to this award: Elefsina has gone from being one of the most sacred cities of antiquity … to one of the most polluted and down at heel districts in the Attica region. Marred by unfettered industrial development, today it is a graveyard for abandoned factories and decommissioned ships and also one of the few municipalities that agreed to host a refugee reception centre. (Korachai 2016, n.p.)

As a short curriculum vitae for cultural capital status, Elefsina seems well qualified indeed. As subject and object of post-industrialisation and neoliberal politico-economic policies, there are thousands of Elefsinas across the world, all possessing variations on the profile which this town can offer. Where Elefsina differs is that it hosts a refugee reception centre and also possesses great antiquarian riches of cultural capital in the Temple of Demeter and its accompanying shrines. Antiquities, unlike Delphi, Olympia or Epidaurus, for example, have not yet become a major part of tourists’ ruin-gazing itinerary. Significantly, in this context, it is the ancient Eleusis

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Fig. 7.3  Old Oil Mill (temporary theatre seating) Elefsina, Greece. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

Fig. 7.4  Old Oil Mill (ceramic installation) Elefsina, Greece. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

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rather than the modern Greek Elefsina which gives its name to one of the three 2021 European Cities of Culture. In July of 2018, Elefsina hosted the International Summer School of Ancient Greek Drama, not only as part of the programme leading up to 2021 but also as a key player within the Greek Ministry of Culture’s newly launched Network of Ancient Greek Drama. Since its selection, Elefsina has also become the focus of much activity around heritage management, planning and evaluation. Between 21 and 23 September 2017, a conference organised by the Heritage Management Organisation (HERITAGE) assembled international speakers to examine and discuss the unfolding development of the Eleusis project, particularly around the future of ruins. HERITAGE posed four questions about monuments as ruins to guide the thinking of conference participants and speakers.

September 2017 Conference on Heritage Management: questions and issues: 1. RUINS OF WHAT/AS WHAT? Where theoretical issues of identity, relation of parts and wholes as well as the authenticity of monuments in relation to their remaining material substance and other theoretical issues on ruins were the main focus. 2. RUINS FOR WHAT/WHERE? Focus was put on the purposes, criteria, hierarchies and decision making in the preservation of ruinous monuments through case studies of theory and practice in ruins management. 3. RUINS FOR WHOM? The different approaches of stakeholders and experts alike in relation to the empathy to ruins, ruins of own or other culture, interpretation of part in relationto the whole and management strategies to accentuate, remedy, mitigate or even celebrated the fragmented condition of the ruin. This session referred to sociological, anthropological, psychological approaches. 4. RUINS HOW? Here the ruination processes, the subsequent functioning of ruins and the diverse methods of documentation, technologies of stabilization and presentation to the public, were the main issues discussed. (Heritage Management Conference 2017, n.p.)

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In Eleusis 2021 we can identify an interesting conjunction between the ancient and modern ruin; between cultural capital as a central part of the Greek imaginary and as economic regeneration through the industry of heritage; between the vocational educational programme of the Archaeology students and staff at the Technical University of Athens; and more critical and reflective enquiries under the academic mantle of Ruins Studies. Whether these juxtapositions offer space for critical thought and action of the kind enabled by the Mavili Collective and the Embros and Green Park activities remains uncertain. The ambitions for Eleusis 2021 are considerable and articulated by the town’s mayor Giorgos Tsoukalis like this: We are not just talking about a tourism revival. The issue at hand is how we can introduce a sense of culture into every facet of life, to transform both the town itself and its residents. It’s about improving our streets, introducing more spaces for pedestrians and bicycles, about respecting public space and our neighbours. Our ambition is to become a model town, to inspire residents to adopt new habits. (Tsoukalis qtd in Korachai 2016, n.p.)

Once again, summoning iconography and narratives from Greek antiquary, the publicity for Eleusis 2021 talks of Elefsina as ‘a melting pot of different cultures and mindsets’ (Korachai 2016), of nurturing a ‘culture of hospitality from early on’ and reflecting the etymology of its name which ‘stems from the Greek word for arrival, “elefsis”’ (Ibid.) North Beyond Athens: Thessaloniki My fieldwork in July 2017 took me to Thessaloniki in the north of the country and Greece’s second city. Always an important transport hub for South East Europe, the Balkans and Greece itself, Thessaloniki was once the second largest and wealthiest city in the Ottoman Empire and was only returned to Greece in 1912. It is particularly renowned for its Byzantine antiquaries, but also Roman and Sephardic Jewish monuments. Over the last three decades, Thessaloniki has become an important cultural centre hosting an annual International Film Festival, an Art and Performance Biennale, a Documentary Festival, the largest annual Pride events in Greece and in 2014 was designated European Youth Capital. Here I met Demosthenes Agrafiotis, a retired Sociology professor, but currently an energetically prolific poet, curator, artist and champion of Greek Dada

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artist, Thanos Murray-Velloudios. Demosthenes had co-curated with Irene Papakonstantis the first Performance Festival within Thessaloniki’s second Biennale in 2009. Themed as ‘Praxis: Art in Times of Uncertainty’, live art and other performance events took place in sites across the city including disused and decaying warehouses, the old Ice Chambers and the Kodra Barracks, abandoned at the end of the Colonels’ regime in 1974. This and subsequent biennales have offered participants an invitation to re-look with a fresh perspective at the complex structures—domestic, commercial and public—and cultural layers of a medium-sized European city in the midst of long-term economic crisis. Nine years later, the sixth Biennale in 2018 built upon earlier aspirations to pursue models of cocuration, and the diffusion of contemporary art across the city, in order to explore notions of ‘home’ at a time when the concept and practice of family and community are rendered hugely tentative and uncertain. The Biennale 2018 webpage identifies its aspirations thus: Taking today’s increasing immigrant influx as its starting point, the 6th Thessaloniki Biennale focuses on the fluidity and continuous redefinition of the notion of “home”. The topics upon which the research and formation of the artistic, educational, and exhibition programs are based are therefore: the contemporary diaspora; identities; the emerging feelings of familiarity; new practices of assimilation, acceptance, and co-existence that correspond to alternative understandings of gender, religion, family, and community in the widest sense possible. (Thessaloniki Biennale 2018)

Demosthenes walked me around parts of the city and took me to the partially disused and crumbling covered market in the city centre where, perhaps, 80 per cent of stalls/shops are now closed pending the demolition of the building and the site’s sale to a real estate company. We had lunch in a tiny café within the market and spoke of performance, ruination and how this site of working-class shopping and sociability was being sacrificed to the desires and business ambitions of a property developer. He showed me a café now abandoned and closed where music and song were performed on a regular basis by and for market stallholders. The café had only recently shut down, the bands and singers continuing as the market became more and more desolate. The following day I met Damianos Konstantinidis and his student interpreter, Valentino. Damianos is a theatre director, writer and Professor of Acting in the School of Drama at Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University

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and had directed and devised performance work in the derelict and long since deserted Kodra Barracks. The Kodra buildings and corrugated iron huts have been used sporadically since 2000 to host art exhibitions, theatre and live art. The buildings are particularly associated with the regime of the military junta (‘the Colonels’) between 1967 and 1974, but were finally abandoned by the Greek army in 1994. In 2004, with his company Angelus Novus, and as part of the Action Field Arts Festival (2004–2008), Damianos adapted Takis Sinopoulos’ (1917–1981) poem, Supper for the dead. Sinopoulos had been active in resisting both the Metaxas fascist regime (1936–1941) and later the Military Junta, and Damianos identified the ruined Kodra Camp as a resonant site in which to adapt and perform this poem. The narrative of the poem deals with the Greek Civil War, and Damianos set the piece in the Camp’s storage space within the original bunkhouse and with the play-within-the-play conceit of actors performing soldiers performing the play. Damianos said that the degeneration and dilapidation of the site offered a scenographic frame for the sense of decay inherent in the original poem. He suggests that The space contributes to the mood of the play. It connects to the world of the characters and the site itself is living proof that we live in a world where things fall apart, they grow old and are abandoned. So you feel more connected to the characters. A real space carries memories and its own history Fig. 7.5  Thessaloniki covered market awaiting demolition, 2017. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

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Fig. 7.6  Thessaloniki covered market (abandoned music cafe), 2017. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

Fig. 7.7  Thessaloniki Kodra Barracks (theatre space). (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

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Fig. 7.8  Thessaloniki Kodra Barracks installation. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

Fig. 7.9  Thessaloniki Kodra Barracks. (Image: Simon Murray 2017)

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and this contributes to the theatricality of the performance. In the play it’s as if the soldiers who lived here had died and they are coming back as ghosts to tell you their stories. (Konstantinidis 2017)

There are interesting similarities here with how Simon Kakalas talks about his production in the Old Oil Mill in Elefsina. For Damianos, although the play itself is political, it is his use of this particular space, with the history of the Greek Military embedded within it, which is a political act. He says: When we had the dictatorship here in Greece these buildings were used as prisons where people were tortured, so it carries that memory. And people coming to watch the play knew that history so it makes the text become more intense as an experience instead of just watching something from a distance so to speak. (Ibid.)

Beyond Athens: From the Argos Festival to Universal Topos Finally, to finish this section, a passing glance at a series of events led and curated by dramaturg, theatre critic and essayist Eleni Varopoulou in the Peloponnese. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the last Argos Festival, which ran for four years between 1993 and 1997, Varopoulou curated and directed Universal Topos, a project of installations, performances, talks and art works in ancient and contemporary monuments, archaeological sites and disused factories in the Mycenae, Argos and Argolid Region. Within the period (3–9 July 2017) and under the title of Microphysics of Ruins, three workshops were undertaken. The first (Seeing, Walking, Speaking) used techniques and insights of performance studies and archaeology to explore the rural-urban spaces of the area, industrial ruins, and their remaining plant and machinery left as detritus when capital abandoned these sites and moved on. The second and third workshops used the decaying factories of Pelargos as sites to stimulate art works and performance, transforming ravaged corners and rough environments into dynamic hosts for a variety of artistic practices. The participants included students and residents, farmers and other workers from the region who collectively investigated questions and answers to queries about farming, harvesting, working conditions and the rituals of everyday life. These participants, along with the artists, temporarily occupied the two abandoned factories and also explored another ruined space that became operational as a museum of memory, a site to reveal the aesthetics of wear and tear. Universal Topos was supported and financed by the Peloponnese Region,

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the Regional Section of Argolida, the Municipality of Nafplion and the Association of Agricultural Cooperatives of Argolida. This unusual combination of sponsors appears to speak of a willingness amongst organisations, whose primary purpose was not cultural, to engage with arts and performance practices in the spirit of stubborn resistance to the conditions of austerity engendered by the EU ‘bail out’. Petros Tatoulis of the Peloponnese Prefecture put it like this: The project is an intervention, aiming to mobilise citizens into a subversive yet creative logic, in order to develop a necessary collective consciousness. (Tatoulis 2017, n.p.)

Tatoulis’ language suggests the harnessing of cultural projects within times and spaces of ruination as tools to mobilise and develop a different and more subversive consciousness. As such, there are clear associations here with the Athens projects identified above and others described throughout this volume. Gathering Threads: Reflections on Reactivating Greek Ruins, Ancient and Modern Read together, this chapter and Chap. 3, which focused on antiquarian ruins and the Greek imaginary, have tried to encapsulate the debates and tensions between the cultural capital embodied in classical ruination and the exigencies of modern ruins and what they have afforded for contemporary artists within the landscape of twenty-first-century Greece. The ‘crisis’—a term which many people felt had become a rather debased currency—since 2009 has brought into stark relief the lack of value and affirmation which Greece has placed on contemporary art practices. ‘Artists have always been in crisis’ was the kind of mantra I heard repeated in various contexts. Writer and curator Iliana Fokianaki put it like this: ‘There is no infrastructure. The Ministry of Culture is completely infatuated with ancient culture. Even in the past there was very little money for contemporary culture, not just visual art’ (Fokianaki qtd. in Davis 2015, n.p.). In support of Documenta3 2017 being sited in Athens as well as Kassel, Helena Papadopoulou who runs Radio Athenes, an institute for the advancement of contemporary visual art, says something similar:

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Greece has always focused on its ancient heritage at the expense of contemporary art. What Documenta has done is emancipate the scene and energise people, and create a curiosity for Athens as a place where contemporary art can be enjoyed. It has been hugely positive. (Papadopoulou qtd. in Smith 2017, n.p.)

Papadopoulou’s view of Documenta was not shared by a considerable number of Greek artists and activists who felt ignored and sidelined by its appearance in the city during the summer of 2017. For the organisers and curator of Documenta, sharing its presence (for the first time) between the habitual host city of Kassel in Germany and Athens was an act of restitution at a time when Greek resentment and antipathy towards Germany as the main instigator of the EU’s debt repayment settlement. For Documenta to be shared with Athens was felt by the organisers to be a productive opportunity for artists to ‘explore the global complexities of possession and dispossession, displacement and debt’ (Ibid.). The presence of Documenta in Athens over the summer of 2017, and the stormy debates which it generated, seemed to offer a crystallisation of the country’s arguments and experiences over the previous ten years, an allegory for the role of culture, and its transformative possibilities and limitations, within a palpably ruined landscape. The Mavili Collective’s reactivation of the Embros Theatre and its role in Green Park and—later—the designation of Elefsina as a 2021 European City of Culture are all examples of these fractious discourses actually being performed through practice. In very different ways, Embros/Green Park and Eleusis 2021 are both strategic cultural responses to ruination. In a closing plenary presentation at a conference (November 2017)—BEYOND THE RUIN: Investigating the fragment in English Studies—organised by the English Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Apostolos Lampropoulos4 began by saying Today I shall be walking through contemporary ruins such as empty buildings and abandoned airports. I will also be dealing with fragments of the lives of the numerous others who have recently been in the vicinity of these buildings and ourselves, leaving behind them material fragments such as musical instruments, toys, bicycles and clothes, but also snapshots of their faces, voices and odours. (Lampropoulos 2017, p. 1)

Lampropoulos’ learned and provocative paper examined ideas, practices and the limitations of ‘hospitality’ within and between communities of

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artists and refugees leading up to and during the Documenta event in Athens earlier in 2017. Central to his argument was the claim that the Greek crisis had not only ‘found its place in the landscape of contemporary art’ (Ibid) but also ‘become one of the major sites of theoretical activity and the crossroads of several political, social, art, cultural and anthropological theories’ (Ibid., p.  2). His paper posed awkward but thoughtful questions to artists who claimed the same identities of dispossession and marginalisation as the refugees passing through Greece from North Africa, Syria and Afghanistan. This conference, and Lampropoulos’ paper in particular, took its place alongside other cultural and performative events over ten years from 2008, which I have identified in this chapter. This period has played out a range of positions and arguments about ruined locations— both ancient and modern—and their ability to host cultural events. Cultural activities which, on the one hand, have sustained the Greek imaginary for thousands of years and, on the other, have sought to challenge and reconfigure such hegemonic practices and belief systems. The deep texture of these debates might be expressed at one end of a scale by this graffiti found in many public places leading up to Documenta 2017 (Fig. 7.10).

Fig. 7.10  Wall graffiti signed by ‘The People’, Omonia Square, Athens. August 2016. (Image: Simon Murray 2016)

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From a rather different perspective within this cultural landscape, I learned from Anna Tzakou about a performance event (curated by Paris Legakis and others) which had taken place early in June 2018  in and around Exarcheia Square called Project Birds. Here on the rooftops of buildings around Exarcheia a project of experiencing (sensing, watching, listening to) the sunset of the city and its birds. At sunset, on 60 different rooftops around the square, musicians played music—percussion, keyboards, violins—and improvised in a kind of ‘call and response’ form. Exarcheia has had a troubled and edgy history and long been a symbol of anti-establishment opposition, but is now rapidly becoming gentrified, and, as in much of central Athens the ubiquitous presence of Airbnb, generates great controversy. It was here in 1973 that the Athens Polytechnic uprising took place, and more recently in 2008, a 15-year-old boy was shot dead by the police during protests. Today Exarcheia is still a multicultural focus for cultural and political activities but seems more tranquil, with bars, restaurants and a very popular Saturday food market. For Anna, this improvised rooftop concert with music from many cultural traditions was a statement of openness, of integration in a still riven city, a moment of collective listening. Here, a less bitter response to art’s relationship with ruination than the message contained in the ‘Dear Documenta …’ street art pictured above. Here, a more communal and collaborative set of possibilities, as this statement from the Project Birds group suggests: We would like to integrate the concept of neighborhood and the relationship among the people who live in the same place, as a topic for experimentation for all the musicians. Concepts such as “symphonia” (agreement), “accompaniment” and “disagreement” are key words upon which we invite the musicians to free their imagination and to take us with them, as individuals and as a whole, into a unique journey. We are looking for the hidden harmony. (Project Birds 2018)

My work in Greece over the last four years revealed many of the issues which occur in various guises and other geographical contexts throughout the rest of the book. Contemporary Greece from 2009 has particularly illustrated that, notwithstanding extraordinary personal and social distress, ruinous times may also afford particular configurations of creative opportunity which in turn can trigger affirmative and progressive disturbances across the cultural landscape. Within these narratives, the role of the artist in dark times constantly appears as the subject of debate and contestation.

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The case of Documenta 2017 in both Athens and Kassel offers a case study of the tension between art as cultural colonialism or as a tool for material and immaterial reactivation and reconstruction. In Stuart Hall’s phrase, the ‘present conjuncture’ in this country seems to offer possibilities for re-shaping and refining the Greek imaginary.

Brith Gof: Performing Occupations The concept and varied practices of ‘occupation’ feature in different but associated forms in all three sections of this chapter. The occupations of the Embros Theatre and Green Park Café in contemporary Athens, the occupations of the Gdansk and Govan shipyards (see section below), and the occupations of disused factories in South Wales are differently nuanced and performed, but also suggest a number of common immaterial features. All propose a temporary taking over of buildings for alternative purposes to their original intended usage, and all, to a greater or lesser extent, hint at a sense of political purpose or protest in the action of occupation. I write here about Mike Pearson and Brith Gof, the company he co-­ created with Lis Hughes Jones in 1981,5 not to offer an extensive profile of either man or company, but because a considerable amount of the work undertaken by Brith Gof over this period was in abandoned, disused and sometimes palpably ruined sites. That these locations were both urban and rural renders Brith Gof’s practice unusual, but also reminds us that economic decline and change are not peculiar to city conurbations, although they may be played out in very different formations. In ways that I will explore below, these productions, whether sited in the remote rural locations of West Wales, or in the ex-industrial heartlands of Cardiff, Tredegar or Glasgow, are in various ways—manifest or implicit—responses to the political and economic circumstances of the time(s). In addition, these practices offer productive perspectives on the complex and often elastic dramaturgical relationships to the ruined sites which Pearson and his fellow collaborators—particularly Cliff McLucas,6 Michael Shanks7 and Mike Brookes8—proposed for each of these works. Before establishing Brith Gof, Pearson had been a member of RAT Theatre (1972–1973) and the Cardiff Laboratory Theatre (1973–1980). During this early period, he had embraced highly physical approaches to performance and was influenced by the work and corporeally disciplined training regimes of Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) and Eugenio Barba (1936–). While never constrained by these methods, Pearson’s theatre and performance making has

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always celebrated and pushed at the performer’s gesture, action and physicality as a central component of the performance event. In reflecting on the array of sites that Brith Gof occupied in the name of performance for over 20 years—disused factories, a functioning sand quarry, an ice hockey stadium, derelict and desolate farm buildings, forests and railway stations, for example—I am struck by what at first sight seems to be a paradox. One the one hand, a sensual acknowledgement and deep respect for the narratives, histories, conflicts and behaviours embodied within the chosen site, yet, on the other, a refusal to be reverential or over-­ awed by the location, however architecturally arresting or historically resonant. A willingness to work with and accept the materialities of the site is implicit whilst at the same time harnessing it as an opportunity to configure and perform narratives not immediately connected to the place in question. In so far as many of Brith Gof’s performances were in and around abandoned, disused and derelict sites, the dramaturgies which Pearson and his collaborators constructed resonate with what in the contextual Chap. 2 of this volume I described as the affordance and enabling properties of the ruin. Here, ruin is understood to be work in process, a shifting and porous receptacle of meaning and possibility. Never fixed or prescribed in what it offers the performance maker, and always a material, semiotic and visceral palimpsest affording a startling range of cultural occupations for the artist who dares to intrude and intervene in its past, present and future life. For Pearson, to regard a chosen site for performance as one that reveals multiple dramaturgical possibilities is not an act of betrayal or disavowal, but one that acknowledges and celebrates the deep, complex and often riven life of the location in question. Too tight a relationship between performance and building or location is likely to push the event towards the more creatively circumscribed territory of theatrical reconstruction—‘costume drama’ as Pearson (2019) puts it—whilst a more elastic affiliation opens up a wider range of performance possibilities. A striking manifestation of the dispositions and processes described above were two Brith Gof productions—Tri Bywyd (Three Lives) (1995) and Prydain: The Impossibility of Britishness (1996)—directed by Pearson and McLucas. These marked the beginning of the end of Pearson and McLucas’ creative collaboration within the company; McLucas was to die in 2002. Cathy Turner and Mike Pearson (2018, pp.  93–107) write a reflective essay on the relationships and potential tensions between the architectural dramaturgies of material space and those of the embodied

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physical performer working in such circumstances. The authors pursue these issues in relation to Prydain. Prior to the making and performing of this production, McLucas had received funding to buy three scaffolding cubes. These were inspired by the designs of the French-Swiss architect, Bernard Tschumi. The idea, says Pearson, was to roll them across the world and wherever we had the opportunity they would be used to stage work … there was a problem of stability so making work with them was rather difficult, but the skeletal design of the cubes somehow continued the notion of letting the dereliction be apparent. (Pearson 2019)

Two of the cubes were used for Tri Bywyd staged at Esgair Faith, a ruined farm in West Wales, and were positioned within the derelict farmhouse to suggest three different architectural staging spaces: the remaining structure of the farmhouse itself and each of the two cubes. The three spaces hosted different stories, although those framed by the cubes had no direct connection with the site and its history. The cube narratives concerned the plight of two young women: Sarah Jacobs, the ‘fasting girl of Llandysul’9 (Pearson and Shanks 2001, p.  160), and Lynette White, a prostitute murdered in Cardiff in 1988. Jacobs allegedly fasted for over two years (1867–1868) and became a tourist spectacle. The veracity of her fasting was eventually challenged and she was placed under the surveillance of four nurses. After ten days she had starved herself to death, aged 11. Following White’s death in Cardiff’s docklands, three local black men were convicted of her murder. Seven years later, the men were freed as it became clear that their trial and conviction were a gross miscarriage of justice. The actual ruins of Esgair Faith hosted a fictional account—performed by an elderly local couple—of a largely unspoken phenomenon in Welsh rural life and beyond, namely the suicides of male farmers. Such details suffice for this account but indicate the complex interweaving of spatial, material and human dramaturgies within Tri Bywyd and which also included recorded sound tapes and various lighting effects. Pearson provides a short account of the spectators’ experience: They arrived at dusk, taking nearly half an hour in the coaches to follow the forest tracks to the site, several miles from road and amenities. From the old quarry they picked their way over a rise, past the generators, towards the lighting rigs, into the conifers and the planked seating, set raked into the trees. Before them a picturesque a ruin as could be, but transected by two rigidly geometric cubes of steel tubing, two storeys high, floored and lit,

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transparent architectures to accompany the stone walls and gable ends. (Pearson and Shanks 2001, p. 159)

Tri Bywyd provides a salient account of how one approach to sited performance has complex and layered relationships with its ruined host. As with the company’s work in abandoned urban sites, ‘the dereliction was apparent but never pointed to. We never particularly alluded to the material ruin of the farmhouse’ (Pearson 2019). The stories of Jacob and White had no literal connection to this site but spoke allusively of a kind of tragically grotesque human ruination in the case of the former. Within the White narrative, there is perhaps a double ruination at play: the physically dangerous dereliction of Cardiff’s docklands where she was murdered in the late 1980s, and later the ruinous consequences of a racially generated injustice: the conviction of three black men for her murder. The suicide narrative had a spatial anchoring in the ruined farmhouse, but only in the sense that this particular farmhouse was standing in for many hundreds like it, places where exhausted, hope-less and lonely farmers might decide to take their own lives. Here, the desolate farmhouse was not the set for a heritage re-enactment, but offered a visceral experience, a sense of ruination and ruined lives without any heavy-handed signposting. Nonetheless, the material presence and staging of the ruined farmhouse invited spectators to take note of the precarious nature of hill farming, only rendered (temporarily) stable by virtue of government or European Union subsidies and therefore always at risk to fluctuations in such support. Beyond this, the farmhouse was made strange and visually and semiotically unsettled by the presence of the cubes (modern and unruined) which framed very different stories. Pearson encapsulates their tactics: Tri Bywyd, site-specific representation as evocation, suggests approaches which can embrace the multitemporality of place and juxtapose different orders of material and alternative interpretations simultaneously, whilst revealing site continuously. Performance is certainly a medium within which meanings and identities are constantly represented, contested and inverted, the best medium perhaps within which to represent heterotopia. (Ibid, pp. 161–2)

