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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the former power plant of Paros, a Greek island, as a modern ruin produced through the uneven temporalities of energy transition. Held in reserve yet already decaying, the site reveals how infrastructures become simultaneously obsolete and indispensable in a polarised world.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the former power plant of Paros, a Greek island, as a site of entangled ruination produced through the uneven temporalities of energy transition. Suspended between functionality and obsolescence, the plant occupies a liminal condition in which past futures of development collide with present narratives of energy transition, tourism, and sustainability. Although formally retained in reserve, it has already entered a state of modern ruin, where obsolescence, decay, and abandonment emerge as accelerated and uneven processes.

Drawing on multimodal ethnographic research, I approach ruination not as a final state of decay but as an ongoing process shaped by competing temporal claims. For some, the station’s reserve status signals a “slow death.” For local imaginaries oriented toward an idealised island landscape, the industrial structure becomes an inconvenient remnant of a past. The paper pays attention to sound and sensory practices as modes through which ruination is made meaningful. The recording of the plant’s final shutdown, the sonic memory of machines, and collaborative artistic engagements with its acoustic environment function as mnemonic technologies that render the transition perceptible and historically significant. Through these practices, the power plant’s afterlife unfolds not only through material decay but through the reactivation of relations between humans, machines, infrastructures, and landscapes.

By foregrounding the power plant as an entangled ruin of the energy transition, this paper argues that ruins illuminate the frictions of a polarised world in which infrastructures are simultaneously obsolete and indispensable.