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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses cultural interventions in post-industrial sites in Southeast Europe. It argues that the aesthetic, political, and temporal trajectories that are activated by commoning spaces of industrial ruination offer a potential to re-think the very imaginations of socialist modernity.

Paper long abstract:

De-industrialisation and the post-1990s capitalist rules left small rural towns and villages in Southeast Europe empty and decayed. The former industrial plants have now turned into spaces of modern ruination. Their state of abandonment gave the opportunity to many local artists and DIY initiatives to reclaim post-industrial ruins, insert them in their artistic practices or transforming them into spaces for practising the commons.

Drawing on the concept of the commons, this paper explores the legacy of post-industrialism in Albania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Acknowledging that industrial ruination is an important post-socialist legacy, the paper proposes an alternative entry point in understanding socialist modernity, as well as its utopias and failures, using as an entry point the visual and material cultures of industrial decay.

What kind of knowledge production can contemporary interventions bring to sites of modern ruination? More crucially, how can we common and reclaim anew spaces that bring both with their materiality, and with their discourse, multiple historic and political connotations? In thinking around these questions, the paper proposes the term “affective commoning” as a concept-tool to describe an emerging body of practices that are centered around affective political action by revisiting spaces and temporalities of ruination.