One of Brith Gof’s signature and most renowned productions was Gododdin, first performed in the engine-shop of the disused Rover car factory in Cardiff in 1988, and subsequently in an Italian quarry, an abandoned German crane factory, an unoccupied Danish ice hockey stadium

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and in Glasgow’s Tramway. At the Tramway (1989) Gododdin marked almost the first performance in this abandoned tram repair shed after it was officially rescued for Peter Brook’s Mahabharata in 1988. Gododdin and some of Brith Gof’s subsequent large-scale performances in ruined industrial sites such as Pax (1989–1991) and Haearn (1992) were propelled by anger and despair at the effects on civic and industrial life of Margaret Thatcher and her government’s dismantling of manufacturing industry during the 1980s. For the artistic teams of Brith Gof and their sonic collaborators, Test Dept. (see Chap. 5), Gododdin represented an explicit cry of fury at what seemed to be happening to Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom as a result of ‘Thatcherism’. Pearson puts it like this: One has to begin by imagining the political situation in the 1980s. The Thatcherite policy to dismantle heavy industry. We felt there was very little artistic response to that moment of high Thatcherism. That was why Brith Gof made the approach to Test Dept. to try to make something, and initially I assumed we were going to make some kind of agitprop performance together. And somehow Gododdin appeared, but it did seem part of a political response to occupy one of those spaces of abandonment. (Pearson 2019)

In Pearson and Shanks’ Theatre Archaeology (2001, p. 102) a section heading on the Gododdin project is entitled ‘Performance as Political Theatre’. Through this subtitle, the authors are signing both the political dimension of Brith Gof’s occupation of the Rover factory and that, although the experience of Gododdin for spectators was undoubtedly highly ‘theatrical’, they were not watching a piece of conventional drama. Pearson deliberately choses to call the event ‘performance’. The production, based on the epic Welsh language poem Y Gododdin (transcribed during the sixth century AD), offered a loose narrative in so far as it told the story—an elegy—of a slain gang of 300 Celtic warriors defending an area of what we would now call South East Scotland (near Edinburgh) against the invading Angles in the sixth century AD. Including sung fragments of the poem, recorded soundtrack, percussion, bagpipes and extreme physical actions, Gododdin transformed the space with 30 wrecked cars, 600 tons of sand, 50 trees and a set that flooded as the performance progressed. Aside from the story itself, I was interested particularly in how Brith Gof related in practice to the built, but decaying environment of the factory. As with Tri Bywyd, the company’s relationship to the site was at

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one level deeply shaped by the actual material setting of this massive building, but, at the same time, almost distant and disrespectful of it. Pearson and Shanks identify this relationality as follows: The design was thus a juxtaposition of that which was of the place – cars, neon, metal – and that which was brought to the place – trees, sand, water. As a total designed environment it was from time to time indifferent to, and in conflict with, not only its host site, but also with the activities pursued within it. The spectators were free to move throughout the space … (2001, p. 104)

Few concessions were made towards the comfort of either spectators or performers: there was no heating in the building, and there were no attempts to smooth over what remained of the jagged and rough qualities of what was once a site where engines were constructed. In addition, during preparation and rehearsal, the roof and fittings of the building were regularly being illegally stripped by unseen gangs. Pearson remarked to me that ‘the temperature on performance nights was zero which is why you see all the bodies steaming in the video. But we made no attempt to hide that’ (Pearson 2019). In Brith Gof’s large-scale works in abandoned or derelict spaces, there is no attempt to disguise or dress the built environment—to manipulate it into being something else—but at the same time the site is not harnessed dramaturgically to support and develop the narrative being performed. It seems to me that however much the site offers a raw and brutal presence in scale and materiality in these productions, it remains dramaturgically ambiguous, open to interpretation and often contestable in its meanings. Later in our 2019 conversation, Pearson reflected more generally about the allure of working in ruined spaces and said: I do wonder if the attraction is that their state of dereliction or abandonment almost meets a kind of work which is trying to assemble itself within that occupancy and the hope that those two things meet in the middle, come together. (Ibid.)

Brith Gof could do nothing to halt the inexorable enforced ruination of the Rover factory, but through the course of its ‘occupation’, its creative processes and transactions with audiences were temporarily working against the grain of entropy and momentarily reversing the building’s inexorable decline.

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Between 1991 and 1996 Brith Gof made three more large-scale performances in industrial or urban sites of varying degrees of decay and dereliction: PAX (1991), Haearn (1992) and Prydain: The Impossibility of Britishness (1996), and these have been documented and analysed in various publications (Pearson and Shanks 2001; Pearson 2010; Roms 2004; Pearson and Turner 2018). For Pearson, during this period, apart from making work in sites which speak bleakly but eloquently of the political conditions of the time, there was pleasure and excitement at the way in which such massive buildings allowed him and his collaborators to work at scale. It seems that the magnitude of the destructive forces unleashed by Thatcher and her government needed to be matched by performance dramaturgies which were loud, angry, cacophonous, often fiercely energetic and scenographically immense. I am reminded again of Rose Macaulay’s comment that the ‘Ruin is always over-stated … part of the ruin-drama staged perpetually in the human imagination’ (1953, p.  100). Quiet, detailed and intimate black box studio practice could not do the same job of work and did not fit with the temper of the times. Equally, the old strategies of agitprop theatre felt inadequate to the task. Although these three works were made after Thatcher had been replaced as Prime Minister, the punitive destruction of manufacturing industries and their enveloping communities had already become an integral part of the wider forces of neo-liberalism—forces which have framed and driven political economies across the world ever since. PAX, originally staged in the St David’s Concert Hall in Cardiff within which 29 men over 17  hours (Pearson 2010, p.  69) reconstructed to scale the aisle of a Gothic cathedral, was later reconceived in the disused Harland and Wolff workshop in Glasgow’s Govan, and finally on Aberystwyth railway station in October of 1991. Whilst the station was still functioning at the time of the performance, Pearson looks back fondly (2019) to this event and notes wryly that the area where PAX was staged is now a branch of the pub chain, Wetherspoons.10 Haearn was only performed in a disused iron foundry in the South Wales town of Tredegar in October 1992. As with Gododdin and PAX, no attempt was made to transform the building although some fire doors had to be knocked through one of the outer walls. Pearson recounts how they discovered that the former steel workers, now unemployed by the closure of the plant, had organised themselves and insisted upon the right to provide casual labour at fixed rates. He adds that

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The most salutary moment came when we wanted to use the mobile gantry crane that travelled up and down the building. Of course the only man who knew how to drive it was the operator who had been made redundant five years earlier. So he came back and performed that role in the actual production. (Pearson 2019)

An interesting relational conjuncture here is between the closed and degenerating building, the artistic team of Brith Gof, the spectators and the unemployed steel workers who used to occupy this space. Prydain (1996) became the company’s final large-scale occupation of an industrial site. Through demolition and redevelopment such buildings were becoming scarcer and less accessible, but more importantly, one senses that Pearson and McLucas had reached the end of these large-scale collaborative projects. The piece was performed in an abandoned industrial warehouse in Cardiff, a space which lacked the resonant and ‘rich histories’ (Pearson and Turner 2018, p. 99) of the decaying buildings that had hosted Gododdin, Haearn and the desolate rural site of Tri Bywyd. Pearson and Shanks write that the piece was ‘part-building site, part-­ performance, part-concert  – a hybrid of action, music, architecture and audience participation for five performers, ten technicians, two music groups’ (Pearson and Shanks 2001, p. 106). The piece became one that was constructed as it was performed, indeed, the act of construction was the performance. At the same time, the building was being dismantled, again illegally, as the company’s rehearsals progressed. During rehearsal, on separate nights both the shipping container and the truck were broken into and all the technical gear stolen. Rendering virtue from necessity, the setting up for the performance—the arrival into the space of musicians, performers, technical equipment and other kit—became the show itself. After 23 years, Pearson recounts the story to me quite calmly, but I can sense that this particular event and, indeed, all the other large-scale works ‘were always a struggle’ (Pearson 2019). Writing 22 years later, Pearson with academic and dramaturg Cathy Turner reflect honestly—and for Pearson, perhaps painfully—on the divergent aesthetic and dramaturgical approaches which were becoming apparent between him and McLucas. Whilst these differences hold no particular fascination for this book, the tensions (creative or otherwise) between the dramaturgies of material architecture and those of the live actions of the performer are, arguably, present in all theatre, but are especially acute in the large-scale site-specific events which epitomised Brith Gof’s work between the late 1980s and the

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mid-1990s. In the context of this writing, the issue becomes focused on the relative power of material ruination, dereliction and decay within the hosted cultural event. Apparently, these strains—conceptual, dramaturgical and practical—between Pearson and McLucas were emerging in previous work, but in Prydain became interwoven with the macro politics of the piece, namely the political dynamics of centre and periphery made concrete by the experience of a stateless nation—Wales—confronted by the disabling power of the British state and the role of human agency within this struggle. Central to the piece were issues of national identity and how productively to problematise these through large-scale performance. For Pearson, the issue had become, it seemed, the tension between the potentially incapacitating power of architecture within a performance context and the enabling agency of the performers and their role within the whole event. For McLucas, deeply influenced by Tschumi, architecture drives the script and the work of the actors (Pearson and Turner 2018, p.  101), whilst for Pearson, steeped as he is in the traditions of physical theatre, it is the embodied agency of the performer which propels the performance event. Pearson and Turner suggest that it might be that Pearson and McLucas’s apprehensions of performance are best regarded as located at either end of Tschumi’s ‘arrows of power’  – McLucas working from space towards event and Pearson from event towards space  – rendering further collaboration difficult. (Pearson and Turner 2018, p. 102)

Pearson left Brith Gof after Prydain in 1997. Until his death in 2002, McLucas continued to create events in empty and abandoned spaces (often farmhouses and outbuildings), particularly with performer, Eddie Ladd. Whilst still often preoccupied with the performative possibilities of sites outwith conventional theatre spaces, Pearson’s practice since then has ranged from the intimate and small scale to spatially ambitious work as director with the National Theatre of Wales (NTW). Given the abundant and varied nature of his work, it is impossible to summarise all of Pearson’s projects here, although a preoccupation with the politics of space, landscape and the environment and their intersections with personal and collective memory seem never to be far from the surface. A commitment to investigating the forgotten, the ignored and empty places ‘off the map’ recur in different forms. And within this broad frame, the visceral and

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always signifying presence of the human body and its actions are also constant. Two projects of a very different order of scale and intent, but both with an embodied and material association with the complexities of ruination and decay, deserve final mention, however. In 2010, Pearson directed The Persians (written by Aeschylus in 472  BC) for the NTW.  This was performed within the Ministry of Defence (MoD) training village at Sennybridge in the Welsh Brecon Beacons. Here, a bizarre mock-up and reconstruction of a would-be German village on the plains of Hanover became the set for Aeschylus’ play. The village was used for soldiers to practise and enact urban warfare. Pearson remarks, ‘the interesting thing was that it looked like a deserted and derelict village, but was built in that way only in 1990 … it has to have a degree of verisimilitude for it to work effectively for the army’ (Pearson 2019). Here, a compelling temporal conjunction where a modern-day interpretation of a play written 2492 years ago meets twenty-first-century site-responsive theatre making in a reconstruction of an apparently time-less German village, devoid of any of the material or human trappings of domestic life, but designed as a training ground in preparation for urban warfare. These temporal juxtapositions become further complicated by the fact that the constructed and artificial German village is sited within the huge Sennybridge camp designed originally in 1940 to accommodate over 2000 soldiers (Figs. 7.11 and 7.12). I finish, largely as a provocation for thought, with a brief account of a Pearson solo piece first performed in 1974 and reprised exactly 40  years later in 2014. The Lesson of Anatomy was an investigation of Antonin Artaud’s concept of the corporeal body and in a raw and highly visceral manner spoke of the French theatre writer/maker’s bodily decline and decay through mental affliction and final death from rectal cancer. Inspired and propelled by the visit to Cardiff in 1974 of two French directors with direct links to Artaud who workshopped scenarios (with Pearson and others) from a mass of Artaud’s writings to create a performance entitled The Anatomy Lesson, Pearson further adapted this piece into a solo performance with two sections entitled ‘Flesh’ and ‘Asylum’. This was performed in Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre and, 40 years on, in the same venue, he reconstructed the original—there was no video or film record—from memory, from photographs and from fragmentary notes. Out of the ruins of 1974, the 2014 reconstitution offered Pearson the author-performer and his audience, a few of whom had witnessed the first iteration of the piece, opportunities to experience and reflect on what the passage of time had done to the

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Fig. 7.11  Mike Pearson in The Lesson of Anatomy, 1974. (Image: Steve Allison)

Fig. 7.12  Mike Pearson in The Lesson of Anatomy, 2014. (Image: Russ Basford)

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work itself, and, as significantly, to the body of the performer. Here, Pearson invites us to consider the slow (in his case) entropic ruination of a human body as it passes through time, but of course there is a doubling going on, too, through the act of performance. Pearson, rather than acting Artaud, is inhabiting and presenting the seriously ill and hugely ravaged body of a man who died in 1948. In writing about The Lesson of Anatomy, Pearson candidly notes the changes in his own physique and surface topology: ‘the muscles are thinned; the torso is hairy; the jowls sag, the veins stand proud; the skin wrinkles in elephantine folds’ (2015, p.  9). In a visually arresting limited edition (Pearson 2014), both performances are documented by Pearson’s own written reflections and—more strikingly—through Steve Allison’s photographs of 1974 and Russ Basford’s of 2014. Basford’s images trace and mirror the same poses and actions as Allison’s taken 40 years early. Although Pearson, in his mid-­60s for the 2014 performance, is still a lean and apparently fit man, this piece is at once a relatively obvious and, at the same time, a layered and nuanced study of human ruination—of entropy and fleshly decay—both of Artaud and Pearson. It would seem that Mike Pearson’s performance work over four decades has regularly had a relationship with decay and ruination, sometimes insistent as in abandoned, large-scale industrial spaces of the 1980s and 1990s, sometimes more obviously layered and nuanced as with Tri Bywyd in rural West Wales. Clearly, Pearson finds a powerful charge in such locations, but this is far from the romantic allure of eighteenth-century poets and writers. Although always acknowledging the materiality of the site as central to the dramaturgical spine of the piece in question, other elements of the performance have always been equally important. For Pearson, with his deep background in Grotowskian physical theatre, the presence of performers’ bodies on stage—often raw, sweating, angry, loud and viscerally startling—seem to be as important as the degenerating built environment which frames and holds their performance. I would suggest that the ruined sites which have so often hosted Pearson’s ‘occupations’ are presented to us as time capsules of memory, sentient but unstable structures which afford a range of stories, ideas, feelings and histories to be performed and shared with his audiences.

Performing the Shipyard Ruins of Govan and Gdansk It is the uncertainty facing abandoned, ruined landscapes that have made them such popular subjects for the imagination. The liveliness of matter, the emergence of surprising ecologies, the proliferation of multi-species becom-

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ings, even the effects of climate change on these forgotten places, inevitably raise questions about what these places might become. On those sites that face insurmountable development pressures, these questions are imbued with greater urgency – what do we stand to lose here? What could these sites become? (Olden 2016, p. 63)

This statement from Ruth Olden’s PhD thesis entitled ‘River Silting, Watered Common: Re-imagining Govan Graving Docks’, awarded in September 2016, is derived from her doctoral research on the Govan area of Glasgow and the derelict graving docks therein. Olden’s standpoint, of course, strongly echoes the perspective(s) on ruin and ruination which have driven this book. Govan, an area of Glasgow, and Gdansk, in Poland, are resonant for various reasons, but primarily because they were massive sites of shipbuilding until global political and economic forces at the end of the twentieth century largely repositioned this industry from Western Europe to locations of cheaper labour and easier proximity to raw materials. Inextricably associated with Gdansk and Govan are two events which remain highly resonant in popular imagination and in political and trade union histories. In Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyards, on 17 September 1980, the first ‘free’ (i.e. not controlled by the Communist Party) trade union was formed in a Warsaw Pact country. Led by Lech Walesa, the membership of Solidarity (Solidarność in Polish) peaked at ten million across Poland by 1981. Its presence, despite martial law (December 1981–July 1983), contributed to the fall of Communist-led regimes across Eastern Europe and a Solidarity-led government in Poland by August 1989. Over the next three decades, the Gdansk yards suffered serious decline, bankruptcy, reorganisation, various forms of ownership (state and private), and now employ only a small fraction of the original workforce. From the late 1990s, much of the Lenin Shipyard fell into decay and dereliction, and it is this experience that is traced within the following narrative. The Govan story is less iconic on an international scale, but the memory (personal and cultural) of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in (1971–1972) led and organised by shop stewards, Jimmy Reid, Jimmy Airlie and Sammy Barr, remains embedded in the history of Clydeside. In the face of closure, the UCS trade unions, rather than go on strike, staged a mass work-in of the yards which comprised UCS. In the end the Conservative government led by Edward Heath provided a £35 m injection of funds to sustain this Govan-based shipbuilder. The UCS work-in has become a signature event in the history of trade union activism and remains influential as a model for resistant, but constructive and generative action in labour disputes.

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Today, Govan has one functioning shipyard, BAE Systems Maritime, on the site which once saw some of the great names of Clydeside shipbuilding—Fairfield and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, for example. However, the BAE yard only contracts for the Ministry of Defence (MoD), and employees are obliged to sign non-disclosure agreements. The original Fairfield administrative offices are now a heritage centre, commemorating the histories of Glasgow shipbuilding. Govan and Gdansk and their inter-relationships over the last decade are given focus in this account as they offer a complex but unfinished case study of cultural and educational interventions (installation, sculpture, debate, workshops, performance and theatre) into two areas of industrial decline and material dereliction. My own encounters with these sites include a visit to what remained of the Gdansk Shipyard in 2013, living and working in proximity to Govan, attendance at various artist-led performance projects in and around the Graving Docks, recorded conversations with artist, t s Beall (Tara Beall) and Katarzyna Kosmala (Project Leader, Interdisciplinary Research and Knowledge Exchange Initiative [2012–2017] from the University of the West of Scotland) and exchanges with Roman Sebastyanski (architect, urban planner and a founder of the Gdansk Artists’ Colony). In the account which follows, I briefly map the cultural and activist interventions which occurred in each of the two sites before the collaborative projects emerged in 2012. Many of these events and projects have been framed—deliberately or implicitly—around questions of memory and regeneration: in whose interests and for what purposes should renewal take place? How can remembrance of these decades best be practised? Gdansk Shipyards 1999–2014 In Gdansk, as large sections of the original Lenin Shipyard closed and drifted into dereliction from the early 1990s, various forms of artistic occupation were galvanised to prevent—or it might be argued, to prepare for—the wholesale redevelopment of the site by private developers. The period between 2000 and 2015 witnessed a range of artistic projects which often lay uneasily beside each other and with the workers still employed in the remaining maritime manufacturing base of the original Lenin yard. Today, the area of the former shipyard is managed by a development company, Stocznia Cesarska, and includes a number of private shipbuilding and manufacturing companies. At different times, and with different

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players, some of these artistic interventions were directed towards protecting key material features—cranes, streets, signature buildings—within this politically charged site so as to commemorate the economic and political struggles which had taken place there since the early 1970s. In 1999 a property development company, Synergia 99, acquired a significant part of the original site, but by 2002 it had given over the former telephone exchange building to a group of 30 young artists and students from the Gdansk Academy of Fine Art for a gallery, studio, performance and social spaces. This grouping became known—self-consciously—as the ‘Artists’ Colony’ and existed as an organisational entity until 2012, despite an enforced move in 2008 from the telephone exchange to the old shipyard management building. The story, however, of artistic practices is not confined to the Artists’ Colony which was only one of several clusters of cultural activity in the post-shipyard area. The key moment that initiated an active period of contemporary art and artists on the site was the Road to Freedom exhibition of photographs curated by Aneta Szylak and Grzegorz Klaman in 2000. Road to Freedom commemorated the establishment of Solidarity in 1980 and its role in the dismantling of Communist rule over the subsequent ten years. Significantly, Synergia 99, which enabled the early artistic projects, branded these developments as the ‘Young City’. In her analysis, ‘The Artists’ Colony in the former Gdansk Shipyard’, Agneiszka Kozik writes: From that moment (1999) the history of the area of the former Gdansk Shipyard is also the history of artists and contemporary art projects. A part of the space made available to artists also served as studios and apartments, and painters, musicians, performers, photographers, actors, directors, sculptors … became the new users and the first permanent inhabitants of the new Gdansk Shipyard. (Kozik 2018, n.p.)

In ‘Save the Cranes: Cultural Heritage in the Gdansk Shipyard Regeneration’, Katarzyna Kosmala and Roman Sebastyanski (2014) note that alongside the Artists’ Colony there existed some more formal organisations such as ZNAK Theatre Company (until 2002) which had a base in the nineteenth-century Director’s Villa and the WYSPA Foundation which established an artists’ cooperative called ‘Modelarnia’, initially based in the former model-building hall, but which later moved to the site of the technical and vocational shipbuilding training school. In 2004 WYSPA set up the Art Institute to support artistic engagement in plans and strategies for

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post-shipyard transformation. The main purpose of the Art Institute from this date was to contest official policies for the economic regeneration of the shipyards which paid scant heed to recognising the histories of the whole site. To this end, the Institute facilitated a series of interdisciplinary research projects which in part transmitted their findings through the ‘Alternativa’ festivals (from 2010). These festivals included exhibitions and other artistic events. In 2012, a young activists group launched an informal campaign entitled ‘No for the Shipyard’s Destruction’. This worked on-line through social media channels and as an off-line space for meeting within the WYSPA/Art Institute building within the shipyard. Two artists from within the Artists’ Colony who collaborated with shipyard workers during this period, and whose practice we may regard as politically engaged, were Iwona Zajac and Michal Szlaga. In 2003/4, Zajac completed her 100-metre-long series of murals—images from the yards and fragments of recorded interviews with shipyard workers. The wall located outside the perimeter of the yard offered a visual and textual testimony of thoughts and feelings from workers who had spent over 40 years working on the site and who had taken part in the strikes leading to the formation of Solidarity. Before its destruction in 2013 by the Gdansk Council, Zajac, in an act of farewell, covered the whole mural with black paint before transferring the mural images on to a virtual public platform entitled Shipyard on Air. Kosmala and Sebastyanski observe that In this work the mural becomes a medium for the workers’ voices, enabling them to communicate to the wider public through individual stories about their long-term relationships with the place. (Kosmala and Sebastyanski 2014, p. 171)

Szlaga, like Zajac, had worked and lived at the shipyard from the beginning of the Artists’ Colony, but had already been documenting cycles of shipyard life—and its disappearance—from the late 1990s. Through photographic archive and recorded conversations, he had been presenting his work through local and national exhibitions and a photo blog (http:// szlaga.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/shipyard). In 2012, he published a set of ‘Ugly Postcards’ (Kosmala and Sebastyanski 2014, p. 171) which revealed the brutal reality of the destruction of Gdansk’s Shipyard Heritage. In 2013, these were published as a photograph album divided into four sections: (1) Shipyard, (2) What has been lost, (3) What remains and (4) Town. The compilation ends with his own technological map of

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the shipyard indicating all the building and material objects destroyed during the processes of closure and dereliction. Alongside these visual art practices, Roman alerted me to the work of the Wyrbreze Theatre of Gdansk between 2002 and 2004. During this period, the company staged two productions in abandoned Hall 42A within the shipyard. Between 2002 and 2003, Wyrbreze performed Brecht’s Happy End and in 2004 a version of Hamlet entitled H. Roman explains that both these productions were highly political and explored the ‘moral and ethical dilemmas of economic transformation in Poland’ (Sebastyanski 2019) and particularly offered a ‘critique of neo-liberal policy in post-Solidarity Poland and the rising inequalities between a very rich Polish elite and the majority of the population’ (Ibid.). In Happy End, unemployed shipyard workers played jobless characters and this same constituency had free access to the performances. From this summary account, it is clear that since Synergia 99 took over much of the Gdansk Shipyard in 1999, a range of arts (visual and performance) activities have taken place within its boundaries. Whilst it is tempting to regard these as a coherent movement with particular aims around preservation of the material shipbuilding environment, the commemoration of Solidarity’s achievements and as resistance to ‘top down’ solutions imposed by private capital or municipal/governmental policy, the reality seems rather more complex. Beyond the rhetoric of cultural beneficence and patronage, one can only speculate about the ‘deep’ motives behind Synergia 99’s decision to offer the old telephone exchange as a site for artists’ studios, workshops and galleries, and later during the first decade of the twenty-first century, other buildings as well. Kozik’s fieldwork in the shipyard over this period reveals that many of the artists forming the Artists’ Colony had no particular interest in what today we might label as ‘socially engaged art’. As we have seen in other parts of this book, the presence of cheap or free studio spaces for artists can be reason enough for their occupation of such sites. For many of these artists, according to Kozik, there was only slight connection with shipyard workers still employed on-site and little interest in making art which either acknowledged the extraordinary history of the Gdansk yards or was preoccupied with the location’s middle- and long-term future. Nonetheless, as Kozik attests: The place “fermented”, “bustled” and “was a melting pot” … “having an effect on each other”, mutual inspiration and joint artistic experiments enjoyed increased intensity thanks to the residents living and working within

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the immediate vicinity of each other … The attractiveness of the Artists’ Colony also consisted of its interdisciplinarity. (Kosik 2018, n.p.)

