Back to the Postindustrial Future. Felix Ringel

years to come. Hoyerswerda’s population had reached one of the highest age-averages of all German cities, so what would happen, as a friend put it, once ‘all of these old people started to die’ (wenn die auch alle anfangen zu sterben)? Indeed, in the long run, there was no end in sight to the city’s demise, and dystopian narratives of decline were widely communicated in local, regional and national media. They had an impact on local thought about life and future prospects, but they did not take away people’s agency. As I claimed in the Introduction, the response to this kind of knowledge about the future and my informants’ everyday experiences of decline was not simply despair or lethargy. Rather, it sparked the production of new kinds of knowledge, deployed to make sense of the city’s problematic present and its unpromising future. Given the undeniably dramatic challenges ahead, such knowledge was in constant need for the right kind of midrange social metaphysics; in order to make (renewed) sense, it needed a context or narrative to fit in.

      This chapter tracks the vast variety of contexts and narratives, in and through which my informants made sense of the problems and changes they faced. In its first half, I assemble a collage of short ethnographic examples in order to account for the local diversity and heterogeneity of such contexts. Instead of providing more ethnographic detail about the city’s demise, I focus, still ethnographically, on its inhabitants’ epistemic and conceptual responses to this demise. In its second half, I follow more closely what came to fruition during my time in Hoyerswerda – the emergence, establishment and final acceptance of one particular context: that of shrinkage. This chapter therefore pays tribute to the local diversity of expressions of epistemic or conceptual agency, and follows the contested social production of a context in an economy of knowledge one could rightly describe as ‘inchoate’ (Carrithers 2007), ‘unstable’ (Greenhouse et al. 2002), and characterized by a ‘loss of coherence’ (Lakoff and Collier 2004: 422) and a ‘crisis in meaning’ (Ferguson 1999: 14). It also constantly reflects upon potential academic contexts, which might and might not correspond with local ones. In lieu of a ‘normal’ first chapter, which would introduce the field through accounts of local history and geography, I offer an initial analysis of Hoyerswerda’s local economy of knowledge and ask which context is the best for this book to account for Hoyerswerda’s present.

      However, as an epistemic tool, any context is simultaneously restricting and enabling, both for my informants and for me. A particular spatiotemporal context allows for a specific vision of the future, and has its specific repercussions on understanding one’s and others’ (temporal) agency. It affects what local inhabitants as well as external analysts can subject to thought and how they do it. This explains the clashes and conflicts that arise when different ideas about the city’s present collide. However, despite local contextual diversity and my own methodological interventions in search of a better or more promising context, the factual results of shrinkage and outmigration seem all too inevitable. Indeed, in times of postindustrial decline, one has to ask whether, after all, there can only be one narrative. The first ethnographic example of an art project in, and slightly out of, context will help me to expand on this question. It offers, for a start, a somewhat external perspective on the city’s past, present and future.

      Figure 1.1 ‘ONE NARRATIVE’: ‘ArtBlock’ building, WK 10, Hoyerswerda Neustadt, August 2008

       ONE NARRATIVE

      In August 2008, Bjarke, a young Danish artist, attached the slogan THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE NARRATIVE in white capital letters onto the upper front of a soon-to-be-demolished five-storey apartment block in Hoyerswerda’s New City (Neustadt). His intervention was produced during an international student art residency, which took place in Neustadt’s youngest residential district WK 10. The district’s main landlord Lebensräume e.V., the LivingSpaces cooperation, temporarily offered thirty-six young international artists two abandoned apartment blocks, which gave the project its title: ‘ArtBlock’ (see http://www.art-block.blogspot.com). Initially, the project’s initiators had searched for other kinds of abandoned places. Such places, they told me, were increasingly common all over Western Europe and North America: places of no further use, redundant cities, factories and train stations, abject spaces of the postindustrial era. They had initially sought a dilapidated West German detached housing area, which in their understanding offered itself neatly for critical remarks on capitalist mainstream culture. Then they stumbled across the former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda and its other houses of other times and in other spaces. The officials and inhabitants of Hoyerswerda nonetheless happily provided the artists from Chile, Peru, Brazil, the United States, Israel, Botswana and several different European countries with ‘free space’ (Freiraum) in the German two senses of the word: physical and ‘conceptual space’ (Buyandelgeriyn 2008: 237).

      The choice for Hoyerswerda changed the artists’ agenda as they suddenly confronted buildings arguably of – and in – a very different context from what they initially expected. Based at the outskirts, these blocks overlooked the fields towards an adjacent Sorbic village, only disturbed by a forest of young pine trees, which must have been planted here around the time of WK 10’s erection in the late 1980s. The two blocks – one housing the artists, the other supplying individual studios – were surrounded by either other abandoned apartment houses or the uncanny absences of those blocks that had already been torn down. The parking lot in the courtyard in front of the two blocks was empty and slightly overgrown with weeds; only Frau Meyer’s little silver car parked there regularly during the time of the project. Frau Meyer still lived in the third, neighbouring block (third entrance, fifth floor on the right). Of all the inhabitants of this courtyard, she was the last to move out with her young son, being relocated to a refurbished flat in WK IV a few days after the end of the two-week art project. The artists had suddenly parked their small, used student cars next to hers (not that there was a shortage of parking space) and the courtyard was revived one last time. But how were they to account for Hoyerswerda’s fate in general or Frau Meyer’s life and her current experiences in particular in the language of art?

      When walking through the city, these artists saw more of the same, since they first had to cross the three districts most affected by deconstruction and decline before reaching the huge, shiny shopping centre in the New City’s central district or the Old City’s picturesque centre with castle, church and market square. In a city currently torn apart by demolition dredgers, they were as much in need of context in order to make their practices and interventions meaningful as were my informants in their everyday work and life. However, I think Bjarke had a very important point to make: both as a former socialist model city and as Germany’s fastest-shrinking city, Hoyerswerda did not fit the common paradigms easily – the changes were too dramatic and a superficial postmodern critique might not capture that.

      WK 10 incorporates these changes. It can probably be described as the epicentre of Hoyerswerda’s shrinkage and deconstruction. Although it was only completed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was, according to plans in 2008, the first district to be completely dismantled by 2013 or, as German bureaucratic jargon has it, ‘area-wide back-built’ (flächendeckend zurückgebaut). During the ‘ArtBlock’ project most of the flats in WK 10 were already empty, because Hoyerswerda’s extreme loss in population specifically affected Neustadt’s outskirts, which housed the youngest and hence most mobile inhabitants. The buildings’ abandonment makes this loss blatantly visible. Bjarke’s initial idea, he confessed, stemmed from this apparent tragedy, capitalizing on the blocks’ totally unexpected life history: finished in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were torn down less than twenty years after their erection. But the buildings did not embody the local context alone.

      The artistic production of meaning was strongly influenced by the many reminders of the previous lives these blocks had housed – random household items, old posters, leftover furniture, wooden slides and personal memorabilia.¹ In addition, many former and remaining inhabitants of WK 10 – as well as a wider Hoyerswerdian public – revisited