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Short abstract:

The material deconstruction of buildings has profound social meanings, one of which connects the material coarseness to the difficulties of socialist life. The harder the demolishing goes, the stronger the remembrance it provokes, eventually rearticulating the time-space to head to the past.

Long abstract:

This paper illustrates how the roughness of architectural remains provokes socialist memories and points the temporality to the past. In this case, fragile building materials and boorish texture and appearance represent the hardships of socialist life, and brutal deformation corresponds to the fading of the era, directing the temporality it exhales backwards. My fieldwork site is located in a herding territory in northwest China, where massive state-led excavation in the 1950s left factories, huts, and railways, and building work in this undeveloped region has cost arduous labour and even blood and lives. Though not directly involved, local herders' understanding of the place has been profoundly reshaped by chilling memories of watching train tunnels built by hammers in hands and clods-made huts erected halfway up a cliff. Their knowing of the grassland where everyday herding life happens, whose physical tracks on earth were humble, was eroded, confronting the brutally-looking constructions exhaling the grandeur of collectivism and the historical affliction it contains. Since 2006 when herders have been moved from the pastureland to urbanized settlements, the geographic separation therefore ruptures the time-space of the land, anchored by the remaining architectural entities, from that of the modern settlements which are constantly renovated. The land whereafter ceased as a living habitus and was completely crystalized to be a museum of desolation and roughness of socialist life recorded by the remains of the buildings.