There are some parallels here, perhaps, with the occupation of the Tacheles building by artists and activists in Berlin after 1989 (see Chap. 8). However, as we have seen above, beyond the Artists’ Colony, and often under the aegis of WYSPA’s Art Institute, a number of artists—for example, Grzegorz Klaman, Aneta Szylak, Iwona Zajac and Michal Szlaga— forged close relationships with some of the shipyard employees and made work which addressed the history and predicaments of the site and its future aspirations. Govan: The Graving Docks and Beyond The parameters of dereliction and ruination are easier to identify in Gdansk than in Govan. Between 1945 and 1989, the Lenin Shipyard was located on a single site just outside the city centre and managed by one massive state-owned enterprise employing, at its height, over 27,000 workers. Whilst Govan, on the south side of the River Clyde, was certainly the material and psychic epicentre of shipbuilding in the Glasgow conurbation, it was only one of many locations up and down the Clyde which hosted privately owned shipbuilding businesses. For much of the twentieth century, Govan was economically dependent on shipbuilding and largely remains a resolutely working-class area of the city. However, over the last two decades, four highly significant employers have relocated or opened in, or close to, Govan. In an attempt to regenerate the eastern end of the Govan waterfront, BBC Scotland relocated to a new headquarters there in 2007 and Glasgow’s Science Museum opened in 2001. In 2011, just across the river in Partick, the relocated Riverside Museum of Transport opened and, in 2015, a number of existing Glasgow hospitals were merged to form the Queen Elizabeth II, one of the largest in Europe. Whilst these developments, especially the hospital, have contributed to a degree of gentrification (e.g. rising house prices), Govan remains a largely working-class district of Glasgow with some of the highest indices of deprivation, poverty and derelict land across the city (Understanding Glasgow, Neighbourhood Profiles, 2019, n.p.). Like similar inner city areas over the last three decades, Govan has experienced a range of cultural and economic projects attempting to provide training, jobs, personal support and openings into the arts including the Centre for Human Ecology,

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Galgael, Plantation Productions, Gilded Lily, Fablevision and the Clyde Docks Preservation Initiative (CDPI). Although Govan (population approx. 14,000) is not a large inner city district of Glasgow, artistic interventions over the last 20 years seem to be more dispersed and less coherently organised than in Gdansk (Beall 2019). However, like Gdansk, the activities and goals of artists and performance makers in Govan have been multiple and diverse. It is, perhaps, only since around 2010 and under the aegis of various collaborative projects with Gdansk (identified below) that a number of art activists have particularly framed and directed their practice towards the politics of ruination and regeneration. From the perspective of this account, the focal point for concern and intervention has been in and around the historic Govan Graving Docks, built between 1869 and 1875 by the Clyde Navigation Trust to cater for the ‘dry’ inspection and repair of ships’ hulls, normally below water. Now surrounded by derelict scrubland, the Docks consisted of three basins, the largest of which could accommodate two ships. With the de-­industrialisation of the Clyde, the Graving Docks were finally closed in 1988 and since then have fallen into further stages of decay, whilst still preserving their original outline profile and topography. Over the last 32 years the Grade A listed Graving Docks have been subject to various speculative development proposals with the most recent plan for 700 flats, a museum, restaurant, shops, office space and hotel being rejected by Glasgow City Council in 2018. However, as Ruth Olden has pointed out, erected fences around the site ‘did not dissuade those that could see opportunity beyond the boundary line: the photographers, pigeon fliers, dog walkers, fire-builders, fishermen, den-builders, bird watchers, urban explorers, courters, walkers and amateur historians’ (Olden 2016, p. 74). The trajectory of visual artist and performance maker, t s Beall (Tara), is significant, if not typical, in this context. Tara moved her studio to Govan in 2009 because, she says: It was cheap and because it was in front of the Graving Docks. I thought, this is Glasgow’s Parthenon – amazing. I could not get over the majesty of it, and became obsessed with how it was used. (Beall 2019)

Tara’s work over ten years in Govan has been both a feminist and an activist practice. Her preoccupations have largely been with the lost or hidden voices of Govan, particularly those of women and, to a lesser

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extent, the marginalising of semi-itinerant showpeople, some of whose bases are close to the waterfront near the Graving Docks and the early medieval stones now housed in Govan Old Church. One of her earliest projects (with artists, Ben Rush and Ben Dembroski) entitled A Stone’s Throw Away: the Govan Beacon (2010) played with the practices of outdated communications technologies and afforded local people the possibility of sending text messages translated via Morse Code from the Graving Docks Beacon to the Glasgow Science Centre. From 2012 Tara’s work became focused particularly around unearthing—and to a certain extent, re-performing—the hidden histories of female activists associated with Govan: the Peace Crusades (2016–2018), Glasgow Rent Strikes (2015), Govan’s Suffragettes, the Kinning Park Complex Sit-In (1996), women’s role within the shipyards and particularly the UCS work-in. These projects have been investigative and performative and have included chalking messages on pavements (like the Suffragettes), small re-­enactments and revocalisations of historic texts and speeches, and performance walks around Govan and its waterfront areas. Later, during the second Govan-Gdansk collaborative project, Tara worked with women artists and activists in Gdansk under the framework of Metropolitanka—loosely translated as ‘the shipyard is a woman’ (Beall 2019), a women’s arts organisation based in Gdansk. I return to this below. A significant dimension of the thrust and form of her work rests on a practice-based re-imagining—a destabilisation, perhaps—of the traditional heritage guided tour or trail. In this Tara would admit to being influenced by the work of Wrights & Sites11 which for over 20 years has been exploring, through the form of the ‘Mis-Guide’, ways of subverting the traditional conventions of the guided walking tour. Unlike many projects, Tara’s work around the ‘Strong Women of Clydeside’, with a team of local collaborators, has sustained itself over a period of at least six years. She says: I keep being amazed and pleased that we have not got tired and moved on. And the reason I think is because the project has developed its own tools – performative tools. I think the combination of the types of things we are trying to investigate and the ways we are trying to perform and re-vocalise them has a lot of resonance, not just for me but for the team, and in the spaces themselves. We’ve expanded a bit in terms of our historical focus, but we haven’t shifted the geography or ground on which we are moving. (Ibid.)

Tara is not alone, but is certainly unusual in a continued practice which manifests a commitment both to the politics of women’s roles within

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Fig. 7.13  Creative intervention highlighting train tracks on Toolmaker’s Street in Gdansk Imperial Shipyard by Ben Parry and Lee Ivett (2015). (Image: Ben Parry, courtesy t s Beall)

Govan’s history (and present) and towards making a contribution to the discourses around the future use of abandoned riverside spaces such as the Graving Docks. Another project to have taken place within the Graving Docks was a piece directed by performance maker, choreographer and teacher, Nic Green. TURN (September 2016) was sited in the largest of the Graving Docks with audiences encouraged to move around either side of one end of the dock and to witness conversations between women celebrating their birthdays, choral singing, acoustic improvisation and the peal of locally hand-cast bells. As an acknowledgement of the natural cycles which shape human lives, the dock provided a performative container for the ebb and flow of the Clyde’s tides. TURN invoked an organic connection with the community of Govan—for example, the choir drawn from local singers and the bells cast in a nearby foundry—but somehow seemed untethered from the startling materiality of the Graving Docks and the wider project of riverside regeneration that this section of the book describes. Nonetheless, the very presence of a well-funded performance event within the Graving Dock hinted at alternative uses and possibilities for this magnificent ruin.

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Govan and Gdansk Collaborative Projects, 2012–2020 Although, as we have seen, cultural activities and events at each location have had their own particular independent histories, origins and trajectories, over the last eight years there have also been a number of funded projects which have generated discursive exchange and artistic ventures linking both the Scottish and the Polish sites. These initiatives brought together artists, performance makers, scholars, architects and local people to offer ‘grass roots’ cultural interventions in the face of either perceived inertia on the part of authorities or unaccountable profit-making solutions proposed by private corporations and property developers. In a report on the University of the West of Scotland’s 2012–2017 project (see above), the aims of the venture were stated thus: To use the derelict shipyards of Gdansk and Govan as models of how to regenerate post-industrial spaces in a way which uses the past to inform the present, listens to the voices of local people, respects the landscape and biodiversity, whilst delivering economic, social and cultural sustainability. (Gardiner et al. 2017, n.p.)

Fig. 7.14  Words Walking  – Feminist Poems and Songs of Solidarity in Gdansk Imperial Shipyard, devised by Metropolitanka’s Anna Miler and t s Beall (UWS Summer School 2015). (Image: Graham Jeffery, courtesy t s Beall)

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Fig. 7.15  Chalking and commemorating July 1917: 14,000 Marched For Peace. ‘Strong Women of Clydeside’ artwalk, 2018. Lydia Levitt pictured. (Image: Chris Leslie, courtesy t s Beall)

Fig. 7.16  Govan Docks during Govan Beacon, 2010. (Image: Ben Rush, courtesy t s Beall)

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These words from Gardiner, Kosmala and Sebastyanski aptly frame subsequent projects and, emerging from but also blending into this initiative, a Creative Scotland funded project, Riverside Solidarity (2017) pursued similar ends, and in 2018 an EU-financed venture called Memory of Water broadened the geographical scope of post-industrial waterfronts to include Levadia (Greece), Limerick (Ireland), Gothenburg (Sweden) and Ostend (Belgium) as well as Gdansk and Govan. In Gdansk, another organisation Metropolitanka (see t s Beall collaboration above) works to reveal and communicate through guided walks the hitherto hidden role of women workers within the shipyard, many of whom were also active within Solidarity. In this account I shall concentrate on the first major project— Regeneration and Waterfront Heritage Research Network, and the second, entitled, Riverside Solidarity. The first Govan-Gdansk project emerged, so Katarzyna Kosmala tells me, as a grass roots initiative from the University of the West of Scotland graduate students, and students from the Gdansk Art Academy … It was about building a platform for exchange, an enabler for linking different projects and groups, an ‘invisible underground’ … (Kosmala 2019)

Key players who conceived and drove the project were Kosmala and Graham Jeffery from UWS, Liz Gardner, founder member and Director of Govan’s Fablevision,12 and Roman Sebastyanski, an important figure in the cultural politics and artistic ‘occupations’ in the Gdansk yard for over 15 years, and who more recently has been undertaking a practice-based PhD at the UWS.  In the early years (2013–2015) of the project, three summer schools led by the team identified above were presented in Gdansk. These began to build up the human infrastructure within which knowledge was shared, goals debated, sites visited and artistic projects imagined and planned. Contextualising all these exchanges were pervasive concerns about the nature, ownership, purpose and direction of regeneration plans for both Gdansk and the Graving Docks area of Govan. Within this frame, beyond preoccupations with preserving aspects of the built environment, the cultural and intangible heritage of both sites became a matter of acute dialogue and discourse. By 2015, a number of interventions by artists had been planned and taken place. Many of these figures—t s Beall, Lee Ivett /Ben Parry, John Mullen, Tom Manley, Andy McAvoy

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and Roman Sebastyanski—continue to be invested in the Govan-Gdansk projects over the years which followed. These projects included the following: • Placing flowers from the Govan Graving Docks at the gates of remembrance at the entrance to the Gdansk shipyard (Beall 2015). • Marking the original line of a destroyed rail track with cobbles leaving a trail (now over grass) of the previous route of the railway (Ivett and Parry 2015). • Exhibition of photographs taken between 2011 and 2016 of the material and more intangible traces of the shipyard’s environment (Manley 2015). • Alternative heritage plaques, one of which particularly commemorated the dark and deep history of the yard under Nazi occupation when U-boats were constructed using forced labour (Mullen 2015). • A video film, ‘The Nature of Shipyard’, depicting nature flourishing in the yard during its period of transition and a manifesto arguing for the centrality of nature in any future redevelopment (Sebastyanski 2015). Between 2016 and the time of writing, these and other artists have developed new projects or extended existing ones. The Riverside Solidarity project, partly funded by Creative Scotland, built upon the work already undertaken by the Regeneration and Waterfront Heritage Research Network and in 2017 enabled further work by artists such as Beall, Ivett, Parry, Mullen and McAvoy. Building upon her Strong of Women of Clydeside project, Beall worked with Anna Miller and other members of Metropolitanka on a performed ‘artwalk’ which revealed and highlighted some of the lost histories of Polish women workers active in Solidarity and the strikes of the 1980s. Using poetry and song, the project renamed certain streets to foreground aspects of women’s work and activism and marked pavements to register such events. Subsequently, in Govan, Tara incorporated into her collaborative artwalks quotes from women in Gdansk. Artists, Ivett and Parry, reprised the construction of the wood and rope installation they had previously made in the Govan Graving Docks. Using rope from an artist’s studio in Gdansk, the artists sought to reference and expose different modes of ‘occupation’ typical of abandoned and derelict landscapes: experimental and often challenging interventions

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by artists and performance makers, private developers and more ‘top down’ governmental or municipal investments in galleries and museums. The intervention of architect, Andy McAvoy, was through a film made with Kric Kesiak entitled The Detonation Shed which explored further hidden but linked narratives embedded in both sites. Taking a cue from a monument to submariners in Govan’s Elder Park, McAvoy’s film connects with Mullen’s alternative heritage plaques, referencing and linking the construction of U-boats by forced labour in the Gdansk yard between 1940 and 1945. Govan and Gdansk: Unfinished Narratives These accounts are by no means exhaustive, but highlight some of the most significant projects led by artists, often using performance as a mode of interaction with audiences, in both locations over the last eight years. The interventions of artists in the Gdansk Shipyard has a longer history and in some ways is a more coherent and less fragmented narrative than Govan and its ruined Graving Docks. Told separately, these two stories mirror the possibilities and limitations of other attempts at artistic occupations in derelict sites so as to contest and offer alternatives to the hegemonic solutions provided either by private capital or through the multiple strategies of the creative industries. However, the intertwining of these various Govan and Gdansk projects, built upon a shared industrial history, and a commonality of present purpose, renders the toil of artistic practice and activism in and across both sites more productively complex and unusual. As with other stories told in this account, there is an intricate and unstable relationship—sometimes dark and covert, sometimes naive and utopian—between artistic interventions in sites of ruination and abandonment and the force fields of private capital and municipal/governmental development planning. The motives behind Synergia 99’s offer of handing over buildings to artists in the Gdansk Shipyard make for curious speculation, and there are interesting comparisons with New City Vision, the current owner of Govan’s Graving Docks. The parameters between artistic agency, creativity and freedom, on the one hand, and incorporation towards very different ends, on the other, are both fragile and porous. Capital, when it chooses, has always been clever at ‘playing the long game’.

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Notes 1. Topos: from Greek Topoi meaning a unifying idea that is a recurrent element in literary or artistic work. 2. Syntagma is Athens’ central square, bordered on its eastern side by the old Royal Palace which has housed the Greek Parliament building since 1934. 3. Documenta was founded in 1955 as an exhibition of modern art which would take place every five years in the German city of Kassel. Its impulse was to re-establish Germany as a country which could celebrate and embrace contemporary art after Nazism. In 2017, for the first time, Documenta was held jointly in two cities, Kassel and Athens. 4. Apostolos Lampropoulos is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne. His paper (from which I quote) was later published in a collection of essays drawn from the conference and entitled Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. 5. Although Brith Gof closed in 2004, Pearson’s work has continued and sometimes as Artistic Director for National Theatre of Wales’ productions. 6. Clifford McLucas (1945–2002) trained as an architect, was a visual theorist and scenographer who worked as co-director with Pearson on a number of Brith Gof projects. 7. Michael Shanks (1959–) is an archaeologist who has collaborated with Brith Gof on a number of projects, was co-author (with Pearson) of Theatre/Archaeology (2001) and is currently Chair of Classics at Stanford University in California. 8. Mike Brookes is an artist, theatre designer and director. In 1997, he co-­ founded with Mike Pearson the collaboration they call ‘Pearson/Brookes’. 9. Llandysul is a village near to Esgair Faith. 10. Wetherspoons, founded in 1979, is a huge chain of pubs, bars and hotels across the United Kingdom. Its stated aims are to sell alcohol as cheaply as possible to its 2 m weekly customers. 11. UK Company Wrights & Sites, formed in 1997, comprises Cathy Turner, Stephen Hodge, Phil Smith and Simon Persighetti. Its work is focused on peoples’ relationships to places, cities, landscape and walking. They employ disrupted walking strategies as tools for playful debate, collaboration, intervention and spatial meaning-making. 12. Fablevision is a cultural social enterprise based in Govan and Paisley whose members (individually and collectively) share values and working practices. For over 30  years, Fablevision has supported emerging cultural social entrepreneurs/enterprises in Govan and elsewhere in Scotland.

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Bibliography Argyropoulou, G. (2015a). Critical Performance Spaces: Participation and Anti-­ Austerity Protest in Athens. In Participatory Urbanisms. http://www.parturbs.com/anthology/critical_performance_spaces. Accessed 25 Nov 2018. Argyropoulou, G. (2015b). Precarious Structures: Passing Thoughts on Forms and Encounters. In L’Internationale Online. https://www.internationaleonline.org/opinions/75_precarious_structures_passing_thoughts_on_forms_ and_encounters/. Accessed 18 Mar 2020. Argyropoulou, G. (2017, July 28). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Azas, A. (2017, July 27). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Beall, T. (2019, July 24). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Davis, B. (2015). Frieze Magazine, No 174. https://frieze.com/article/athenscity-report. Accessed 22 Nov 2018. Eleusis 2021. (2019). https://eleusis2021.eu/portfolio-posts/7-thematic-areaseleusis/?lang=en. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Gardiner, E., Kosmala, K., Jeffery, G., & Sebastyanski, R. (2017). Govan-Gdansk. Heritage, Regeneration and Alternative Futures. https://www.academia. edu/34001226/Govan-Gdansk_Heritage_Regeneration_Alternative_Futures. Accessed 12 June 2019. Hamilakis, Y. (2009). The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquary, Archaeology and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. HERITAGE Conference. (2017). https://heritagemanagement.org/monuments-in-ruins-ruins-as-monument-evaluation-protection-enhancement-management/. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Journal of Modern Greek Studies. (2018). https://www.mgsa.org/Temp/ruins. html. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Kakalas, S. (2017, July 24). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Konstantinidis, D. (2017, July 25). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Korachai, M. (2016). Eleusis: Mysterious Ancient Town Named European Culture Capital. In GREECE IS. http://www.greece-is.com/author/maria-korachai. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Kosik, A. (2018, June 18). The Artists’ Colony in the Former Gdansk Shipyard. In Baltic Worlds. http://balticworlds.com/the-artists-colony-in-the-formergdansk-shipyard/. Accessed 10 Apr 2019. Kosmala, K. (2019, February 6). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Kosmala, K., & Sebastyanski, R. (2014). Save the Cranes! Cultural Heritage in the Gdansk Shipyard Regeneration. In Tradition and Heritage in the Contemporary Image of the City: Vol. 3, Practice and Process (pp. 167–175). Cracow: University of Technology Publishing House. Lampropoulos, A. (2017, November 23–25). Contemporary Ruins, Fragments of Hospitality, Intimacies in and out of Comfort Zones. Unpublished Paper. In

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Beyond the Ruin: Investigating the Fragment in English Studies. HASE Conference, Athens. Lampropoulos, A. (2019). Contemporary Ruins, Fragments of the Lives of Others, Critical Intimacies In and Out of Comfort Zones. In E.  Mitsi, A. Despotopoulou, S. Dimakopoulou, & E. Aretoulakis (Eds.), Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination (pp.  271–288). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mavili Collective ‘Re-activate Manifesto’. (2017). https://mavilicollective.wordpress.com/re-activate/. Accessed 20 July 2017. National Theatre – Experimental Stage. (2017). https://www.n-t.gr/en/experimentalstage. Accessed 27 July 2017. Olden, R. (2016). River Silting, Watered Common: Re-imagining Govan Graving Docks. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. Pearson, M. (2010). Site-Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pearson, M. (2014). The Lesson of Anatomy 1974/2014. Published in a Limited Edition and Printed by Copytech (UK) Limited. Pearson, M. (2015, June). The Lesson of Anatomy 1974/2014. In C. Lavery & R. Gough (Eds.), Performance Research on Ruins and Ruination 20 (3). Pearson, M. (2019, May 21). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Pearson, M., & Shanks, M. (2001). Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge. Pearson, M., & Turner, C. (2018). Living Between Architectures: Inhabiting Clifford McLucas’ Built Scenography. In A.  Filmer & J.  Rufford (Eds.), Performing Architectures: Projects, Practices, Pedagogies. London: Methuen Drama. Performance Biennial NO FUTURE. (2016). https://performancebiennial.org/ theme/. Accessed 25 July 2017. Project Birds. (2018). http://www.birdsproject.net/participation/soundscape/? lang=en. Accessed 17 July 2019. Roms, H. (2004). Performing Polis: Theatre, Nationness and Civic Identity in Post-Devolution Wales. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 24(3), 177–192. Sebastyanski, R. (2019, June 23). Unpublished Correspondence with the Author. Smith, H. (2017, May 14). Crapumenta! … Anger in Athens as the Blue Lambs of Documenta Hit Town. The Guardian. Szlaga, M. Blog. http://szlaga.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/shipyard. Accessed 10 Apr 2019. Tatoulis, T. (2017). https://int.ert.gr/a-new-artistic-project-in-the-peloponnese/. Accessed 21 Nov 2018. Thessaloniki Biennale. (2018). https://biennale6.thessalonikibiennale.gr/en/ mainpage. Accessed 21 Nov 2018. Tzakou, A. (2018a, June 4). Unpublished Conversation with the Author.

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Tzakou, A. (2018b). Walking as Meditation or How to Walk in Places of Emergency. In Interactive: A Platform for Contemporary Art and Thought. https://walkingart.interartive.org/2018/12/walking-as-meditation. Accessed 17 July 2019. Tzakou, A. (2019a). https://annatzakou-geopoetics.com/about. Accessed 17 July 2019. Tzakou, A. (2019b). https://annatzakou-geopoetics.com/performance-groupgeopoetics. Accessed 17 July 2019. Tzakou, A. (2019c). Unpublished Correspondence with the Author. Understanding Glasgow. Neighbourhood Profiles. https://www.understandingglasgow.com/profiles/neighbourhood_profiles/2_south_sector/34_greater_ govan. Accessed 30 Sept 2019.

CHAPTER 8

After Communism and the Cold War: A Ruined Inheritance

Performing Cold War Ruins in Berlin As we have seen in ‘Dissonance and Contestation: Ruining Heritage and Its Alternatives’ (Chap. 5) my fieldwork in Germany took me to the Ruhr region and the post-industrial sites of Zollverein in Essen and the Landschaftspark in Duisburg-Nord. The rest of my time in Germany was spent in Berlin investigating four ruinous phenomena which I describe and reflect upon below. Berlin summoned my attention not only to the occupation of two ruined sites—Teufelsberg and Tacheles—by artists, theatre makers and other activists, but also to the disused and semi-derelict Tempelhof Airport and one man’s attempts to generate drama and performance work there with asylum-seeking refugees. Beyond these three specific examples, it was perhaps inescapable that Berlin invited—required almost—a persistent psychic, political and emotional engagement with two extended periods of its twentieth-century history. The weight of history bears down on you in this city. Myriad images, narratives and representations of Berlin as centre of the Third Reich, Hitler’s bunker and its destruction in 1945 by Allied Forces’ bombing compete and jostle in the imagination with the iconography of the city’s partition through the construction of a 3.6 metre high wall dividing Communist East (German Democratic Republic [GDR]) from Capitalist West (German Federal Republic [FRG]) in 1961. Twenty-eight years later with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, the East German authorities announced the political and psychological demolition of the Wall on 9th © The Author(s) 2020 S. Murray, Performing Ruins, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40643-1_8

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November 1989 and that GDR citizens were henceforth permitted to visit West Berlin. The Wall was physically dismantled over the following six months. Berlin and the Wall as Diasporic Ruin We start with the Wall (Fig. 8.1). In the drawer of my work desk at home, along with a strange collection of objects, both functional and more poetically idiosyncratic, I have a shard of reinforced concrete measuring approximately 9 × 5 centimetres at its widest points (see above). The rough back of the object is pitted, coarse and reveals tiny stones embedded within the concrete. It has clearly been crudely chipped out of its surrounds with a chisel, jack-hammer or pickaxe. On the flat side there are markings which stamped across its diameter which read Friedrichstr and around part of its circumference, Checkpoint Charley. I note that Charley is the incorrect spelling (in this context) for Charlie. On the right side of the flat surface vestiges of blue spray paint remain to tint the silvery grey concrete. The blue suggests the now formless edge of street art/graffiti. I bought this souvenir off a street vendor whilst in Berlin for a conference in 1990, and, at the time, firmly believed I owned an authentic fragment of the now ruined and dismantled Berlin Wall. That this fragment is stamped with the name of the most iconic crossing point between East and West Berlin— Checkpoint Charlie—should have aroused my suspicions that this Cold War memento was possibly fake. Many years later in conversation with artist Wendy Kirkup, who had just returned from Berlin, we reflected on the ruination of the Wall. A construction designed as a barrier to prevent mobility between two halves of a divided city, destroyed, materially and symbolically undone, fractured, redistributed, sometimes reassembled, Fig. 8.1  Berlin Wall fragment, 1990. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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re-­painted and reinvested with meaning. In November 1989 over the space of several months the Wall was dismantled by bulldozers, wrecking balls and human hands. Subsequently, thousands of fragments, large and small, real or bogus, were gathered as personal souvenirs, sold ubiquitously throughout Germany and beyond and collected by museums across the world. The United States has at least 22 such museums which display segments of the Wall. What is the status of these remains and what role do they still perform 30  years after the Wall ‘came down’? What meanings have subsequently been re-invested in these material memorabilia to the formal and symbolic end of Communism, Soviet power and the apparent ‘triumph’ of Western capitalism? On her visit to Berlin in 2014 Kirkup encountered the work of two Canadian artists, Blake Fitzpatrick and Vid Ingelevics, and their project Freedom Rocks: The Everyday life of the Berlin Wall. Freedom Rocks investigates post-Cold War histories, the souvenir economy of Cold War relics and how the Berlin Wall has been remembered through a diaspora of the material detritus of concrete slabs and smaller fragments. Fitzpatrick and Ingelevics’ work traced the destinations of a significant number of these remains to a range of collections (private and public) in North America. Their interest lies in the stories that these fragments tell of their original excavation and journey to another continent. They describe their toil like this: Ultimately our project attempts to metaphorically “rebuild the Wall” through photographic and video media as a post-Cold War nomadic and atomized monument severed from its base. The project asks where the Berlin Wall is now, and how its restless mobility, even within the city of its origin, has changed its meaning. How does the Wall both accommodate and yet have the potential to resist the process of commemoration? (Fitzpatrick and Ingelevics 2018, n.p.)

These myriad bits and pieces of Wall represent a host of different feelings, philosophies and dogmas dependent upon personal connection and ideological disposition. Above all, perhaps, they speak of spatial dislocation, disruption and—ultimately—unification and fusion. Like the antiquaries of ancient Greece, and the multiplicity of narratives surrounding them, these fragments (now distributed across the globe) perform the contested and complex imaginary of modern Germany, a unified Berlin and the apparent closure to one of the twentieth century’s most toxically pervasive conflicts. Fitzpatrick and Ingelevics’ project contains ‘Biographies

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of fragments’ in which they film key collectors of these pieces—individuals, curators and business people. The camera offers a close-up of the individual’s hands touching and moving the shard of Wall as they speak of its provenance and journey to North America. These can be found on the Freedom Rocks web site (https://www.freedomrocks.ca/fbios.php) and make for a beguiling narrative. One such character, Joe, President of the New Jersey-based Berlin Wall Commemorative Group, explains how he intended to market Berlin Wall fragments immediately after the fall of the Wall. His words reveal the ideological character of his enterprise and its purpose: This is from the original section, said to be the very first segments to be brought into our country. We created a piece which was put into a watch box and glued it to a piece of foam and created a certificate of authenticity which I’ll read to you real quick: The certificate says that in 1961 the Communist Party erected the Berlin Wall to oppress an entire nation. In 1989 the demolition proceedings marked the beginnings of global freedom. This piece was removed in November 1989 during the initial demolition proceedings of the Berlin Wall and we put a little certificate of authenticity on the back and our original intent was to market these world-wide. (Joe qtd. in Fitzpatrick and Ingelevics 2018, n.p.)

In a more literal sense the Wall and its military protocols continue to perform for tourists and the citizens of Berlin. At the site of the original Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse, where little is left of the original border crossing, in front of a reconstructed version of an American guard house, actors perform as soldiers with US flags and charge three Euros for a photo. A sign—a copy of the original now held in the private Wall Museum nearby—alerts us to the knowledge that ‘You are now leaving the American sector’. A few steps away, ‘Die Bude’ (the Shed) invites us to sample Currywurst sausages and French fries. Next to this a street stall sells gas masks and military helmets. Behind lies ‘Charlies Beach’ [sic], an area to chill, drink wine and listen to music. A TripAdvisor review encapsulates the incongruity of the experience: ‘What a pleasant surprise, the atmosphere was very beach-holiday like, the food and drinks were normally priced and the music put me on a tropical beach somewhere in the Caribbean’. Responding to accusations that the whole Checkpoint Charlie experience represents a ‘Disneyfication’ or trivialisation of the Cold War and a hitherto divided city, the Berlin Senate has recently installed display boards with historic photos and descriptions. At present there are political

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divisions over the future development of the area but the director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, Axel Klausmeier, bemoans the fact that the whole area lacks ‘a clear design concept’ (Klausmeier qtd. in Kruse and Schutz 2018). Clearly, as with many similar sites across the world, Berlin is wrestling with how to remember and commemorate—in this case—the end of the Berlin Wall 30 years on from its dismantling. The role of art and performance within these debates remains contentious and unresolved. Only in 2018 the Berlin city authorities blocked a film and performance project—DAU—by Russian filmmaker, Ilya Khrzhanovsky. The plan for DAU had been to erect 900 concrete wall slab replicas, each 3.6 metres tall on the Unter den Linden Boulevard. The walled-in ‘city within a city’ was to have its own visa checks and visitors to this parallel universe would have to apply online for entrance permits. The organisers had hoped to build the facsimile wall from 12 October 2019, for it to be torn down on 9th November, 30  years on from the event itself. The organiser, Thomas Oberender, of the Berliner Festspiele, which was to host the project said ‘it is not a film premiere, but a mixture of social experiment, artistic experiment … and an impressive form of world-building … a political and social debate about freedom and totalitarianism, surveillance, co-existence and national identity’ (Oberender 2018 n.p.). It seems that we will never know whether such grandiose aspirations might ever have borne fruit. Field Station Berlin and the Devil’s Mountain At Teufelsberg in the Subjunctive Mood (Rebecca Lindenberg) The subjunctive is not a tense but a mood – uncertain, wishful, regretful …               Perhaps we would not now be arriving in the Grunewald by train, to climb a hill built of the rubble Berlin had been blasted into by war’s end – Today, the many steps are matrixed with frost. Teufelsberg Devil’s Hill, the highest point in Berlin – from here, I can see the Allianz building at Treptower Park,

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at Alexanderplatz the Fersehturm, slender tack pinned at the center of the city’s map, silver divots of its sphere refracting pale spring sun. Tense refers to when an action takes place: past, present, future. …          (Lindenberg 2017, p. 8)

On the morning of 4 May 2018, on my way to Teufelsberg, I took an S-Bahn train to the Olympic Stadium and spent a couple of hours immersed in the atmosphere of this historically resonant site. No ruin this, but still haunted by the ghosts of the 1936 Olympic Games. A huge plaque identifies in bronze lettering the achievements of one of the greatest athletes of all time, Jesse Owens, who won gold medals in the 100, 200 and 4 × 100 metres relay as well as the long jump. Startling athletic prowess apart, Owen’s extraordinary achievements fundamentally—but hopelessly— challenged Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy. Now home to Berlin’s leading football club, Hertha Berlin, this huge neoclassical space offers a glimpse of how Albert Speer’s vison of ‘ruin value’ (see Chap. 2) might have been performed in Germania and the 1000-year Reich had the war’s outcome been different. Whilst the material reality of the renovated stadium and its monumental architecture and sculptures are far from being physically derelict or abandoned it is a location which has the breath of ruins, an allegory, perhaps, for twentieth-century ruination. From the Olympic Stadium, a further few stops down the S-Bahn line towards Berlin’s historically evocative satellite suburbs of Potsdam and Wannsee, I embarked at Grunewald, the nearest station for a 30-minute walk through a forest to the Devil’s Mountain, Teufelsberg. Possibly, of all the ruined sites I visited during my fieldwork, Teufelsberg was the most startling and complex. Today, it exists as a palimpsest of many layers and strata. This artificial rubble-made hill is Berlin’s highest spot at 120 metres above sea level and lies within the Grunewald forest, west of the city. In terms of volume it is said that over 25 million cubic metres of detritus went into the construction of this man, or war-made edifice, the equivalent of over 15,000 buildings. There is little that is ‘natural’ about the Devil’s Mountain save for a covering of top soil, grass, weeds, shrubs, now mature trees and a multiplicity of wild life which includes occasionally encountered wild boars. Teufelsberg is constructed from the rubble of a

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ruined Berlin pulverised by Allied bombing between 1942 and 1945. From the end of the war the immense task of removing the rubble fell largely to Trummerfrauen (rubble women) since millions of young German men had been killed during the conflict. Archive photography shows thousands of images, largely of women hacking away at piles of rubble and pushing carts of debris on temporary rail tracks, the Trummerbahnen. The removal of rubble went on for 20 years until the Devil’s Mountain was complete. Another perverse curiosity about the Teufelsberg ‘mountain’ is that deep within it, at its base, lies the unfinished Military Technical College designed by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer. Such was the robust nature of this steel, stone and concrete structure that it successfully resisted demolition before the city’s rubble piled up around it. Instead, its demise arrived by suffocation as millions of tons of dust and debris buried the building that was to have trained Hitler’s elite military for the next 1000 years. In their essay on Teufelsberg, Chris Smith and Benjamin Jay Shand describe Hitler’s monstrously ludicrous ambitions which were to be designed and constructed by architect Speer: If monumental megalomania were to serve as the Reich’s studium, Speer’s Wehrtechnishche Fakultat1 in the Grunewald’s heart was to be its punctum. An elite military school in the stark guise of a castle. The placement was to burn a new axis across Berlin’s cityscape. Spanning from Alexanderplatz through the Technische Hochschule and the Adolf Hitler-Platz before reaching the Olympiastadion and terminating at Hochschulstadt. It was more axial than axis. The route itself was to be littered with the institutions of Western civilisation – museum, academies and fora – and yet these overwrought schematics often ceased with white models and leaded line on butter paper. (Smith and Shand 2016, pp. 186–7)

Although not easily accessible from the centre of Berlin, Teufelsberg is a wooded park for walkers, picnickers, mountain bikers, lovers, naturalists and those who want to reach its summit where the doubly ruined site of the decaying buildings and geodesic radomes2 of the US National Security Agency’s Field Station Berlin can be discovered. Within this startling and unnerving collection of buildings, with hardly a space left free of graffiti art, we can also discover the half-built, but abandoned remains of property developers’ failed attempts over the last two decades to translate this dereliction into highly profitable real estate. A triple layer of ruination. In

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1963 from the ruins of Berlin, at the peak of rubble-filled Teufelsberg, the Berlin Field Station was built to see and hear across the frontiers of the Cold War. From the post-war settlement, Teufelsberg had become part of the British sector of Berlin, but it was the US listening station that was to be built atop the Devil’s Mountain. From this vantage point, British and American personnel monitored the electronic emissions from the Stasi and the military forces below as well as significant and high-level political intelligence from as far away as Moscow. When the Soviet Empire collapsed in 1989 and the Wall came down, Field Station Berlin had immediately lost its function and was rapidly abandoned. In the 1990s the site was leased to a developer as part of Berlin’s property boom, but although foundations for various housing projects were built—and now lie empty as devilish swimming pools full of brackish, murky water and rusting steel—nothing was completed. Thus, so far, attempts to commercialise the site have come to naught and it is now home to a shifting collection of artists who visit or live on the site. The mystery and complex rich history of the place only partly explain its attraction to artists and performance makers. As with similar sites of occupation, Teufelsberg’s appeal lies as much in the availability of unregulated and low-cost ‘studio’ space: the economics of cultural production trumping—or at least competing with—aesthetic and atmospheric allure. Moreover, like Tacheles, the Embros Theatre and Green Park projects when they existed, the promise and practice of ‘community’—a shared, if temporary commons—was also a strong enabling driver and force field. Today the ownership of the place remains confusing, unsatisfactory and complex with a situation of stasis and stand-off between the Berlin city authority and the tenant who notionally runs the site. On my visit during the afternoon of 4 May I had arranged to meet Richard Rabensaat, a journalist, artist, curator and performance maker. Richard is one of a group of art activists who established an ‘Art Club’ in 2014 whose purpose was to re-animate and activate the location, using the multiple and strange spaces of the now semi-derelict Field Station, and its hilltop surroundings, as site for developing art practices and as experiments in alternative living. Today Rabensaat offers guided tours around the location, charging five euros, and helps to curate cultural activities. He tells me that the first tenant of the site invited graffiti artists from across the world to decorate the buildings and, indeed, there is hardly a blank wall to be seen. This wall art became a recognised part of Berlin’s cultural capital and is one of the reasons for the steady stream of visitors to the site. At the time of my visit,

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two groups of architectural students from the United States and China were presenting future plans for Teufelsberg which clearly had been part of a university design project. As an exercise in imagining futures this seemed to be received in a very positive light and signalled how this weird and dystopic place might be with an injection of millions of euros and architectural flair. I approached the site up a steep winding path through trees and undergrowth, but joined a narrow tarmacked road when I encountered the entrance. On mentioning Richard’s name, and our planned meeting, I was waved through by a man who was collecting entrance fees of five euros from visitors. As I waited for Richard I could see a collection of functioning though dilapidated glass and concrete buildings, dating back to the 1960s. Although ramshackle and with some broken or absent panes of glass, these buildings are used as workshops, studios or rough and ready performance spaces. Later I am shown a very large first floor room which clearly functions as the Art Club’s base, furnished with wooden tables, sofas, cupboards, a wood burning stove, computers and kitchen equipment. A rather comfortable, open, calm and inviting space where a few people were chilling, drinking coffee or working on computers. Richard walks me around the whole site for about an hour as we converse about its history, challenges and current activities. He apologises for the fact that until three days ago he could have taken me to the very top of the largest dilapidated radome where views across the city are said to be spectacular. Earlier that week the health and safety authorities had ruled it unsafe and hence prohibited for any access. I express disappointment, though am secretly relieved, given my propensity for severe vertigo. My tour is punctuated by conversations which Richard has with various people and we meet three young sonic artists who are setting up equipment for a ‘NoiseLab’ performance event. Dedicated to noise and sound art, this will take place over the weekend. Their publicity and call for performers describe what will happen and it is noteworthy that these artists have particularly planned the Teufelsberg event to engage with its immediate environment within the territory of the now ruined listening station: WE ARE LOOKING FOR ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS WORKING WITH SOUND EXPERIMENTS, CHAOTIC ELECTRONICS AND NOISE FOR OUR FESTIVAL IN MAY.  WE ARE PLANNING A WEEKEND WITH SEVERAL OUTDOOR INSTALLATIONS AND SOUND ADVENTURES EXPLORING THE ARCHITECTURE AND SITE SPECIFICITY OF THE LOCATION. (Noiselab 2018)

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The whole area is a curious, but not displeasing blend of abandoned buildings, scrapyard, playground, shopping trolleys, plastic chemical containers, overgrown shrubbery, rusting mechanical excavators and other machinery, semi-derelict buildings—many no longer used, but some having the apparent function of workshop/atelier and studio—and a living laboratory or field station. I am reminded of what Hayden Lorimer and I wrote about NVA’s Invisible College approach to the regeneration of the ruined St Peter’s Seminary near Glasgow (Chap. 5). Two very different sites but both sharing a similar ethos of experimentation, open-­endedness, unpredictability and uncertainty. We wrote: St Peter’s magnetic attraction … will be offset and decentred by the return of a grander landscape aesthetic, integrating the ruins with a reinvigorated woodland habitat, once again productive walled garden and the facilitation of arts performance, community-led making and open-air learning … a field station for a wilfully experimental, environmentally aware culture is the foundation for a concrete future. (Lorimer and Murray 2015, p. 66)

In one open area, about the size of a tennis court, a series of vertical two-metre-high concrete slabs have been intentionally erected and offset one behind each other, slightly on the oblique and about two metres apart. Each has graffiti cartoon images meticulously spray painted by Jobo Skull of Deviant Art. Indeed, the whole site and virtually every vertical flat surface are covered by street art images, slogans and cartoons. A huge investment of time, skill and paint: probably the single most significant trope of ruinous art work, as so many European sites I visited have testified. As we return towards the Art Club building, we pass a wall-mounted installation of intertwined bikes, ripped rubber tyres, rusting frames, handlebars and chains. All these are pinned vertically to the wall almost as three-dimensional sculptural graffiti, possibly three metres in height and two in width. Next to the cycles, two free-standing bears, carved from hardwood about a metre high, stand guard over this little corner of the site. They are placed either side of what appears to be a kind of steel gantry and so help to frame the rubbish, debris and wild sprouting shrubs and saplings within. In front of the bears there is rust engrained trunking which has either fallen off the structure behind or merely discarded there. Further on, past the largest and now banned-from-entry radome, Richard invites me to identify two carefully painted mugshots of a face which seems familiar. These, it turns out, are of filmmaker David Lynch, who had been

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a regular and admiring visitor to Teufelsberg over the past decade. In 2009, Lynch’s company, the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-­ Based Education and World Peace, attempted to buy the whole Teufelsberg site. ‘On the mountain’, Richard tells me, ‘he would develop a University of Yoga and the central radome unit would be called the “tower of Invincibility”. When they laid the cornerstone the assembled gathering shouted “invincible Germany”’ (Rabensaat 2019). This extraordinarily bizarre project was turned down by the local council. Richard laughs, ‘unsurprisingly he was not successful’ (Rabensaat 2018). Much of the graffiti has a dissenting and deviant voice, critiquing not only the Cold War power brokers but more contemporary bureaucrats and property developers who have further contributed to the site’s ruination. On one wall are images inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove, an Uncle Sam figure astride an atomic bomb, triumphantly waving his red and white striped hat. We conclude the tour back in the Art Club where in an entry corridor the American Architecture students from the University of Colorado Boulder are talking enthusiastically about their project, explaining computer-­ generated design drawings of their imagined future for the Devil’s Mountain and eagerly and articulately fielding questions. Outside, sitting on some weedy grass in the sun, a separate group of Chinese students are chatting by what looks like a three-dimensional molecular structure which I assume they have made. Through the working office—a private space not accessible to the public—and social area for the Art Club, Richard leads me into what initially I assume is an art installation comprising solely of wooden doors erected to form a maze in a deliberately poorly lit space. Somewhere within the maze there is a hole in the floor dropping several metres to the level below. It is an unsettling and unnerving experience. Richard later corrects my assumption that this is an art piece, pointing out that the doors were a rather incongruous ‘showroom’ for an antique dealer hoping to sell artefacts. It is soon to be dismantled he tells me and was never open to the public. I sense that Richard will be pleased to see it go. A bizarre addition to the politics and aesthetics of the rest of Teufelsberg. Throughout my walking with Richard he tells me about performance pieces which have been made in and for Teufelsberg. It becomes clear that, alongside the ubiquitous graffiti—skilful, funny, colourful, childlike, lurid, sinister, political, unnerving—live performance has played a key role in animating the site, bringing the ruin back to life again, imagining its future

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and as a vehicle for occupiers or visiting artists to speak of and to its history and present predicament. Richard’s practice seems to move between curation, production, visual artmaking and performance. With Dirk Thorwarth, he curated, directed and dramaturged a performance—live art—event with Biljana Bosnjakovic in August 2016. The piece, entitled PURGE, explores the concept and experience of purgatory through Biljana’s embodied and raw engagement with different parts of this ruined and sometimes dangerous site. Plants, overgrown shrubbery, shattered concrete, mangled and rusty steel take on a live and animated quality as she moves amongst the buildings, culminating in her immersion in a filthy and hazardous ‘lagoon’ left open to the elements after the collapse of one of the building projects. Completely naked, Biljana moves through the brackish polluted pool, sometimes up to her chest, sometimes lying on her back, hair matted with sludge and muck. Although I was not present for her performance in 2016, Richard and I spent some time staring into this hellish lido, and it took little imagination or effort to conjure up a very visceral sense of Biljana’s startling performance. He speaks of another performance—I am unclear whether this is separate or connected to Biljana’s piece—where he is wading through the water and burning paper boats which are floating in the murk (Figs. 8.2 and 8.3). At the end, he tells me, he climbed on to one of the walls abutting the pit of water and declaimed Alan Ginsberg’s poem, HOWL (Ginsberg 2001). Later, Richard also refers me to a ‘Body Mapping Lab’ described as a ‘performative expedition to the historical site, Teufelsberg’ (Fari 2018, p.  2). Led and imagined by Nathalie Fari with Rafael Dernbach and Petterson Costa in September 2016 this seems to have been part workshop/laboratory, part site-specific performance. For eight days between 3 and 10 September a group of artists from diverse backgrounds met at the S-Bahn Grunewald station to walk the 30-minute, three-kilometre journey up the Devil’s Mountain to the Listening Station. Each day they took a different route, with members following agreed performative instructions, for example, ‘Walk slowly and in silence’. Fari describes the rest of each day: Once we were at Teufelsberg, we spent the rest of the day investigating specific spots within the area as well as executing various physical and writing exercises. The main purpose of these exercises was to question how bodies and spaces can inscribe themselves into each other. How can a space (or a body) become a medium or an agent for stories and histories? And how does an embodied or history itself become a written history? (Ibid.)

Fig. 8.2  Biljana Bosnjakovic, PURGE, Teufelsberg, Berlin, August 2016. (Image: Richard Rabensaat 2016)

Fig. 8.3  Biljana Bosnjakovic, PURGE, Teufelsberg, Berlin, August 2016. (Image: Richard Rabensaat 2016)

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For Fari and her collaborators the body was to become a vehicle or a site of translation ‘of how the space might condition the body, and the body the space’ (Ibid., p. 4). Drawing upon the performance practices and theoretical influences of Mike Pearson (2010), Tim Ingold (2012) and Ben Spatz (2015), Fari seems to be investigating the melding of ideas from psychogeography, practice as research and new materialism. I can grasp this performance landscape, although Fari’s article offers little in terms of pinning down what actually happened, what bodies did or felt throughout the workshop and in the 40-minute performance offered to a selected audience on the final day. A text by Rafael Dernbach, incorporated into the performance, identifies the utopian aspiration of the piece: In ten years Teufelsberg will look different to what it looks right now. A mountain of fragments and speculation will have turned to a mountain of translation and healing. It will have become a space for unclaimed experiences, unclaimed emotions and unclaimed relationships … the modern Teufelsberg is about divide, the new mountain about relation. A school of senses and relatedness will be established that hides from the increasingly aggressive flows of capital and opacity. (Ibid., p. 6)

Drawing upon similar frames of reference—concern for sustainable solutions to the environmental crisis, the world of the spirit and nature, ritual, the sacred and gender theory—Lisa D.  Robin’s installation, The Pilgrimage of the 13 Blood Moons, seems to inhabit comparable territory to Fari’s work. The installation was displayed at every full moon over the course of 2018, a year with 13 full moons. Her materials are largely drawn from recycled materials, particularly paper. I don’t know if, or whether Dernbach (see statement above) and Robin know or collaborate with each other but there is clearly common ground between the two around the sacred, the role of ritual and notions of healing, repair and restitution in relation to ecology and human life. In different creative territory and ten months on from my visit to Teufelsberg I am in contact with artist Louise K. Wilson who as part of her practice has spent time in many Cold War abandoned military ruins and at Teufelsberg in particular. Wilson describes what propels her interest in these abandoned Cold War sites: I have become increasingly intrigued as to why other artists embark on journeys to explore these sites. There are perhaps multiplicities of personal, political and psychoanalytical reasons as to why. This programme was a per-

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sonal journey to talk to some artists, explore the sites that have fascinated them and consider the very different responses that have been made. (Wilson 2018, n.p.)

For Wilson, whose practice is partly as a sound artist, Teufelsberg offered a rich and multiple sonic repertoire which she was keen to play with and explore. In her article, ‘Sounds from the Bunker: aural culture and the remainder of the Cold War’ in the Journal of War and Culture Wilson reflects on the plethora of musicians and sound artists who have been beguiled by Teufelsberg’s sonic landscape, and who have composed and performed their own work there. She notes particularly, sound collective, KGB’s ‘Smoke on Devil’s Mountain’ and sound artist John Grzinch’s 40-minute improvisation with five people (Wilson 2020, n.p.). Following a visit to Teufelsberg in 2018, Wilson narrated a Radio 4 documentary called Cold Art (2018) on 4th September of that year. She tells the story of visits to sites in Norfolk and Suffolk in the United Kingdom and to Berlin. With American artist Deirdre Stewart, who was then resident on the site, and who has made a piece of immersive theatre on surveillance there, Wilson reflects on her feelings about the place and describes some sound experiments, bursting balloons to measure and experience reverberation times in one of the high radomes, for example. She writes: In addition to visitors seeking a visual or historic encounter, the extraordinary acoustics at Teufelsberg prompt ‘sonic pilgrimages’. The whole site of Teufelsberg is rich in sound: from the wind animating the trees of Grunewald Forest, rumbling over the radomes and carrying voices far … Here the cathedral-like acoustic effects are startling, the spatial information for the listener is confusing. By clapping hands, bursting balloons, singing and other utterances, you can hear the scale of the fibreglass interior – the reverberation is astounding and takes eight seconds to die away. (Ibid.)

Teufelsberg possesses many of the characteristics of other modern dilapidated and decaying sites which have been embraced by artists and those who find comfort in constructing their lives outwith the constraining and regulatory structures of the mainstream. But here, as has been noted above, in so far as these occupiers are performing an alternative lifestyle, it is one also driven by necessity as much as choice. What was once Berlin’s ‘Listening Station’ is now an uncertain and strange meld of activities, hopes, dreams and plans played out in an extraordinary architectural setting. For some, such as Louise K. Wilson, Teufelsberg seems less

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of interest as a playground to explore rituals of healing and restitution, and more as a material site which demands attention for its extraordinary aesthetic charge and its iconic role in mid to late twentieth-century politics and ideological warfare. Alongside such preoccupations, as a sound artist, Wilson also explores the changing sonic properties afforded by the multiple materialities of the site and its wider surroundings. Driven by similar force fields to those that have propelled this book, Wilson is perpetually curious about the cultural practices, belief structures and human behaviours enabled and generated by these material legacies of the Cold War. For the likes of Fari and Robin, Teufelsberg offers a mystical and spiritual stage upon which to imagine and perform remedial and restorative practices constructed from and through nature and the human spirit. For Richard Rabensaat, I sensed that a broad palette of practices, curiosities and interests underpin his serious commitment to this place. A kind of obligation to do justice through art, performance and writing to Teufelsberg, so that it is at once remembered, without nostalgia, and provides the social and material opportunities as a laboratory—a different kind of field station—for experimentation and utopian thinking. Undoubtedly, Teufelsberg the rubble mountain and Teufelsberg the abandoned listening station offer a strong sensation of the uncanny—or for Germans, unheimlich—generated, for me, by both an overwhelming sense of twentieth-century European history and the unnerving material remains of the radomes and their torn fabric skins, now flapping in the wind, but which once provided the protective membranes for the antennae within. Smith and Shand put it like this: The photographs of Teufelsberg reek of the complex history of the place – they are indissociable from the layers of rubble and ruins, World Wars and Cold Wars. But these photographs also tend towards the magical. They entrance as an odd posturing does and awaken desire as alien and utopian gestures do. The radomes that once protected antennae and listening devices gesture to much chatter and intelligence, even though now mute and deaf. These structures still overlook Berlin, though now blindly. In this sense, there is something particularly untimely and haunting about these images. (Smith and Shand 2016, p. 191)

Postscript, September 2019: an email exchange with Richard informs me that a new ‘location manager’ has been appointed who is trying to make the whole place more profitable by privileging the appeal of the graffiti, but is much less sympathetic to the work of other artists

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and performers. Nonetheless, Richard was involved in a large-scale dance theatre and aerial performance project by Company VoLA StageArt which took place across the whole site in August 2019. The piece commemorated the 30th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall and examined ideas of both internal and external borders. The struggle between preventing the gentrification of Teufelsburg and its presence as a site for autonomous, experimental and transgressive performance practices continues. Kunsthaus Tacheles (1990–2012) and Paolo Podrescu The etymology of Tacheles lies in Yiddish and in that language means plain or straight speaking, a quality many occupants of the building felt to be conspicuously absent in Cold War East Berlin. It is tempting to see the story of this building down the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries as a material and architectural mirror to the social, political, economic and cultural life of the city across these decades. Opened in 1908 in the Mitte district as a market of independent shops around a central arcade which linked the two major thoroughfares of Friedrichstrasse and Oranienburgerstrasse, the ‘umbrella’ business organisation which built the structure and owned the leases went bankrupt within six months of opening. It then became a departmental store of five floors, but was auctioned off just before the outbreak of war in 1914. Between 1914 and 1928 its ownership and function are unclear, but after becoming a showroom for the General Electric Company in the late 1920s it was taken over by the National Socialists (Nazis) and became the central office for the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi paramilitary organisation, until the end of the war. From 1948, now within the East German GDR, the building was used as the headquarters for the Free Trade Union Federation (FDGB) and also populated by various small businesses and an Artists’ and Technical School for foreign trade. Partially dismantled in the 1980s it was due finally to be demolished in 1990. At the last moment a group of artists called the Kunstlerinitiative Tacheles occupied the building and after many bureaucratic skirmishes Tacheles was named as an historic landmark and declared structurally sound enough for human activities. Until 2012 it was occupied and reactivated by artists, performers and radical campaigners, often of an anarchist disposition. After 2012 and the gradual eviction of its myriad occupiers, further changes of ownership occurred, but by May 2018 it had been completely demolished, save for its historical frontage facing onto Oranienburgerstrasse.

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Fig. 8.4  Teufelsberg Radome Tower, Berlin. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

Fig. 8.5  Teufelsberg US architecture students presenting future plans for transformation of site, Berlin. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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Fig. 8.6  Teufelsberg, bike sculpture, Berlin. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

Fig. 8.7  Teufelsberg cartoon slabs, Berlin. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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The building’s complex and fascinating history for just over 100 years warrants a book in its own right, but its narrative between 1990 and 2012 is the focus for my interest here. Interviewing Tacheles activist Martin Reiter, Rory Maclean encapsulates the feel of the place not long before its eventual closure: Part war ruin, part artists’ colony, part anarchic wonderland and wholly Berlin. Huge murals decorate its blitzed exterior walls. Steel sculptures advance from its doorways onto the street. Its stairwells are layered with two decades of graffiti. It’s home to a late night whisky bar, a café and a good cinema. Above all it is a seedbed of radical creativity which can help to galvanise and shape tomorrow’s Berlin. But its future is under threat. (Maclean and Reiter 2010, n.p.)

The occupations of Tacheles during this period propose alternative prefigurations for collective action and common futures after Communism’s ruination as an ideal and the material destruction of one of its most resonant manifestations, the Berlin Wall. Within the cosmology of cultural activism in ruined, disused and derelict sites Tacheles stands almost as an ‘ideal type’ in the sense that German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) (Weber 1895/1994) used the term.3 Whilst the artist-led occupation and reactivation of Tacheles have greater longevity than the others profiled in this account (Green Park, Embros Theatre and—in a slightly—different context, Mostar’s Street Art Festival, partly housed in the ruined Konak Barracks) it seemed also to hold both within its multiple practices, and in the circumstantial conditions which engendered, framed and sustained it, most of the features of this very particular trope of alternative cultural activity. In terms of social context it is rarely the simple presence of a ruined location that invites artistic reactivation, but its conjuncture with times of often huge political upheaval and change. The end of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and, more particularly, the reunification of East and West Germany and its local corollary, East and West Berlin, created the social, political and, perhaps above all, material conditions which enabled (in the broadest sense) this 22-year-long occupation of Tacheles. Tacheles is situated in what during the Cold War was East Berlin, where until the 1990s there were thousands of dis- or under-used buildings, lacking repair and on the cusp of ruin and dereliction. Upon reunification of the city many of these premises—often with ownership unknown—became occupied by squatters or by those who welcomed low or non-­existent rents.

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A heady combination of these material circumstances and the celebratory psychic energy generated by the destruction of the Wall and the freedom of movement it afforded rendered Berlin a very attractive place to make one’s home. This was particularly the case for artists and cultural workers who chose to come to work in this rapidly changing city. Art journalist Jonathan Jones visited Tacheles on several occasions, and recorded his early impressions in a valedictory article for the Guardian newspaper in 2012. He wrote that Tacheles was a place where art seemed to actually be about experimental lifestyles and defiant visions of social freedom  – and not about the career of artists. Tacheles was one of many buildings in East Berlin that hovered between semi-collapse and unfinished building site. In its courtyard of raw earth and smashed concrete, surreal sculptures of missiles and tanks made from scrap metal created apocalyptic mayhem … It was a meeting place for the city’s artists and subversives that had the atmosphere of some legendary, mythic avant garde venue of the past like the Cabaret Voltaire. (Jones 2012, n.p.)

The notion of ruined space as latent laboratory, field station or performance playground, alluded to above, seems never more accurate a description of the potential that Tacheles must have offered in the early days of its occupation during the 1990s. Where, perhaps, the first years of Tacheles were different from similar activities in, for example, Athens or Mostar, is that the cultural circumstances of Berlin seemed to offer a time of exuberance and hopeful, almost Utopian change. In Greece, however, the circumstances were born from debilitating austerity and economic recession. In Bosnia-Herzegovina the street art of Marina Mimosa and her colleagues in Mostar was contextualised not only by a very weak economy, but also by the ever-present legacy of the Balkans’ murderous conflicts during the 1990s. What, nonetheless, is consistent about all these occupations and reactivations is the pragmatic need for artists of all persuasions to find lowcost accommodation and studio/workshop space. Disrupted, unsettled and impoverished cities undergoing traumatic or exuberant change provide just such opportunities. However, this sense of opportunity is likely to be time-limited and rarely open-ended. The social and psychological reinvention of a unified Berlin following the events of 1989 was never exclusively the province of radically minded alternative artists and activists but was simultaneously a driver for boom times in the construction industry and the rapidly creeping gentrification of those inner-­city locations like

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Tacheles. There is then, it would seem, a cyclical rhythm to these events. The very attractiveness of a Tacheles to a community of artists later renders it equally appealing to real estate businesses and an expanding middle class seeking to practice seductive life-styles in central Berlin. The occupation of artists, paradoxically perhaps, engenders added value and makes such buildings (even) more attractive to property developers. I return to these matters below (Fig. 8.8). At its height, Kunsthaus Tacheles contained numerous artist’s studios and workshops, a café, whisky bar, nightclub and a cinema; its stairwells and walls layered with graffiti. Behind the main building a large courtyard served as a social area during clement weather and as a quasi-exhibition space for sculptures built from rubble, old machinery, vehicles and other objects. Throughout its history, Tacheles produced or hosted many live performances—see, for example, Paolo Podrescu below—embracing dance, live art, cabaret and experimental theatre. Some of the earlier events included performance group the Mutoid Waste Company, musicians Spiral Tribe, theatre companies DNTT and R.A.M.M. theatre, live artist Lennie Lee and dancer/choreographer, Sasha Walz. Walz’s company Sasha Walz and Guests included, at different times, architects, visual artists, filmmakers and singers. Alongside these events, political and campaign meetings were ubiquitous. It was always a shifting population and many non-resident artists and activists would hang out there. In the final years there was a division between a gathering of artists on the upper floors who were part of the Tacheles e.V. association (chaired by Martin Reiter), and ‘downstairs’ a group of businesses, including Café Zapata and High End Kino 54, not represented by e.V., which formed Gruppe Tacheles. On 6 May 2018, I met and had a long (recorded) conversation with Paolo Podrescu in a bar in the Mitte area not far from the now empty shell of Tacheles. I had been given an introduction to Paolo by writer Carol McGuigan and artist Topsy Qur’et who had moved from Tyneside (UK) to Berlin during the last decade. Paolo arrived in Berlin in 1987 from the United States, angry, he said, with the politics of Ronald Reagan’s America. Friends had told him that as a ‘Gothic punk kid’ (Podrescu 2018) he would like the ‘dark arts’ (Ibid.) of Berlin. Significantly, Paolo’s arrival in Berlin predates the reunification of the city by two years and well before the influx of artists from the 1990s. His hunch that Berlin might be a place to satisfy his cultural preoccupations and political needs seems to have been realised and he was involved in the Tacheles occupation from the outset. When we conversed he talked possibly of moving elsewhere again

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Fig. 8.8  Tacheles building awaiting redevelopment. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

and of Berlin no longer offering the fertile ground for politically creative expression that it had once done. He has no EU citizenship and so regularly must return to the United States to renew his visa. He deplores the gentrification of Berlin and laments the lack of low rental studio space for artists and performers to make work. ‘I am sad’, he says, ‘that Berlin is getting more normal’ (Ibid.). I press him on his decision to come to Berlin in the late 1980s and why he has stayed for so long, notwithstanding a short attempt to re-settle in San Francisco in 2014: When I first came I was fascinated by Berlin’s ruined state. Somehow I got attached to this city as a haunted ruined place – it was in alignment with what I wanted to get out of my art, but I didn’t really know the reasons. I was still discovering things. Dark themes. It’s been a process almost of deconstructing everything I knew or had learned. Dismantling the way I’ve been programmed. Berlin was always a party town, but it’s now as if all those things have been paved over. I want to dig up the ruins. (Ibid.)

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Paolo’s own practice offers a fascinating and shifting trajectory over 30  years in Berlin. In the early days he made two pieces of theatre in Tacheles, working from a soundtrack as his starting point. Strongly influenced by the scenography and design of Robert Wilson he allowed, he says, ‘the visuals’ (Ibid.) to emerge from sonic composition. He worked with Wilson’s sound designer and wanted to produce ‘non-linear theatre of images’ (Ibid.). He explains: I wasn’t working with spoken text and I wasn’t well connected to actors at that time. It was like a kind of silent film, quite physical, Butoh-like. … There was a kind of mad king sitting on a throne with a trail of babies – we had all these dolls. Ubu was probably in the back of my mind. I was working with dark imagery and a sound ambience track. There was no real narrative, but lots of emotions, anger, sadness … It was called Children’s Tales. (Ibid.)

During the 1990s into the 2000s Paolo took workshops with Forced Entertainment and Anne Bogart and increasingly his practice seems to be of a deliberately hybrid nature, fusing music, sounds, live performance, digital construction and film. He speaks of ‘curated cinema’, which entails making and showing moving image material in a way which is less passive and more interactive, but usually somehow engages with a sense of the ruin and ruination. ‘It was more like a happening’ (Ibid.). These were mobile projects which he took to different sites in and beyond Germany— at Teufelsberg, for example, and in a ruined bunker in a Balkans’ salt mine. For Paolo the site in question is always the driver of the composition and the source of recorded sound or music. He says, ‘I’m interested in the industrial scene and once made work in a disused water tower. Part of what drew me to Berlin was the industrial music scene’ (Ibid.). He tells me the story of breaking into a ruined Berlin church and of making a sound recording there which engaged with the building’s atmosphere and charge. Wryly he remarks, ‘I was very anti-church and needed to get that off my chest’ (Ibid.). The group made very loud sounds until 6.00 or 7.00 in the morning, whereupon they were arrested. Because one member Fig. 8.9  You gentrify, We occupy. Street message, Berlin. (Simon Murray 2018)

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of the group was young, they were sent to a juvenile court and given a community service sentence which entailed cleaning out a disused building. The conclusion to this episode was that they were given the rooms they were cleaning as rehearsal space for two years (Fig. 8.9). One reading of this, Paolo notes, was ‘this wonderful thing that perhaps “crime pays” or something like that’ (Ibid.). Over the last two decades Paolo’s work and life in Berlin has been resolutely political and constructed around his art and activism. It seems that the work he presents always has a strong element of political education (my phrase, not his) embedded in it, allowing space for debate and conversation. The proactive participation of his audiences seems crucial. Over the last ten years Paolo, under the fictional name of Dr Podinski, has made and performed a series of iterations of a piece called CiTIZEN KiNO. On his blog (plog!) Paolo (2016) AKA Podinski offers a descriptor as follows: CiTiZEN KiNO #78 Re-animates the Frankfurt School for Our Digitally Cooked Times

C-KINO – a situational cinematic investigation – curates a film clips evening, and stitches together a zone wherein all triggered emotions and relevant insights from the critical theory archives can be layed out in a fearless and highly-eroticized theater, transformed into a new school of resistance. Dr. Podinski and the XLterrestrial friends put the Btropolis Patient on the couch and asks what one sees in the 24/7 live stream consumption … but not without a bouquet of flowers and poems flying from our extended hand… and a tribute to our fallen arts+culture comrades! (podopolog 2016) CiTIZEN KiNO has had outings at Teufelsberg, at other sites and Podinski delivers it as a live performance whenever possible. These pieces, which are developed with every new performance, comprise Podinski’s commentary (original and found texts), music, audience interaction and the projection of moving and still images. He says he wants to develop the stage character of Dr Podinski much further, but always within the dramaturgy of expanded cinema. I found Paolo a strange, beguiling and interesting man with a rich history of activism and performance over a lengthy period of time. A profile which somehow personifies the shifting, mutable and context-bound practices of ruin performance that I had encountered

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in Greece, Bosnia Herzegovina and Germany. His extensive and ubiquitous online presence is evidently crucial to his persona as art activist. In conversation, he was much less startling than I had imagined from scouring his social media and blog postings. Face to face I encountered an apparently relaxed, thoughtful, reflective and occasionally melancholic figure—passionately and, at times, angrily political, but hugely well-read and quietly assured in the fields of contemporary theoretical and arts discourses. I was absorbed by his approach to ruin which seemed to be summed up by the notion that such sites—Tacheles, par excellence—are, for a limited time anyway, ‘liberated zones’ (Podrescu 2018) which not only afford the flourishing of a variety of creative and other performance practices but also perform as prefigurative forms for living differently in relations of mutuality, sustained kindness and support. I sensed that for Paolo the ruined or derelict site was not only materially attractive to him, but also that ruin and ruination in itself possessed a kind of psychic and cultural force field to see and experience the world differently. His dismay at the final ruining of Tacheles in 2012–2014, and the concomitant gentrification of Berlin, was due not to nostalgic sentimentality or some kind of attraction for an aestheticised ruin porn, but signalled an ending, the termination of those ‘liberated zones’ which in their ruination offered space for difference, creativity and an empathetic mutuality. The Ruination and Reinvention(s) of Flughafen Tempelhof On 5 May 2018, I met with Carol McGuigan and Topsy Qur’et and on a sunny, late afternoon we cycled around what used to be Tempelhof Airport, another material and symbolic palimpsest of Berlin’s complex history over the last 80 years. In 1923 the site was first used as an airport for regular flights between Berlin and Konigsberg,4 but in 1934 the SS5 built Berlin’s only concentration camp on the site. However, in 1936 the camps were demolished to make way for the terminal building designed by Ernst Sagebiel and which is still present today. During the war the SS torture headquarters were housed in Sagebiel’s building and next to this a forced labour camp was constructed which was used to assemble the Stuka fighter planes employed to attack London during the Blitz in 1941.6 Tempelhof only became a functioning airport again when the war ended and is now a protected monument after it was formally closed for air traffic in 2008. When it was completed the terminal was allegedly the largest building in the world and was imagined by Hitler and Speer to be part of the Nazi’s

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monumental repertoire for a 1000-year Germania. Although empty of fixtures, fittings and equipment, the buildings still exude an ambience and atmosphere of the pre-war Nazi era. The division of Germany and Berlin under the post-war settlement triggered the Cold War and the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies’ railway, road, and canal access to those sectors of Berlin under Western control. For almost a year from 24 June 1948 until 12 May 1949, during what became known as the Berlin Airlift, American and British planes flew in food and other supplies through Tempelhof Airport. At the height of the airlift one plane every three minutes was delivering provisions for a besieged West Berlin. The history of Tempelhof is, it seems, one of perpetual ruination and restitution and of a built environment which has witnessed acts of great brutality and of peoples seeking sanctuary from such behaviours. Following campaigns from community organisations a referendum on the airport’s future usage was held in 2014 and the right to public access triumphed over development for private profit. The result, many people claimed, was emblematic of modern Berlin. With Carol and Topsy I cycled along massive runways within what was evidently a fraction of the total space, observing young and old, running, cycling, sleeping, sitting or playing in the sunny evening. One small corner of the airfield had been devoted to allotments or gardens and next to these there appeared to be a significant number of new cabins fenced off from the public area and within the confines of the old terminal building which itself has an ‘Historic Monuments’ preservation order placed upon it and cannot be changed either structurally or decoratively. I suspect these cabins offered additional facilities to the refugees living in the main buildings. Since the airport ceased functioning for its original purpose, the terminal buildings had been used sporadically for large events, until 2015 when they became the principal single camp for refugees arriving into Germany. At the same time, aspects of the legislation protecting public access to some parts of the site were overturned. The political and social economics of the situation are complex and, at the time of writing, the camp is being wound down towards closure as refugees become dispersed across the city or much further afield. The camp within the building was regimentally organised with hundreds of beds or bunks lined up along the whole length of hangers, or what had hitherto been public departure areas. Since no alterations could be made to the fabric of these buildings there were severe limitations placed on how refugees could domesticate their living spaces. Significantly, within these constraints, many inhabitants arranged the

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configurations of the beds into cubicles with brightly coloured sheets or drapes so as to personalise and add a scant degree of privacy to their living conditions. For a brief period up until April 2016 many of the camp residents began producing wall graffiti of children’s paintings, religious symbols, names (in different mother tongues) of home towns and relatives left behind, all contributing to compelling murals, often of an aesthetically high standard. More importantly, perhaps, these paintings and writings became a canvas upon which refugees could articulate their hopes, fears, frustrations and national identities. From April 2016, however, this graffiti was banned and cleaned away. In its place, the camp authorities stencilled prints of famous Berlin landmarks in a crude and clumsy attempt to generate some sense of identity with the city in which the refugees were now living. The deep and complex political issues thrown up by the Tempelhof refugee camp cannot be untangled within the purpose and confines of this book, but the creative and artistic reactions of the refugee residents resonate with the responses of artists and other occupiers of the disused and ruined spaces encountered in other chapters of this volume (Fig. 8.10). During the evening of the same day over glasses of wine in a local bar, Carol and Topsy introduced me to professional theatre director, teacher and performer, Ali (Alexander) Schroeder. The reason for this planned encounter with Ali was that, through various circuitous routes, he had begun to make theatre and performance work with some of the refugees over a two- to three-year period. I summarise his story here. He began his account like this: It was December 2015 and I lived close to the airport. On the news they were telling us about this largest (2000+) refugee camp in Germany. I wanted to find out more because you never saw anyone. Was it a prison? I was wondering what they were doing with their time. So I went there, tried to get in, but it was impossible. I tried to speak to security guards and some refugees. All the security guards were chosen for their ability to speak Arabic or Farsi so they could be understood by the refugees. I knew it would never work so I sneaked around the back of the building, tried some doors then found an emergency exit which was not blocked. I was the only white guy in the building and lots of people approached me to get help with forms. I’d say, “I can’t help you with forms but I’m from theatre”! One out of ten people could speak English. I was directed to Room 3029 to see the boss. Everyone thought I was very important. He said, “what do you need”? I said that I needed a rehearsal room. They gave me space in a hanger. (Schroeder 2018)

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Fig. 8.10  Tempelhof Airport Terminal, Berlin. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

Ali was not interested in constructing conventional theatre with the refugees, rather he imagined making ‘postdramatic work where people could think and talk about their experiences in Syria or on the way here’ (Ibid.). He was thinking of documentary or verbatim pieces, but quickly learned from those who spoke up that their flight was too close, too traumatic and they wanted to talk of more daily preoccupations and stresses in the camp. They were not allowed to smoke and had to go to bed at a specified time. Their frustrations, he said, seemed to be less with the German authorities, but with the racism of some of the Turkish security guards. Every part of the camp was under surveillance and each refugee had 1.2 square metres of space including his/her bed. Ali explains that the first performance piece was called 1.2 metres and recounts the moment in rehearsal when a refugee appeared spread-eagled outside and hanging on a window ledge while inside people were telling harrowing stories of rape and torture. He remarks sardonically, ‘who needs theatre when you have this?’ (Ibid.) Organisationally, he admits, it was chaotic, as the performers

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often arrived late due to security checks and the other demands of camp bureaucracy. Eventually they were given permission to work in a community hall outwith the camp and it was here that 1.2 metres opened. Over the period that Ali was working with refugees they started to make short films for You Tube, the first of which was called How to be a refugee role model in 7 steps. He notes that: After a while the group became confident enough not to need me as director/producer and so now I’m just an ordinary member of the group. They have made five short sketches about their situation and the politics of their experience. (Ibid.)

Ali has been working with the refugees between a part-time post at the University of the Arts in Berlin and as a professional actor and director. I like his pragmatic, committed but unsentimental approach. I sense it was for him an experience where most of the habitual protocols and expectations of working with students or actors had rapidly to be discarded. He finishes his story, remarking wryly: There was no money in the refugee work. Usually rehearsals would start two hours late and I would have to enjoy and learn to live with this waiting! If I’d got money for this work I would have felt like it was “biting me in the neck” – too much pressure. Any money would have made me feel that I had to get angry about them being late … wasting money! (Ibid.)

The story of Tempelhof does not fit neatly into any of the tropes of ruin performance which are identified and examined within the pages of this book. Nonetheless, I have included it here because it seems to speak of a location whose original function (being an airport) has been abandoned or ruined, and where the apparently relaxed and largely unregulated space of the airfield and its runways contrast strangely with the prohibited hangers and terminal building with their fluctuating functions and populations. Materially, the buildings of Tempelhof are not yet ruins, but along with the airfield itself there was a palpable sense of imminent ruination across the whole site. At this date of writing Tempelhof’s function as a temporary camp for refugees seems to have been almost completely run down or ceased. However, between 2015 and 2018 many of the refugees at Tempelhof had come from conflict zones and the proportion of those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) was—unsurprisingly—high. Refugees, almost without exception, are

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escaping ruined countries and their lives—at least for a significant period—are equally ruined. As with many of the locations I explored while researching this book, Tempelhof is a site where material, temporal and symbolic realities meet, clash and intertwine in complex, unsettling and troubling ways, an expert site, or playground, if you will, for the performance of Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘hauntology’ (Derrida 1994). A landscape where the presence of the past is all around us whether it be a shadowy awareness that this was once the site of concentration and forced labour camps, the glowering statues of Third Reich eagles ‘guarding’ abandoned terminals, the distant thundering of planes delivering food aid to the West Berlin of 1948/9 or the more present histories of traumatised refugees arriving through central Europe from the war zones of Syria, Iraq, Libya or Somalia. My leisurely cycling with Carol and Topsy around the airfield on a warm, early summer afternoon, watching young Berliners drinking beers and taking selfies on their Iphones, was always on the cusp of a disquieting mix of anxiety and ‘nostalgia for lost futures’ (Gallix 2011), melding into different time zones and (often imagined) memories. Tempelhof also warrants inclusion within my investigations on the basis of Ali Schroeder’s idiosyncratic one-man incursion into the territory of performance making with refugees in the camps housed in the site’s hangers and terminals. Ali’s project only marginally aligns with other artistic, theatrical or performance interventions in ruined or dilapidated locations and is distinctive in terms of his relationship with migrant populations of refugees. I sense that Ali was driven to this project, neither by a questionable self-identification with the plight of the refugees, nor by a political agenda beyond that of human compassion and empathy. I note a contrast here with some Greek artists who, in the run up to Documenta 2017 in Athens and Kassel found it necessary to imply analogous levels of exclusion and marginalisation with transient groups of refugees moving north through Athens towards the rest of Europe. Apostolos Lampropoulos’ keynote paper (Lampropoulos 2017) at the ‘Beyond the Ruin’ conference at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in November 2017 explores with insight and a gentle sensitivity the possibilities and limitations of hospitality and intimacy between artists and refugees in Greece during the times of crisis and economic austerity from 2008. One of Lampropoulos’ case studies, coincidentally, focused upon the fate of the old Elliniko airport of Athens, abandoned in 2001 but much more recently used as a temporary refugee settlement. The parallels with Tempelhof are not hard to draw. In his

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paper, Lampropoulos explores and reflects upon the triangulation between ruined sites, cultural/artistic intervention and dispossessed migrant populations. He is troubled by claims of the possibility of ‘unconditional hospitality’ and instead prefers to wrestle with the concept and practice of ‘critical intimacy’. Unaware, I have to assume, of Lampropoulos’ ideas and writing, Ali Schroeder has been navigating a different path through this complex but similar terrain and remains diffident about making any claims as to efficacy and affect for the performance work he has been undertaking in the ruins of the Tempelhof hangers.

Polish Ruin Theatre in Wroclaw and Legnica My fieldwork visits to Germany and Poland took place over a 16-day period in May 2018. These choices were shaped by a sense that I wanted to profile and identify a number of projects in Northern Europe to offer a degree of counterbalance to the detailed research I had undertaken in Greece, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sicily. Moreover, my attention had been drawn to a range of ventures and organisations in the Ruhr Region, Berlin and in the Lower Silesia area of Poland which seemed to offer some very striking examples of ruin performance and cultural intervention(s) in abandoned and derelict locations. These choices also proposed generative spheres of association around the Cold War and the post-Communist world of Eastern Europe. In early May 2018 I travelled from Berlin to Poland. I had arranged to meet theatre scholar Magdalena Gołaczyńska from the University of Wroclaw in Poland’s fourth largest city and then move on to Legnica, a smaller town, but only 45 minutes on the train from Wroclaw. At Legnica I was to spend two days with Teatr Modjeska and its director, Jacek (Jack) Glomb. Magdalena was born in Wroclaw, was a student at the University and has been particularly pre-­occupied with site-specific theatre which, she says, had become widespread in Poland during the 1990s. She attributes these developments, on the one hand, to a continuation of Polish theatre’s historical commitment down the twentieth century to formal experimentation—in this case experiments with the spatial dimensions of dramaturgy— and, on the other, an attention to the very particular and turbulent geographical history of this south west corner of Lower Silesia which since 1945 has become known in the vernacular as the ‘recovered territories’. Wroclaw and its surrounding Silesian towns and cities became part of the Prussian Empire in 1742. At the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, Upper and

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Lower Silesia were split with the latter being retained by Germany. In 1945, however, the region around Wroclaw once again became part of Poland, which in turn, until 1989, was subject to the dominance of the Soviet Union. It is a region with a high proportion of German speakers and, as I was told on several occasions, with a prevailing sense of a split GermanPolish identity. Until 1945 ‘Wroclaw’ was German ‘Breslau’ and there remains in some quarters a feeling that Lower Silesia was wrongfully stolen from Germany in the post-Second World War settlement. Thus, within a more extended time frame, Wroclaw was successively a Polish, Czech, Austrian, Prussian and German city and also a place with a large Jewish community. Whilst I got little sense that these territorial claims were still being played out in any active or combative way, nonetheless, Poland’s torn and fractured history down the centuries has been an acute element of cultural memory within the collective consciousness of the citizens and politico-­ cultural institutions of this region of Poland. This narrative has special traction for the considerations of this book since the work of a number of the theatre companies I investigated, or met in the case of Teatr Modjeska, was shaped and framed by these historical currents and tensions. For Modjeska in particular, sited work outwith traditional theatre spaces was driven as much by its desire to engage with the preoccupations and grievances of ignored and marginalised local communities as it was to play in quirky and exotic ruined spaces. I return to Teatr Modjeska in more detail below. Wroclaw’s Theatres of Ruins In correspondence, Magdalena had urged me to make contact with Teatr Ad Spectatores whose work, she said, had particularly been performed in ruined or decaying sites. Despite several attempts, the company did not respond so I became reliant on Magdalena’s and other accounts. Initially, the company had a base in the abandoned subterranean spaces beneath Wroclaw’s main railway station and several productions were performed there. Ad Spectatores also regularly made work in a disused water tower and is now based in a renovated and restored brewery site. In her writing and conversations with me, Magdalena particularly focuses on Ad Spectatores’ pieces made and performed in disused and derelict spaces beneath Dworzec Główny, the city’s railway station. In Wroclawski pociag widm (WPW, or translated, Wroclaw’s Train of Phantoms) written and directed by Krzysztof Kopka in 2004, the company blends personal stories associated with the station into broader historical episodes between 1938

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and 1948. The Wroclaw Jewish community’s experience of Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass, 1938) is woven into the dramas of well-known and anonymous inhabitants of Nazi Breslau and Stalinist Wroclaw. Included in these personal narratives is the story of the Schumann family with railwayman, father Schumann and his son, Peter all of whom later emigrated to the United States with young Peter eventually founding the iconic Bread and Puppet Theatre Company. Magdalena describes the story line in some detail in her essay, ‘Wroclaw-­Breslau. Searching for New Theatrical Space and Local Identity’ (Gołaczyńska 2006, pp. 31–4). WPW, it seems, was an ambitious piece of immersive theatre avant la lettre. The audience was led from the ruined and labyrinthine caverns beneath the station up to the functioning platforms above and on to baggage waggons whose windows were blanked off by brown paper. After a journey to another Wroclaw station everyone is returned to Dworzec Główny to become guests of the 1948 International Peace Congress of Intellectuals. Spectators and performers have time-­travelled from 1938 to 1948 and moved from experiencing Nazi to post-1945 communist regimes. Representation of suffering under both fascists and communists was a central thematic of the piece with the message of a deeply shared experience regardless of the participants’ German or Polish lineage. From these various accounts WPW was clearly an ambitious piece of site-sympathetic performance and one which unapologetically engaged with the tumultuous and often tragic mid-twentiethcentury histories of the city and the region of Lower Silesia. Maciej Masztalski, founder and director of Ad Spectatores, referencing Richard Schechner’s concept of Environmental Theatre, explains the dramaturgical rationale behind siting performances in these ruined or abandoned spaces: These buildings were once full of life. This energy has a great impact on the reception of the performances. Plays staged in sites possessing rich histories are perceived in a different way … [there is] a close energetic link between the performance’s structure (both plot and staging) and the site in which it is performed. (Masztalski qtd. in Gołaczyńska 2008, p. 31)

Whilst WPW was evidently the most complex and ambitious piece of theatre located underneath, in and around Wroclaw’s station, the company realised three other linked productions—Historia (2004), Historia II (2006) and Historia III (2008) in the derelict spaces beneath Dworzec Główny. These pieces again referenced actual figures, lives and real events in Wroclaw’s post-war history while ironically ridiculing some of the claims and pretensions inherent in German-Polish relationships (Figs.  8.11 and 8.12).

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Fig. 8.11  Teatr Ad Spectatores, abandoned water works building, Wroclaw. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

Fig. 8.12  Teatr Ad Spectatores, company base Wroclaw. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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After our conversation in the University courtyard, Magdalena drove me around Wroclaw to indicate locations—especially the abandoned water tower—where Ad Spectatores had performed over the years, and we ended up at the old brewery where the company now has its base and a theatre. That evening a street food festival was being played out in the streets immediately surrounding the old brewery buildings. Other buildings within this site are now used as studio and workshop spaces for film and media companies. On our visit there was little sense of exploring a ruin, rather this was a rather chic and stylish place with hitherto decayed and abandoned buildings now restored and whose whole purpose seemed to be devoted to media, leisure and cultural activities. A classic example, perhaps, of the gentrification of hitherto ruined sites. According to Magdalena, the company now largely performs cabaret style events for young people in the old brewery itself. I wondered what narratives Maciej Masztalski and Ad Spectatores might offer to account for these changes in their practices over this period. Magdalena had published three articles about site-specific productions in 2006, 2008 and 2012 and in these she describes work in non-theatre, sometimes ruined sites. By the time of my visit in 2018 I sensed that, for various reasons, the passage of time had weakened the raison d’être for seeking out and continuing to perform in Wroclaw’s ruined spaces. Perhaps this modern and apparently confident city had little time nowadays for ruins and how they might be performed. Magdalena, indeed, had said to me, ‘when I lecture to my students, they are not interested in ruins. It is too back, it is history’ (Gołaczyńska 2018). Perhaps, the urgency for the work becomes dissipated, the causal relationships become weaker, the buildings in question may be demolished or reinvented for other purposes and the company and artists seek new forms of stimulation and invention. If theatre in ruins is driven by the possible performance conversations generated through the relationship between the artists and the materiality of the particular site, I am prompted to reflect on whether there is almost inevitably a limited life span to these forms. If theatre work in ruins is initially provoked and enabled by political or social upheaval and crisis, the performative response loses its drive and momentum when the crisis passes or is resolved. Legnica and Teatr Modjeska: ‘a most ruinish theatre company’ On the morning of Saturday 12th May 2018 I took the train to Legnica from Wroclaw and was met by Tomasz Turketti, promotion and

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marketing specialist for Teatr Modjeska and my main point of contact with the company. Over the course of two days I was looked after by Tomasz and spent time with him, Robert Urbański (Company Dramaturg), Malgorzata Bulanda (Company Designer/Scenographer) and Jacek Glomb (Artistic Director). In his first reply to my email enquiry, Tomasz had written ‘I think we are one of the most ruinish theatres in Europe’ (Turketti 2018) and a comment by Jacek in a later recorded interview set the tone for the work I was to hear about: We don’t want to dance in the ruins to make them fun, but to walk there and give them back some life … We want to change ways of thinking about the city. (Glomb 2018)

I was offered great hospitality (overnight accommodation in the main theatre) by the company, and Jacek, Robert, Malgorzata and Tomasz were immensely generous with their time, especially on the second day when we toured the city identifying various locations—some disappeared, some in a new incarnation, some still in ruins—where the company had performed over the last 20 years. Compared to the iconic names of late twentieth-­ century Polish theatre, Modjeska is less well known outside Poland than other artists and companies such as Kantor, Grotowski and the Laboratory Theatre, Theatre of the 8th Day and Teatr Gardzienice. Nonetheless, the company has performed at the Edinburgh Festival (Coriolanus, 2001) and toured regularly in recent years to other European countries. Possibly, the main reason for this lower profile in Europe relates to Jacek’s commitment to working locally and making theatre in response to the dramaturgical forces at work in very specific ruined spaces and the experiences of the communities which surround them. I found the narratives and motives about Modjeska’s work since Jacek became the company’s Artistic Director in 1994 compelling and relevant to many of the preoccupations of this book. It seems crucial to position Modjeska’s practice in relation to the historical and political circumstances of this south west corner of Poland, and Legnica in particular. This is not simply an academic construct but, more importantly, how the company itself has identified its political and cultural mission and ambition. It is also important to register that Legnica is a less culturally fashionable city than Wroclaw, with less than a sixth of its population. However, as the headquarters of Soviet forces in Poland during the Cold War, Legnica seems to have been more of a pressure point than Wroclaw. During this period the

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city was divided into Polish and Russian zones, with the latter forbidden to the public, and, indeed, Russian troops were still garrisoned in the city until 1994, three years after the official end of the Soviet Union in 1991. This exacting history has left Legnica with very particular scars and memories. Clearly, Jacek and his theatre team are deeply conscious of these and their continuing legacy for contemporary Legnica. In a short essay for a publicity pamphlet published in the early 2000s, Roman Pawlowski writes: Staging performances in alternative spaces is a response to Polish theatre losing audiences during the nineties. Glomb searched for new ways to reach audiences and discover new venues after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Both with “Coriolanus” and his recent “Hamlet”, he presents a portrait of a society at a crucial turning point of history, when life becomes chaotic, people scramble for power, and moral order breaks down. His choice of dilapidated old buildings for his performances is symbolic of a struggle in the ruins of the ancient regime. This approach makes Glomb one of the most interesting directors in contemporary Polish theatre today, and one of the most important voices on the changes in Eastern Europe. (Pawlowski, undated, n.p.)

Before considering particular productions in ruined spaces, it seems important to dig a little further into how Jacek frames and explains his company’s work in decaying and dilapidated spaces. The choice of particular sites seems to be largely shaped and governed by the relationship they promise with potential local audiences. Thus, for Modjeska these must be buildings which have had some kind of resonance or function for people living in their immediate vicinity and, in addition, ideally some deeper kind of social, political or ideological significance beyond their last and manifest function. Underpinning this quest lies an overwhelming concern with revitalising and restoring the social and cultural fabric of the city. Jacek says: Our philosophy is to bring this city back to life again, and to respect its long history. But the authorities here do not want to remember the past and only wish to celebrate new gods, shopping centres, property developers … We think there is no such theatre in the world that is trying to deal with politics in this way, with different cultures … We want to change ways of thinking about the city. (Glomb 2018)

Jacek is, of course, aware of the dramaturgical complexities in this meeting of space, story and community interest or support. ‘Often’, he says:

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firstly comes the space then the story. But sometimes the opposite: first we have the story then we look for the space. We don’t want to make them alive just for a short while, simply to have fun, but we want to tell the story – and have a mission. In a ruin performance you are not just a spectator, you take part in it. (Glomb 2018)

The plan for my visit had been to arrive around midday for a kind of orientation, sit in on a rehearsal of Hamlet in a ruined theatre and then meet with Jacek and Malgorzata who would take me on a tour of the city and the sites they had worked in over 20 years. In the event, this final part of the itinerary was delayed until the following morning, since Jacek had been called to Warsaw to take an active part in a demonstration and rally against Poland’s increasingly right-wing and authoritarian government. So, after a tiring return trip to Warsaw, Jacek met me at 10.00 am on the Sunday morning for a journey around the city, followed by a long conversation over coffee with Malgorzata and Tomasz as translator. Modjeska has two permanent theatre spaces in addition to found sites around the city. It has its main base in Legnica’s 175-year-old municipal theatre and a smaller semi-derelict space not far away. This latter is called ‘Scena na Nowym Świecie’, which translated means ‘Stage on the New World’. ‘New World’ being the name of the street where the building, once the home to the Jewish Cultural Society (1951–68), is situated. It was in the latter that I spent two hours watching a rehearsal of Hamlet, a revised version of a production they had mounted 17 years previously. This space has a modern but quite limited seating area, lighting rig and technical kit, dressing rooms and offices, but the actual stage retains a permanently decaying, dusty  and rough industrial aesthetic. A deep floor-boarded playing area dips away from the audience down into a flat zone covered with sand. Beyond lie a series of spaces and rooms, disappearing into the gloom of the rear of the building. Either side of the main performance space are two wooden ramps leading up to a raised backstage balcony area. These have been constructed by the company to afford access to the balcony and allow playing at different heights. They are now clearly permanent features of the stage area. The ramps are supported by wooden columns and scaffolding, and black plastic tarpaulins are hung over one of the walls. On another wall there are two or three recessed spaces, each approximately the size of a vertical coffin. Overall, it offers a very large playing capacity and resembles an abandoned warehouse whose front has been cut away and removed. As a staging structure it has considerable depth and height

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as well as a number of different levels. During a pause in the rehearsal I wander around and inspect the backstage spaces, existing in a kind of twilight zone. It is difficult to know how much of this has been contrived by the scenographer for this production of Hamlet, and how much is a permanent feature of the building around and within which any production has to be performed. I suspect that apart from some obviously mobile artefacts and props most of this dilapidated space stays in a permanent and fixed state of semi-ruination. Largely due to my inability to speak Polish, and my visitor status, I cannot fathom out the scenographic concept for this Hamlet. I am unsure what world they are trying to create, and I veer between seeing it as located either in a futuristic dystopic and post-­ apocalyptic universe, or in the ruined remains of a long dead and dysfunctional post-industrial warehouse or factory. The rehearsal is very stop-start, but the action focused, energetic and extremely physical. The mood is attentive but not strained. I remind myself that this production was first realised some 17 years previously with only one of the original cast remaining. I assume that Modjeska’s first Hamlet was performed in this very same space. The next morning Jacek and Malgorzata take me to various locations around the city where, for over 25 years, the company has made and performed work. Each of these sites  evidently have a strong—and in some cases quite emotional—resonance for both Artistic Director and scenographer. The Company’s approach to these spaces and its rationale are clearly and passionately articulated by this statement in a Teatr Modjeska catalogue for the Second International Theatre Festival (2009) in Legnica: We want to meet you in the theatre whose stage is the city. Our theatre is known for taking over various spaces within the city  – an old factory, a ruined cinema, a run-down theatre, a church, or an old courtyard. We mark these places by being inside them, and the regular performances help bring these venues back to life, often save them from demolition. Thus the theatre goes beyond the borders for art and becomes more community-oriented; breaks from exclusive entertainment and achieves social dialogue. Such theatre forms a portrait of the space we live in, and helps to build a civil society that is aware of history, tradition and its place in the contemporary world. (City 2009, n.p.)

I note that none of these places are currently being used by the company and this may be because they no longer exist (e.g. the cinema) or, as

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I am told to be more often the case, Modjeska has been prevented from continuing to use them by the Legnica Council. I sense a perplexed disenchantment from Jacek, Tomasz and Malgorzata towards the mayor of the City who is a member of Poland’s current governing party, Law and Justice. Our first stop is at an empty brownfield site, formerly home of the Kolejarz Cinema, but now overgrown with scrubby grass and containing three huge garbage skip containers. When Modjeska used the cinema it was already closed and falling into decay. The space is surrounded on three sides by four-floor apartment blocks. This is clearly a very poor and neglected part of Legnica and Jacek tells me that it is an area where ‘travelling people’ and Roma have habitually been given housing. It is hard to imagine this space containing a thriving cinema but this is where Modjeska made performances and also films in the early years of Jacek’s artistic leadership of the company (1994–2003). Clearly, both Jacek and Malgorzata have considerable affection for this place but their warm memories of the work they made here are undercut by feelings of anger at being forced to leave the building. They were told that after demolition there would be new buildings on the site. However, the cinema was only demolished in 2014 and now the site remains bare and abandoned, a set almost readymade for one of Kieślowski’s Dekalog films. One of the final theatre pieces in the Kolejarz cinema was in 2000 when The Ballad of Zakaczawie was premiered on 7 October. Modjeska’s publication, Modjeska’s Theatre in Legnica, offers this description: An epic tale of the suburbs: a story of the 50 post-war years of the Legnica demi-monde, portraying life in the Communist People’s Republic of Poland as ridiculous as horrible, together with the failure of youthful ideals in a clash against the ruthless contemporary. A legendary, award strewn production by the Legnica Theatre. (Modjeska Theatre in Legnica 2014, p. 10)

Theatre critic Roman Pawlowski is quoted thus: In The Ballad, Jacek Glomb successfully grasped the genius loci: the spirit of the place. It is the crowning of his experience with the plays in the city space […]. Thanks to film-like editing, the three hours of the play are gone like an exciting séance. (Ibid.)

We walk on a couple of blocks and pass two sites which remain close to the company’s heart. Both these buildings are still standing but boarded up and empty. The first, Jacek describes as ‘a place of ghosts. Now, a most

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painful place … one of the creepiest buildings in our town’ (Glomb 2018). During the Second World War this had been the Legnica Headquarters of the Nazi SS and subsequently under communist rule, the home of the secret police. After 1991 and the end of communism it had been a community hall for several years, only later to be closed by the local authority. Jacek and Malgorzata believe that this final closure of the building was undertaken deliberately to thwart the company’s presence there. I have no details of the performance work in this space, but we shortly arrive at an abandoned building which had once been a supermarket. Modjeska had undertaken a number of educational and performance projects here over a period of seven years. It was clearly a signature location for Jacek and they had particularly worked with children who lived close by in the blocks of flats. In 2004 Modjeska rehearsed, performed and filmed for television a piece called Made in Poland. This was premiered on 21 November 2004 and shown on Polish television a year later. Made in Poland spoke of and to the dispossessed and impoverished communities which lived around the supermarket, and particularly to teenage youth. I sense that Jacek and the director Przemyslaw Wojcieszek’s anger, frustration and sadness about the state of a Poland which had transitioned rapidly from totalitarian communist rule into unregulated free market capitalism were hugely invested in this theatre piece. Actors performed in the dilapidated shop windows and in a car outside. Jacek says that ‘people watched from the flats all around and at the beginning they did not know what was happening. The police came quite often but this made a really good background to the piece’ (Glomb 2018). The work is clearly a cry of anger and pain against the oppressive restrictions of Cold War Polish society and the differently alienated world of rampant consumption and unfettered consumerism. A review by Roman Pawlowski suggests that the play ultimately finds no answers in either the nihilistic violence of teenage rebels or the despotic command-led economies of Soviet-style communism. I sense a strongly felt and manifest ethical politics at work in all Modjeska’s theatre. In his review of Made in Poland Pawlowski writes: The first scenes were so realistic that somebody in the audience tried to call the police in the premiere … It is one of the most interesting Polish plays about the “no future” generation. Wojcieszek shows the trap of blind anarchy, into which the main protagonist falls. Smashing cars and telephone booths solves no problems, on the contrary: it builds new ones. At the same time, the play shows the ideological divides in the society. (Pawlowski 2014, p. 18)

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During the remainder of my tour of Legnica, Jacek indicates various buildings where the company had once performed. These include the Warehouse Hall of a traditional winery, a Soviet bunker, the original sports hall of an army barracks, the old town hall and a factory building which had housed a woollen mill or factory, Hanka. My ‘Mis-Guide’ to Legnica concludes with a visit to a part of the city diametrically opposite from the workers’ housing around the Kolejarz Cinema and the Izerska Street supermarket. Here are spacious streets, gardens and large villas. This area, Jacek tells me, was the prohibited Soviet zone of the city and where the top brass of the occupying Soviet army worked and lived. Without invitation, we enter a villa which is now an upmarket restaurant with large tables immaculately set for Sunday lunch. Waitresses are making last minute adjustments to elaborate table layouts and do not seem particularly unsettled by our presence there. Without speaking or explaining anything I feel Jacek has brought me to this incongruous place to illustrate a continuity or through line from privilege and entitlement under Soviet communism to reconfigured bourgeois power and prerogatives within free market capitalism. We return to Modjeska’s home in the main municipal theatre of Legnica and sit in Jacek’s office drinking coffee with Tomasz heroically undertaking two-way translation between myself and Jacek and Malgorzata. As the conversation progresses I am becoming much clearer about the wide range of work which this company has undertaken over the last 25 years. At one level the activities are multiple and diverse: Shakespeare on the main stage of the Modjeska theatre and in the ruined, semi-derelict hall of the old Jewish Culture House; extant plays or devised work in the various abandoned and sometimes very derelict buildings identified above; educational work with children in the poorer working classes districts of the city; international theatre festivals (2007 and 2009); conferences, and two extraordinary ‘reunions’. The first of these was called The First Great Reunion of the People of Legnica in 2004 and brought together different generations of people who had once lived in the city, but who are now scattered across the globe. The second, in 2013, was entitled Twenty Years After and constituted a meeting of people currently living in Legnica with their former Soviet neighbours on the 20th anniversary of Red Army troops eventually leaving the city. This event comprised a ‘scientific conference, a concert, a play and film screenings. A historical reflection and an attempt at discussing difficult subjects over any divides’ (Modjeska Theatre in Legnica 2014, p. 47). These ‘reunions’ offer a palpable sense of how the company imagines and practices its role as an organisation, not just

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with civic responsibility, but also with a generous, expansive and imaginative grasp of what might be done to help heal or repair historical and ethnic divisions in the city and beyond. That a theatre company might see its remit and responsibility to extend into these areas of civic and social reconstruction indicates, amongst many things, a fluid and elastic view of what constitutes theatre and performance on the one hand, and a concept of ruin and ruination which extends well beyond the material and built environment on the other. Jacek and Malgorzata tell me a little about the 2007 and 2009 festivals, both of which were predicated upon performances in abandoned or ruined sites. Companies were invited to participate in the two festivals but on the condition that they presented work which was responsive to the site or location they had chosen. Over both festivals, as well as Modjeska itself, companies performed from Poznan, Cracow, Wroclaw, Prague, Budapest, Barcelona, Riga, Herisson, Torino, Tibilisi and Santa Barbara. Each selected company visited Legnica nine months before the festival was scheduled to take place and during this time they selected the site which they preferred to work in. The companies then returned to their home base to prepare the work, arriving back in the city a few days before the festival began to rehearse in situ. Thus, it might be said that these were assuredly festivals of ‘theatre in ruins’. Jacek claims that this concept of a festival was unique and certainly I know of no event which has organised its programme on a comparable basis. Over each festival’s four-day span audiences would have experienced around ten different pieces, all performed in dilapidated and ruined sites. Tomasz’s bold claim in his first email to me that Modjeska was the most ‘ruinish’ theatre company in Europe seemed to be increasingly convincing. The company’s educational work is ongoing and remains crucial to its profile and identity. When I read that this is less about teaching young people to work on stage, ‘but generally to hone their sensitivity and social intelligence’ (Modjeska Theatre in Legnica 2014, p. 46) I continue to get a much more focused sense of what underlies Modjeska’s apparently disparate activities and theatre forms. The radicalism of the company under Jacek’s leadership finds no division between what we might, in a different context, label community or applied theatre and formal experimentation, nor does it believe that productions of Shakespeare need only be performed in their grand municipal main stage theatre or, indeed, be rendered exempt from drastic reinvention or re-working. I also sense an absence of self-satisfied worthiness in these endeavours despite the considerable political conviction which profoundly suffuses all their activities. I

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spot evidence of a certain self-deprecatory wry humour when I read of another event the company organised in 2011 and 2012 called the Festival of Not-Bad Theatre. This seems to have been an event which restated Modjeska’s social commitment to working with youth at the same time as reaffirming their credentials as a performance company willing to play with and, if necessary, break the formal parameters of theatre making. The statement below testifies to these commitments but also, perhaps, indicates Jacek’s impatience with vogueish or fashionable trends in art and theatre. In a section called ‘Besides the plays’ within the company’s book, Modjeska Theatre in Legnica, we read that the Festival of Not-Bad Theatre is: A review of stage works from all over Poland that the organisers believe to go against the current of contemporary fashion and at the same time are shoved to the margins by the media and grand theatre events, prepared in cooperation with the Teatr Nie-Taki foundation of young theatre students and theatre lovers. A lesson in the variety of theatre for theatregoers from Legnica and vicinity. (Ibid., p. 47)

A provisional and contingent conclusion to this account of Teatr Modjeska in Legnica is that the company and its main players have a multiple and layered set of relationships with ruin and ruination. In an important sense, the abandoned, derelict and decaying building clearly holds a political, aesthetic and dramaturgical charge for Jacek as Artistic Director and for someone like Malgorzata as scenographer and designer. This charge—this force field—functions both at the level of dramaturgy, shaping and informing the ‘on-stage’ work, and helps to forge an active participatory relationship with the audiences who see the work and who often live their lives in close proximity to the sites in question. Beyond these two crucial factors there also seems to be in Modjeska’s extraordinary and imaginative portfolio of performance and performative activities an almost Beckettian acceptance—an existential recognition—of lives ruined by cultural, political and psychic circumstances beyond the control of the individuals concerned. I sense that Jacek finds ruination beyond the material ruin all around him in this corner of modern Poland. He is evidently deeply aware of the historical circumstances which so clearly leave their impression on contemporary Legnica, but equally finds that the combination of free market and socially authoritarian solutions embraced by postCold War Polish governments offers only further division and alienation in place of the social cohesion and creative commons which his company espouses through its multiple theatre and performance practices.

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Fig. 8.13  Teatr Modjeska, abandoned Piekerach supermarket performance site, Legnica. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

Fig. 8.14  Teatr Modjeska Made in Poland, Legnica. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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Fig. 8.15  Teatr Modjeska theatre posters, Legnica. (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

Fig. 8.16  Teatr Modjeska—Jacek Glomb, Tomasz Turketti & Malgorzata Bulanda in Legnica (13 May 2018). (Image: Simon Murray 2018)

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Polish Postscript: Crumpled Paper and the Ruinous Emballages of Tadeusz Kantor It was Kantor who first drew me to Poland. Long before this ruin project—and well before I started to think about the term—I tasted ruination in his work, or at least a sense of decay, of things being worn out, and a pleasure in the generative power of detritus. Around that period (the 1990s) I became slightly obsessed with Poland and its twentieth-century history, with filmmakers like Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski and with the tumult surrounding the emergence of Solidarity and Lech Walesa. I also searched for any writing on Poland by the Scottish political analyst, historian and journalist, Neal Ascherson. An Erasmus teaching exchange in the late 1990s, whilst working at the then University College of Ripon and York St John, led me on several occasions to the University of Silesia’s campuses in Sosnowiec and Katowice, and from there to Kantor’s Cricot 2 museum in Krakow. On one of these visits I also went to the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw which had been co-founded by Kantor and where for several decades his paintings, installations and object-sculptures have been exhibited. With Kantor’s work, for reasons I found hard to identify, I became preoccupied with the objects that featured in his theatre and which always seemed to have a life of their own. On the one hand these were ordinary, quotidian, usually brown and perpetually dusty (I imagined) and seemed to populate works like The Dead Class, Wielopole Wielopole, The Return of Odysseus and Today is my Birthday, all of which I only ever experienced on video or DVD. On the other hand, there were mysterious Heath Robinson7 contraptions or artefacts such as the cannon cross, the thudding mechanical cradle, the waltzing bike, the camera gun and a giant mousetrap. There seemed to be a perpetual worn-out shabbiness to the household and domestic objects such as suitcases, stacks of chairs, brooms, tables, rolled up carpets, milk jugs, sacks, bicycles, hand carts, step ladders, umbrellas, bundles of kindling and heavy military or winter overcoats. Sometimes, these were mysteriously wrapped in brown paper or hessian (or similar) cloth. Only later did I read about Kantor’s emballages—packaging in French—which became one of the key concepts and practices within both

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his static and performance work. It’s an elusive idea which seems to be about removing—or indeed ruining—the habitual representative function of found objects and as they are often used on stage (Kantor n.d., p. 15). Kantor writes: It was then that I made my first E M B A L L A G E. When I made my first GESTURE – so familiar to me later – of cramming into a poor paper bag scraps of crumpled paper and what not, I had to be emotionally prepared not to return like the Prodigal Son to his old HOME with all its “i m a g e s”, with the IMAGES of Mother, Father, Children, Dogs, Domestic Animals, Horses, the Sky behind the Window, Woods, Hills, Roads, Paths, Clouds… All those things, so dear and beautiful “in life”, lost all their truth to me “in image”. Now it looked as if it were a reproduction, a repetition. I remember very well that moment, the crumpled-up paper and other things … A N O B J E C T. Something that is O U T S I D E of me. I could paint it. Its IMAGE. I see almost anything in a ball of crumpled paper, but then I thought it was not enough. THE IMAGE was not the point.

The worn-outness of these everyday ‘poor’ objects is the very source of the narrative potential embedded and contained within them, not because they represent stories but because they are those narratives: they hold and perform their own memories. Prefiguring the New Materialist movement8 (Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010), for Kantor these objects become active participants in the work of art, or in the performance, in an unadorned and simple form. Kantor’s use of these material objects is born

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out of his training and practice as a visual artist and as a dramaturgical strategy for engaging with intense memories and experiences of living under war and the attendant artistic censorship of autocratic communist regimes. These conditions marked almost all of Kantor’s working life. It was the scrunched-up piece of paper, as image and material object, which helped perform the story of Poland’s twentieth-century ruination. Today, I feel certain that Kantor’s theatre is a concrete theatre not about ruins, but of ruins. His objects are not ruins, or indeed ruined as such, but seem inexorably on a never-ending journey towards ruination. Often these household objects seem as if they have been discovered in a long-locked storeroom or dusty attic. Brought on to the stage their passage towards ruin is punctuated, or at least temporarily halted, through their life in performance. Jan Kott (1914–2001), Polish theatre scholar, political activist and critic, finds strong associations between Kantor and Beckett. He writes: In Kantor’s tragi farce, just as in Beckett’s tragi farces (despite all the differences in their semantics and their imagery, one cannot help seeing profound similarities between these two theatres, representative of the century’s end) birth is already dying. In The Dead Class birthing takes place on a broken dentist’s chair, and in Endgame dying takes place in a garbage can. In both their theatres birth and death are degraded. (Kott 1992, p. 53)

Elements of ruin or wreckage are a defining element of Kantor’s aesthetic and, like Samuel Beckett, with whom he has often been compared, he wrote to and, in different ways, experienced, the backdrop of twentieth-­ century conflagration. Neither writes about the Second World War, or indeed living under Cold War conditions, but for both the pressure of experience suffuses their work, and both engage with the inevitability of ruination.

Notes 1. Military Academy. 2. A radome is a structural, weatherproof enclosure that protects a radar antenna. It is constructed of material that only minimally weakens any electromagnetic signal transmitted or received by the antenna. Thus, it is effectively transparent to radio waves. 3. ‘Ideal type’ is an analytical tool first articulated by sociologist Max Weber. It is not ‘ideal’ in the sense of being excellent or, indeed, an average but refers

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to a collection of features or characteristics present in a particular phenomenon which recur in different times and places. In this sense I would argue that in my context, the occupation of Tacheles over 22 years represents an ‘ideal type’. 4. Königsberg is the name for the historic Prussian city that is now Kaliningrad in Russia. 5. The Schutzstaffel or SS as it became known by English speakers was a leading para-military organisation under Hitler and the Nazi Party. Founded in 1925 it ceased operations on 8 May 1945. 6. Thanks to Topsy Qur’et for intelligence on Tempelhof’s early history. 7. William Heath Robinson (1872–1944) was an English cartoonist, illustrator and artist, best known for drawings of whimsically elaborate machines to achieve simple objectives. 8. New Materialism is a movement which some claim is not ‘new’ at all but is nonetheless concerned with ontology and our understanding of matter. A way of thinking which recognises the agency of non-human forces in events, a shifting of our focus from the human experience of things to things themselves.

Bibliography Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. City. (2009). Catalogue for 2nd International Theatre Festival, Modjeska Theatre, Legnica. Coole, D., & Frost, S. (Eds.). (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge. Fari, N. (2018). Mapping the Teufelsberg, or How to Embody History. In Urban Appropriation Strategies: Exploring Space-Making Practices in Contemporary European Cityscapes (pp. 1–9). Bielefeld: Verlag. Fitzpatrick, B., & Ingelevics, V. Freedom Rocks: The Everyday Life of the Berlin Wall. https://www.freedomrocks.ca/welcome.php. Accessed 3 July 2018. Gallix, A. (2011, June 17). Hauntology: A not-so-newcritical manifestation. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jun/17/ hauntology-critical. Accessed 16 June 2020. Ginsberg, A. (2001). ‘Howl’ from Collected Poems, 1947–1980. London: HarperCollins. Glomb, J. (2018). Unpublished Conversation with the Author, 13 May. Gołaczyńska, M. (2006). Wrocław-Breslau: Searching for New Theatrical Space and Local Identity. Slavic and East European Performance, 26(2), 25–36.

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Gołaczyńska, M. (2008). Site-Specific Performances in Lower Silesia. Slavic and East European Performance, 28(2), 30–41. Gołaczyńska, M. (2012). The Local Theatre in Ruins. In Critical Stages/Scenes Critiques. IATC Webjournal/Revue Web Dei’ait – December, Issue No 7. Gołaczyńska, M. (2018). Unpublished Conversation with the Author, 11 May. Ingold, T. (2012). Towards an Ecology of Materials. The Annual Review of Anthropology, 41. Jones, J. (2012, September 5). The Closure of Berlin’s Tacheles Squat Is a Sad Day for Alternative art. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/sep/05/closure-tacheles-berlin-sad-alternative-art. Accessed 20 March 2019. Kantor, T. (n.d.). 1986–88. Intimate Comments. Typescript in the Cricoteka Archives, p.  15. http://www.cricoteka.pl/old/en/print.php?id_art=86&nr_ str=1. Accessed 29 Sept 2019. Kott, J. (1992). Memory of the Body: Essays on Theater and Death. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kruse, S., & Schutz, J. (2018). Tourist Trap and Memorial: What Is to Become of Checkpoint Charlie’? In DW Made for Minds. https://www.dw.com/en/tourist-trap-and-memorial-what-is-to-become-of-checkpoint-charlie/a-45062258. Accessed 5 Aug 2018. Lampropoulos, A. (2017). Contemporary Ruins, Fragments of Hospitality, Intimacies in and Out of Comfort Zones. Unpublished Paper in Beyond the Ruin: Investigating the Fragment in English Studies. HASE Conference, Athens, 23–25 November. Lindenberg, R. (2017). At Teufelsberg in the Subjunctive Mood. American Poetry Review, 46(5), 8–9. Lorimer, H., & Murray, S. (2015). The Ruin in Question. Performance Research on Ruins and Ruination, 20(5), 58–66. Maclean, R., & Reiter, M. (2010). Interview. http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/ lp/prj/mtg/men/kun/tac/enindex.htm. Accessed 20 Nov 2018. Modjeska Theatre in Legnica. (2014). Company Publication. Legnica: Copy-­ World Legnica. Noiselab. (2018). https://www.noiselab.org/. Accessed 10 June 2018. Oberender, T. (2018). The Berlin Wall Rises Again. http://www.thestandard. com.hk/sections-news_print.php?id=199672. Accessed 3 Sept 2018. Pawlowski, R. (2014). Modjeska Theatre in Legnica (Company Publication). Legnica: Copy-World Legnica. Pawlowski, R. (undated). Teatr Modjeska, Legnica, Poland. Company Publicity Leaflet. Pearson, M. (2010). Site-Specific Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Podrescu, P. (2016). podopolog. http://xlterrestrials.org/plog/. Accessed 21 Nov 2018.

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Podrescu, P. (2018). Unpublished Conversation with the Author, 6 May. Rabensaat, R. (2018). Unpublished Conversation with the Author, 4 May. Rabensaat, R. (2019). Unpublished Correspondence with the Author, 29 August. Schroeder, A. (2018). Unpublished Conversation with the Author, 5 May. Smith, C., & Shand, B. J. (2016). Architectural Wounds: Teufelsberg. Architecture and Culture, 4(2), 185–192. Spatz, B. (2015). What a Body Can Do, Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research. London: Routledge. Turketti, T. (2018). Unpublished Correspondence with the Author, 12 May. Weber, M. (1895/1994). The Nations State and Economic Policy (Freiburg Address). In P.  Lassman, & R.  Speirs (Eds. and Trans.), Weber: Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, L.  K. (2018). Cold Art (Radio Programme). https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b09yfplt Wilson, L. K. (2020). Sounds from the Bunker: Aural Culture and the Remainder of the Cold War. Journal of War and Culture, 13(1), 33–53. https://wwwtandfonline-com.ezproxy.lib.gla.ac.uk/toc/ywac20/current. Accessed 18 Mar 2020.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion: Ruining the Ruin or Pausing at a Partial View

While reflecting on Goat Island’s1 work, It’s an Earthquake in my Heart (2001), Matthew Goulish, co-founder and performer with the company, writes, ‘We have discovered a performance by making it’ (Goulish 2001, n.p.). In a similar vein I have discovered a book by writing it. My own professional practice and teaching over 30  years have been rooted in devised theatre and an understanding that a piece of work is never finished, and is being made, invented and re-invented as an ever-unfolding process punctuated by public performances. This book is a consequence of discovering, through research and field work, what ruins do, how they work, what they offer, how people perform in them and how we might think about decay, dereliction and ruination at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Following cultural geographer Doreen Massey, who wrote that ‘a lot of enquiry consists in reformulating the initiating question’ (Massey 2010, n.p.), my process has not simply been a matter of stacking up new knowledge, but equally importantly it has required recalibrating and reformulating information and thoughts that I already had. Discoveries made before and during the writing of the book, discoveries made partly through desk-based research, but, more importantly, through ‘being there’, as Diana Taylor writes in her essay ‘Performing Ruins’ (Taylor 2009, p.  14) of the experience of a guided tour by Pedro Matta within one of General Pinochet’s partially ruined torture centres in Santiago de Chile. Matta, we learn, is one of the surviving torture victims, originally held in this ‘dark ruin’ (Taylor 2009, p. 13), © The Author(s) 2020 S. Murray, Performing Ruins, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40643-1_9

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the Villa Grimaldi. Taylor reflects honestly and perceptively on what her ‘being there’ with Matta, a survivor of this dreadful place of torture, means for her—and him—in relation to both the trauma and the politics embedded in this location. None of my experiences, however, except perhaps for Mostar and Sarajevo, exposed me to sites of such extreme trauma and distress. That most of the ruin narratives articulated in this account have entailed my ‘being there’ and often talking to key protagonists involved in these performance events is not to claim some questionable authenticity or foundational truth to my writing, but simply to suggest that having— an albeit often fleeting—sentient relationship with these places has provided a different or additional way of knowing. A knowing beyond the page or the computer screen which has generated a diverse sense of these ruinous places and the activities and motivations of those who were actively involved in them. Ruins become known not only though historical and conceptual context, but also through their material structures and as an ‘affecting presence’ (Armstrong 1971, p. 26). What has become abundantly clear over this investigation is that any kind of singular or unitary perspective on what ruins are, how we should think about them and how performance performs in these spaces is an errant quest. As Pétursdóttir and Olsen write in their introductory essay to Ruin Memories (2014), ‘things – ruins – do not bow to any one approach’ (2014, p. 5). Ruins are happily stranded between classifications and offer the challenge to embrace—and celebrate—several ways of thinking at the same time. As such, it is productive to see cultural and particularly performance interventions into ruins as potential sites of plenitude and laboratories for experimenting with ideas and artistic practices. Apart from ruins of antiquity (Chap. 3) all the sites which figure in this account are modern ruins in that they have been destroyed or rendered derelict from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Ranging from factories, shipyards, Cold War listening posts, the site of a devastating earthquake, the Berlin Wall, a seminary, a department store, a cinema and a supermarket, these sites of ruination have one quality in common. Through economic and political change, natural catastrophe or warfare they have had their original form and function erased and destroyed. Of course, the extent of material destruction of these places when I encountered them as cultural sites of occupation varied according to time frame and the reasons for their ruination. In my conversation with Mike Pearson (Chap. 7) he regularly spoke of Brith Gof’s ‘occupation’ of factories, warehouses and abandoned farm houses for each theatre project in question, but this notion of

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occupation, although generative, is a complex one in that it covers different motives and practices in diverse situations. All the cultural occupations identified above share some sense of protest and dissent with a concomitant desire to put the building or location to a different, more productive and creative use, if only for a limited period of time. Some of these occupations were with permission (although such an agreement may have been time-limited, fragile and mutable) and some were illegal in that the occupation by the artists was formally without consent from the authorities concerned. In the former category, for example, we can identify Brith Gof’s occupation of various industrial sites, NVA’s occupation of St Peter’s Seminary and the heritage-framed occupations of Landschaftspark and Zollverein in the Ruhr region of Germany. In the latter, the occupations of Berlin’s Tacheles and Teufelsberg or Athens’ Green Park café and the Embros Theatre were at least initially without approval and were driven both by a sense of protest at the lack of affordable work spaces for artists and a demonstration against wider social and political conditions. Certainly, in the case of Athens, occupations were also driven by anger at the depredations experienced by Greek citizens from the brutal austerity imposed by global banking institutions and the EU in 2010, and subsequently, but reluctantly, agreed by the Greek government. In the capacious field of Ruin Studies, it is often noted how the ruin— buildings or locations—play with time, or at least has a complex temporality. I have reflected in the first two chapters that ruins are continuously ‘on the move’, both in the sense of their material deterioration and in terms of how they gesture to both past and future. Pointing to the past the ruin becomes not only a complex testimonial of and for memory, most plangently for those who once had an intimate connection with the site in question, but also that sense of where the building has come from and what caused its ruination, what it might have been and what it has become. Here the ruin signals its own future: one of further imminent decay and destruction or perhaps repurposed for an alternative future and function. The intervention of performance and other artistic activities into sites of ruination unsettles these time dynamics, offering temporary suspension in either the process of entropy or reconstitution for other commercial or cultural purposes. Sometimes ruin performances represent a liminal space, a punctuation mark between different states of ruination, and at others, a prolonged occupation which may last years (St Peter’s, Tacheles or Teufelsberg), or even an open-ended one such as Nuova Gibellina.

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The performance and theatrical projects described and reflected upon over the preceding chapters represent both a diverse range of activities and manifold relationships with the ruined environments which they occupy. These portraits are singular in their particular and detailed practices, but, also, as has been identified above, reveal some patterns and commonalities. In almost all these cases the performance events which have taken place in these locations have a nuanced relationship with both the materially ruined environment and its immaterial history. The sitedness of all these performance projects is intriguingly complex. In no cases is there an exact fit or congruence between performance event and the history, original function and current materiality of the ruin in question. This book was never framed as another investigation into site-specificity, but what it has—unwittingly—revealed is a more generative and pleasingly complex way of configuring the web of relations between live performance events and their material surroundings. Furthermore, beyond this are the elusive, always unstable and ephemeral relationship(s) between the piece in question and the immaterial memories, moods and atmospheres generated by audience reception and interaction with the work. The example of Mike Pearson’s work with Brith Gof illustrates some of these shifting and unstable relationships. Gododdin’s construction in and for the empty Rover car factory in Cardiff was always a dramaturgically elastic one since the abandoned Cardiff engine factory stood in for hundreds of other industrial spaces across Europe rendered derelict by the political/economic regimes of Thatcherite and other neo-liberal governments. Moreover, for Pearson a too tight or reductive relationship with the ruined site would have produced a theatrical reconstruction, far removed from Brith Gof’s political intentions and aesthetics. Similarly for Farquhar, NVA and St Peter’s Seminary, although there is a strong element of site-specificity to the embryonic cultural and performance work undertaken there, the site itself was treated as a prompt or trigger for performative ‘laboratory’ experiments across the fields of performance, ecology, archaeology and history. For many of these projects the very act of occupying a ruined or abandoned space is a statement in its own right, regardless of the nature of the performance executed therein. This clearly is the case with the Mavili Collective’s occupations of Embros Theatre and Green Park in Athens. Here, performance is a secondary but significant tool and expression for the protests and anger which were the force fields propelling these actions. In different ways the extraordinarily heroic theatres under siege in Sarajevo or Jacek Glomb’s impassioned and angry

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theatrical work with Teatr Modjeska in the abandoned cinema, supermarket and piano factory in Legnica are all highly charged statements in terms of just ‘being there’—for the Serbian forces, Polish authorities and immediate communities. Beyond this, the actual theatre which was performed in these spaces fills out these occupations, gives them form, shape, content and liveness that together articulate the total experience of performance as political protest. For Ludovico Corrao in Gibellina contemporary art and performance are the animus not simply to offer a new future for the 1968 earthquake survivors, but also to suggest that the reconstitution of the remaining community lies as much in the emancipatory qualities of art as it does in bricks and mortar. Behind or beside both the political propulsion of protest and dissent and the form and dramaturgies of works performed, there remains for many of these protagonists, on the one hand, the elusive and mysterious fascination for ruined spaces, and on the other the pragmatism of needing to occupy abandoned low or no cost spaces for work, social or domestic purposes. However, for none of these artists and activists was the attraction built upon the lyrical allure which classical painters or eighteenth-­ century Romantic poets and writers had for the ruined fragment. Three of the people I interviewed each put it slightly differently. For Pearson the pull of a dilapidated, soon to be demolished industrial space is rooted in his sensibility as a performance maker. His comment to me in conversation quoted earlier deserves repeating here: I do wonder if the attraction is that their state of dereliction or abandonment almost meets a kind of work which is trying to assemble itself within that occupancy and the hope that those two things meet in the middle, come together. (Pearson 2019)

In Berlin, activist and performance maker of three decades, Paolo Podrescu spoke of ruined sites as being ‘liberated zones’ (Podrescu 2018), but these I sensed were much more than practical workspace solutions for impoverished artists. These places seem to have had a particular charge or force field which offered ways of living, not determined by the cash and commodity nexus, but by relations of mutuality, exchange, support and creativity. Through a different lens, Athens-based theatre director, Simos Kakalis (see Chap. 8) told me that his decision to stage Apokopos in the old oil mill at Elefsina was due to his sense that this abandoned place spoke resonantly to the dream performed in Bergadhis’ poem. For Simos, the

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long dead oil mill was a place of ghosts, of rituals engaging with the dead and the dying and he believed that the memories generated by the meeting point of poem and material space would well serve his dramaturgical mission. This book is not a representative survey of ruins nor a taxonomy of performances enabled by them. It has approached ruins through a range of lenses: the intuitive and the analytical; the rational and the romantic; the affective and the cognitive and the associative and the deductive. Rather than mutually exclusive binaries, I regard these dualities to be in a reciprocally propitious relationship with each other, for this is how to approach a ruin and the cultural work that it may afford. Across different countries of Europe at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century this narrative identifies ways of encountering ruins through practices of performance in a world where dislocation, disorder and disruption seem to be dominant modes of experience. There is no mechanical or reductive relationship between ruins and the cultural activities they may enable, rather that the ruin in its very brokenness provides a site for projection of ideas, for productive uncertainty, for experiment and for the invention of narratives. Perhaps T.S.  Eliot in his poem The Waste Land offered, in a hugely different context, something similar in the line, ‘These Fragments I have shored against my ruins’ (Eliot 1990, p. 41). These possibilities, these fragments are all part of the appeal. The performance and other artistic practices marked in this book vary gloriously in their intention and their form. All have a degree of utopianism to them in that they hint at different ways of being in the world and engaging with the world’s materiality and its potential destruction. In this sense each of these projects has its own generative ecology, even if this ecology is short lived, only to be swiftly re-ruined. The field of ruin performance is replete with paradox and complexity, never more acutely evidenced than in Sarajevo’s ‘theatres under siege’. Here, under unspeakable conditions of death and destruction, theatre, often itself ruined, afforded opportunities for resilience, comradeship and a strange sense of familiarity during a period of time which was far from ordinary. In the two decades following the end of Balkans War a number of the key players remarked that peacetime failed to engender or recapture the depth and richness of feelings and creativity that conditions of extreme danger under siege had somehow generated. In a different context, Simon Ward, writing about ruination and poetics in the works of W.G. Sebald, reflects that ‘these are sites of broken narration,

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realms where the imagination actively engages with, indeed transforms, the material environment’ (Ward 2006, p. 62). In the opening chapter I suggested that the timeliness of thinking and puzzling over ruins was framed by the era of the Anthropocene and our consciousness of impending environmental disaster driven by human agency. At the completion of the volume such preoccupations remain as urgent and present as they ever were. However, today in the final weeks before this writing is dispatched to the publisher two more events of huge import cast long shadows upon my thoughts and writing about the nature of ruin and ruination. Britain’s decision to leave the European Union (a referendum in 2016) was confirmed unequivocally, but far from unanimously, by the General Election result of December 2019 which saw a Conservative government elected by a large majority on the platform of ‘Get Brexit done’. Only two months later the rapid global spread of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) resulted in extraordinary enforced changes in social life, economic activity and human behaviour in most countries across the world. At the time of writing the middle- and long-term consequences of this pandemic are unknown. Whilst the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU may seem a parochial concern compared to climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, it nonetheless has momentous impact on what being European means both in very practical terms and as part of our collective imaginary. When the pandemic subsides, the UK decision to leave the EU will begin to reconfigure global political and economic relationships and the interactions we have with each other. In this context, if the idea and practice of a collaborative Europe is not exactly ruined it is most surely fragmented and seriously fractured. Each of these events, both global in very different ways, would seem to shed a new and acute light on notions and experiences of ruination. As has been explained in the opening chapters this is a European book with European case studies and a very European sensibility on the part of the author who must live with and accept the consequences of this partiality. However each of these events are experienced and perceived it is difficult not to sense a feeling of severe disquiet about socio-political systems, structures and relationships which seem worryingly cleft and variously ruined. Regardless of whether this brokenness is to be welcomed as heralding more optimistic futures, or deplored as a catastrophic sign of end-­ times, our collective imaginary is inevitably engrossed and being formed—and re-formed—by these experiences. Whilst these global events have significant real-life impact on our worlds it is also hard not to view

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them as having a metonymic and allegorical function in relation to the places and projects which have been the subject of this book. I conclude by returning to Benjamin and Beckett. The former found the allegory as a generative strategy for approaching objects, images and behaviours always as multivalent and polysemous. For Benjamin, the world of meaning is never one-dimensional and as an allegorist he finds meaning even in wreckage and ruin. His comment about their relationship, quoted earlier in the book, warrants reprising here. He writes that ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things’ (Benjamin 1977, p.  178). As a last word it may seem perverse to turn to Beckett for a (slightly) upbeat note, but we might remind ourselves in closing that even Beckett, during his unbroadcast piece for radio (The Capital of the Ruins), proposed that the devastated French town of St-Lo offered an ‘inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again’ (Beckett 1986, p. 76). At their most startling, eccentric and compelling these ruin performances have offered their own ‘inkling’.

Note 1. Goat Island was an influential Chicago-based collaborative performance group, founded in 1987 which closed with a final performance of ‘The Lastmaker’ in 2009. Goulish was one of the founding members of the company.

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Pétursdóttir, Þ., & Olsen, B. (Eds.). (2014). Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics, and the Archaeology of the Recent Past. Abingdon: Routledge. Podrescu, P. (2018, May 6). Unpublished Conversation with the Author. Taylor, D. (2009). Performing Ruins. In J. Lazzara & V. Unruh (Eds.), Telling Ruins in Latin America (pp. 13–26). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ward, S. (2006). Ruin and Poetics in the Works of W.G. Sebald. In J. Long & A.  Whitehead (Eds.), W.G.  Sebald  – A Critical Companion (pp.  31–44). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wilkie, F. (2002). Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain. New Theatre Quarterly, 18(2), 140–160.

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Index1

A Abbate, Fulvio, 65, 73, 74 Aberystwyth, 209 Abrašević Youth Cultural Centre, 133 Acropolis, 2, 3, 9, 43, 55, 187 Admonia, Youva, 140–144 Aeschylus, 48, 51, 53, 56, 61, 73, 74, 187, 212 Agrafiotis, Demosthenes, 58n1, 177, 193 Antiquarian ruins, 42, 46, 199 Antiquary, 9, 12, 14, 41–58, 73, 77, 187, 193 Archduke Ferdinand, 144, 145, 160 Archibald, David, 118 Argos Festival, Universal Topos, 198–199 Argyropoulou, Gigi, 177, 179, 180, 184 Aristophanes, 48, 52, 53 Artists’ Colony, 217–220

Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), 111, 171n5 Ascherson, Neal, 108, 123n9, 280 Athens, 11, 16, 43, 44, 48, 50–52, 54, 62, 175–180, 182–187, 189, 193–203, 229n2, 229n3, 253, 263, 289–291 Avant-garde, 51 Azas, Anestis, 177, 183 B BAE Systems, 216 Balkan wars, 15, 76, 127–171 Ballard, J.G., 1, 30, 31, 38n6 Barba, Eugenio, 52, 161, 203 Baudrillard, Jean, 164, 167, 168 Bauhaus, 87, 93 Beall, ts Tara, 216, 221, 222, 226, 227

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Murray, Performing Ruins, Performing Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40643-1

309

310 

INDEX

Beckett, Samuel, 1, 6, 14, 16, 32–35, 37, 50, 158, 164–168, 171n6, 282, 294 Endgame, 33, 34, 282 Happy Days, 33 Waiting for Godot, 16, 33–34, 145, 151, 164, 168–171 Begic, Aida, 147, 155–159 Belice Valley, 14, 62–70, 79 Benjamin, Walter, 13, 23, 239, 294 Bergadhis Apokopos, 187, 291 Berger, Cara, 115, 116 Berlin Airlift, 259 Wall, 234–237 Beuys, Joseph, 69, 72–75 Bogdanović, Bogdan, 139, 141 Bolero, 148, 160–161 Bonanno, Vito, 61 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 12, 15, 86, 127–129, 138, 143, 159, 160, 162, 253, 264 Bosnian Croats, 127, 128 Bosnian Muslims Bosniaks, 127 Bosnian Serbs Bosniaks, 127 Bosnjakovic, Biljana, 244 PURGE, 244–245 Brith Gof, 16, 108, 203–214, 229n5, 229n6, 229n7, 288, 290 Gododdin, 108, 206, 207, 209, 210, 290 Haearn, 207, 209, 210 Pax, 207, 209 Prydain: The Impossibility of Britishness, 204, 209–212 Tri Bywyd (Three Lives), 204–207, 210, 214 Brook, Peter, 32, 100, 123n10, 149, 207

Brookes, Mike, 203, 229n8 Bulanda, Malgorzata, 269 Burić, Sanja, 144, 145, 147 Burri, Alberto, 14, 61, 70–73, 78 C Cardiff, 16, 203, 205, 206, 209, 210, 212, 290 Cardross, 15, 78, 102, 103, 109, 118 Checkpoint Charley, Checkpoint Charlie, 234 CiTIZEN KiNO (Dr Podinski), 257 Cold War ruins, 86 Colonels’ regime, 194 Consagra, Pietro, 64, 69, 71 Corner, James, 95, 101 Corrao, Ludovico, 14, 15, 63–65, 69–79, 291 Costa, Petterson, 244 Creative Scotland, 119, 124n19 D Dapic, Marina, 133, 140, 142 David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, 243 Davidson, P., 2 Davis, Ben, 180, 199 Dayton Accord (Agreement), 127 de Silvey, Caitlin, 26, 36 Delphi, 12, 42, 47–57, 73, 181, 190 Delphic Festivals, 55 Dembroski, Ben, 222 Dernbach, Rafael, 244, 246 Derrida, Jacques (Hauntology), 263 Diklich, Davor, 146, 150–153, 155, 157, 158, 164, 165, 169 Dillon, Brian, 25, 28 Documenta, 74, 199–203, 229n3, 263

 INDEX 

Dramaturgy, dramaturgical, 19n2, 49, 58n5, 73, 116, 138, 141–144, 158, 163, 186, 189, 257, 264, 277 Duisburg-Nord, 15, 27, 62, 85–101, 233 E Earthquake, 3, 11, 63, 77 East Berlin, 76, 129, 152, 193, 207, 233, 234, 249, 252, 253 Edensor, Tim, 26, 27, 36 Elefsina (Eleusis) European City of Culture 2021, 186–193, 200 Old Oil Mill, 16, 177, 186–193, 198, 200, 291 Emballages, 280–282 Embros Theatre, 16, 177–184, 193, 200, 203, 240, 252, 289, 290 Epidaurus Theatres, 9, 11, 12, 42, 47–57, 73, 181, 190 Etchells, Tim, 6, 14, 20n3, 35 Europe, 10–13, 16, 32, 37n1, 56, 64, 70, 76, 78, 86, 87, 116, 122, 134, 141, 143, 152, 159, 164, 171n2, 183, 193, 215, 220, 252, 263, 264, 269, 270, 276, 290, 292, 293 European Cultural Centre of Delphi (ECCD), 56 European Union (EU), 52, 57, 125n23, 146, 148, 184, 199, 200, 226, 255, 289, 293 Exarcheia, 202 F Fari, Nathalie, 244, 246, 248 Farquhar, Angus, 107–109, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120, 122, 123n6, 125n23, 290

311

First World War, 144, 160 Fitzpatrick, Blake, 235, 236 Fondazione Manifesto, 79 Forced Entertainment, 1, 14, 20n3, 32, 35, 37, 89, 123n4, 256 Frayn, Michael Copenhagen/Kopenhagen, 163 Freedom Rocks, 235, 236 Friedrichstrasse, 236, 249 Fuchs, Elinor, 19, 118 G Gardner, Liz, 226 Garrod, Andrew, 137, 143 Gdansk Shipyards, 216–220 Gdansk Artists’ Colony, 216 Gender-blind casting, 165, 166 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 233 German Federal Republic (FRG), 233 Germany, 12, 15, 17, 85, 86, 89, 101, 132, 163, 178, 181, 200, 229n3, 233, 235, 243, 252, 256, 258–260, 264, 265, 289 Giaros, 44–47 Gibellina, Nuova Gibellina, 11, 14, 15, 61–82, 82n1, 289, 291 Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, 104 Glasgow, 1, 15, 17, 85, 102, 103, 108, 111, 116, 122, 123n10, 124n11, 124n12, 124n14, 128, 136, 203, 207, 209, 215, 220–222, 242 Glomb, Jacek, 18, 264, 269–271, 273, 274, 290 Goat Island, 287, 294n1 Gołaczyńska, Magdalena, 18, 264, 266, 268 Gough, Richard, 2, 4, 6, 25 Goulish, Matthew, 287, 294n1

312 

INDEX

Govan, 17, 203, 209, 214–228, 229n12 Graffiti, 117, 139, 140, 201, 234, 239, 240, 242, 243, 248, 252, 254, 260 Gramsci, Antonio, 5, 6, 65 Greece, 12, 14, 24, 29, 41–57, 58n2, 58n3, 58n4, 69, 76, 86, 175–203, 226, 235, 253, 258, 263, 264 Greek Civil War, 58n2, 195 Green Park, 16, 177–184, 193, 200, 203, 240, 252, 289, 290 Grizedale Arts, 113, 124n16 Grotowski, Jerzy, 203, 269 Grunewald, 237–239, 244, 247 Grzinch, John, 247 Guardian (newspaper), 115, 253 H Hadziosmanovic, Jelena, 153 Hall, Stuart, 5, 24, 64, 88, 203, 209, 219, 275 Hamilakis, Yannis, 41–43, 45, 46, 51, 56, 58n1, 189 Hamzagic, Nermin, 145, 147, 148, 161–163 Hellenism, 44, 45, 175 Heritage, 11, 12, 15, 52, 55, 85–123, 124n19, 129, 134, 192, 217, 218, 226, 227, 233 Hidden histories, 222 Hinterland Hinterland Manifesto, 114, 116, 120 Hitler, Adolf, 13, 23, 24, 233, 238, 239, 258, 283n5 Hollis, Ed, 111, 114, 124n13 Hotel Belle Helene, 54 Hromadžic, Azra, 137, 138

I Il Cretto di Burri, 70–72 Industrial ruination, 86 Ingelevics, Vid, 235, 236 Inkling, 166, 294 The Invisible College, 111 Ivett, Lee, 223, 226, 227 J Jeffery, Graham, 224, 226 Johnson, Odai, 43, 44, 137 Jones, Jonathan, 27, 29, 203, 253 Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 176 K Kakalas, Simos, 187, 188, 198 Kantor, Tadeusz, 18, 269, 280–282 Kassel, 74, 199, 200, 203, 229n3, 263 Kieślowski, Krzysztof, 273, 280 Kilmahew, 102–123 Kilmahew Estate, 103–107, 120 Kirkup, Wendy, 234, 235 Klaic, Dragan, 152, 154, 157, 158, 161 Klaman, Grzegorz, 217, 220 Klausmeier, Axel, 237 Kodra Barracks, 194–197 Kolejarz Cinema, 273, 275 Konak Barracks, 133–135, 142, 252 Kosanic, Dejan, 140 Kosmala, Katarzyna, 216–218, 226 Kotecki, Kristina, 164, 165, 167 Kott, Jan, 282 Kozik, Agneiszka, 217, 219, 220 Kresevljakovic, Nihad, 145–147, 154, 156, 157 Kunstlerinitiative Tacheles, 249 Kurt, Aleš, 170, 171

 INDEX 

L Lampropoulos, Apostolos, 200, 201, 229n4, 263, 264 Landschaftspark, 12, 15, 27, 85–101, 233, 289 Latz, Peter, 94, 95, 99–101 Lavery, Carl, 2, 4, 6, 25 Legnica, 11, 18, 62, 264–282, 291 Liberated zones, 258, 291 Lindenberg, Rebecca At Teufelsberg in the Subjunctive Mood, 237 Lorenz, Peter, 70, 128, 129, 133–135, 137, 142 Lorimer, Hayden, 27, 111–114, 117, 124n12, 242 Lower Silesia, 264, 266 M Macaulay, Rose, 13, 24, 209 Maclean, Rory, 252 MacMillan, Andy, 104, 115 Makronisos, 44–47 Mannebach, Joachim, 93, 94, 96 Marina, Dapic, 132, 133, 137, 140, 142, 143, 253 Massey, Doreen, 5, 26, 287 Masztalski, Maciej, 266, 268 Mavili Collective, 177–184, 193, 200, 290 McGuigan, Carol, 254, 258 McLucas, Cliff, 203–205, 210, 211, 229n6 Mehta, Zubin, 147 Melancholy, 7 Metropolitanka, 222, 224, 226, 227 Metzstein, Isi, 104, 115 Multiculturalism, 167 Murray, Gilbert, 175

313

Murray, Simon, 27, 117, 118, 124n20, 182, 190, 191, 194–197, 201, 242 Museum of Mediterranean Weaving, 75–77 Mustafic, Dino, 148, 150, 153, 156–159 Mycenae, 55, 177, 198 N National Theatre of Greece, 49 National Theatre of Wales (NTW) The Persians, 212 Neretva River, 129, 141 1984 Winter Olympics, 160 1936 Olympic Games, 238 NoiseLab, 241 Normality, 133, 147, 148, 151–153, 169, 255 NVA, 5, 15, 27, 78, 85, 102–123, 123n6, 124n11, 124n12, 242, 289, 290 O Occupation, 16, 203, 208, 227, 288 Olden, Ruth, 215, 221 Olsen, Bjørnar, 288 Oranienburgerstrasse, 249 Orestiadi, 73–79 Orestiadi Foundation, 75–79 Ottoman Empire, 129, 193 P PACT Art Centre, 88 Palimpsest, 62, 204, 238, 258 Palmer, Eva, 55, 56 Parry, Ben, 223, 226, 227 Partisan Park, 138

314 

INDEX

Pasovic, Haris, 149, 151–154, 157–160, 164, 169 Pearson, Mike, 3, 16, 17, 108, 189, 203–214, 229n5, 229n6, 229n7, 229n8, 246, 288, 290, 291 The Anatomy Lesson, 212 Performing Memory, 128, 159–163 Pétursdóttir, Þóra, 288 Physical theatre, 8, 112, 145–147, 153, 203, 205, 207, 211, 214, 244, 256, 272 Pinchbeck, Michael, 147, 148, 160, 161 Podrescu, Paolo, 19, 249–258, 291 Poland, 12, 17, 123n9, 215, 219, 264, 269, 271, 273, 274, 277, 280, 282 Polytechnic (Athens), 179, 180, 202 Potter, Dennis, 156 Primorac, Dino, 135, 142 Project Birds, 202 Public art, 85, 116, 120, 123n6 Q Qur’et, Topsy, 254, 258, 283n6 R Rabensaat, Richard, 240, 243, 248 Redgrave, Vanessa, 149, 164 Refugees, 18, 92, 180, 182, 190, 201, 233, 259–263 Reiter, Martin, 252, 254 Resistance, 7, 16, 34, 46, 58n2, 112, 150–155, 157, 164, 171n2, 171n6, 199, 219 Rimini Protokoll, 89, 178 Riverside Solidarity, 226, 227 Robin, Lisa D. The Pilgrimage of the 13 Blood Moons, 246

Rodger, Johnny, 118 Roman Catholic Church, 103, 104 Rubble Mountain, 248 Ruhr, 15, 25, 85–101, 233, 264, 289 Ruin Porn, 25–27 Rush, Ben, 222, 225 S Sarajevo, 1, 11, 15, 62, 127, 138, 142, 144–171, 171n3, 171n4, 176, 288, 290, 292 Sarajevo Red Line, 159–160 Sarajevo War Theatre (SARTR), 146, 171n3 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 55, 150, 159, 170 Schliemann, Heinrich, 55 Schroeder, Ali, 18, 260, 263, 264 Schumann, Peter, 158, 159, 266 Scotland, 12, 17, 78, 85, 86, 102–104, 107, 109–111, 114, 116, 118, 121, 122, 124n14, 124n17, 124n19, 124n21, 125n23, 181, 207, 216, 220, 224, 226, 227, 229n12 Sebald, W.G., 1, 6, 7, 30, 31, 38n7, 292 Sebastyanski, Roman, 216–219, 226, 227 Second World War, World War Two, WW2, 23, 31, 46, 58n2, 140, 162, 274, 282 Shakespeare, William, 32, 50, 137, 158, 275, 276 Shanks, Michael, 3, 203, 205–210, 229n7 Sicily, 12, 14, 47, 61–63, 65, 71, 74, 76, 77, 80, 86, 264 Siege (of Sarajevo), 11, 16, 127, 144–166, 169–171, 171n4, 180, 290, 292

 INDEX 

Sikelianos, Angelos, 55, 56 Situated practices, 7–9 Skoko, Ivan, 129 Smajlovic, Vedram, 154, 155 Smith, Chris, 239, 248 Smith, Phil, 5, 6, 19n2, 29, 229n11 Smithson, Robert, 28, 30, 38n5, 94, 95 Solidarity (Solidarność), 215 Sontag, Susan, 16, 145, 151, 158, 161, 163–171, 171n6 Speer, Albert, 13, 23, 24, 238, 239, 258 Stabile, Nicolo, 70, 78 Staklena Banka (old bank), 128 Stara Biblioteka (old library), 128 St-Lo, 6, 32, 35, 166, 294 St Peter’s Seminary, 15, 78, 85, 102–123, 124n11, 124n12, 124n19, 125n23, 242, 289, 290 Street Arts Festival, 16, 132, 133, 140, 142 Strong Women of Clydeside, 222 Structure of feeling, 4–6 Suffragettes, 222 Susan Sontag Square, 169, 170 Synergia 99, 217, 219, 228 Szlaga, Michal, 218, 220 Szylak, Aneta, 217, 220 T Taylor, Diana, 30, 123n2, 287, 288 Teatr Ad Spectatores, 18, 265 Historia, Historia II, Historia III, 266 Wroclawski pociag widm (WPW), Wroclaw’s Train of Phantoms, 265

315

Teatr Modjeska, 18, 264, 268–280, 291 The Ballad of Zakaczawie, 273 Festival of Not-Bad Theatre, 277 The First Great Reunion of the People of Legnica, 275 Hamlet, 271, 272 Made in Poland, 274, 279 Twenty Years After, 275 Temple of Demeter, 186, 190 Test Dept, 107, 108, 207 Teufelsberg Field Station Berlin, The Devil’s Mountain, 237–249 Thatcher, Margaret, 32, 123n7, 123n8, 207, 209 Theodoropoulos, Vangelis, 50, 51 Thessaloniki, 16, 176, 178, 187, 193–198 Tito, President, 127 Torvill, Jayne and Dean, Christopher, 160 Trauma, 161, 288 Trummerfrauen (rubble women), 239 Tsoukalis, Giorgos, 193 Turketti, Tomasz, 268 Turner, Cathy, 3, 9, 204, 209–211, 229n11 Tzakou, Anna, 184–186, 202 U United World College (UWC), 128 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS), 17, 215, 216 V Venice Architectural Biennale, 102 Vidackovic, Igor, 129, 132, 138 Villa Grimaldi, 288 Vraca Memorial Park, 161–163

316 

INDEX

W Wajda, Andrzej, 280 Wales, 12, 16, 86, 203, 205, 207, 209, 211, 214, 229n5 Walesa, Lech, 215, 280 Ward, Simon, 292, 293 Watters, Diane M., 78, 102, 104, 105, 108, 110, 114, 116, 117 Weber, Max, 33, 252, 282n3 West Berlin, 234, 252, 259, 263 Whyte, Yvonne, 87, 88, 92 Williams, David, 61–64, 68, 72, 73, 80 Williams, Raymond, 4, 5, 19n1 Wilson, Louise K., 28, 246–248 Cold Art, 247

Wilson, Robert, 51, 73, 75, 100, 256 Wrights & Sites, 19n2, 55, 58n6, 136, 222, 229n11 Mis-Guides, 58, 136 Wroclaw, 18, 264–282 WYSPA Foundation, 217 Y Yugoslavia, 17, 127, 129, 139, 171n2 Z Zajac, Iwona, 218, 220 Zollverein, 12, 15, 85–93, 95, 233, 289