Black Asturias: A Future in Ruins
Naomi Soto Andrino
“A land without ruins is a land without memories,
a land without memories is a land without history� Ryan Abram Josep
Asturias is black and green. It is said in traditional songs and poems. The former due to the coal, the later due to its exuberant nature. Now most of the coalmines are closed and their buildings remain silent, quiet like skeletons, casting a long dark shadow on the land that not long ago would bustle around them. For the last two decades the region has been immersed in an unfinished and unsuccessful process of reindustrialisation which has added nothing but another colour to the canvas; a faded grey that gets everywhere. It is the grey of the ruins from the past, stubborn reminders of prosperous times, that fall apart patiently. It is in the new roads and pavements that get to the same places but in a different way, with a different pace. And it is the colour of concrete, ubiquitous in uncompleted buildings and empty homes, ruins of the present that observe, in silence, those who will neither finish nor live in them. Among those ruins people live in a limbo where time has seemed to freeze, nothing seems to change. Trapped between a vanishing lifestyle at which they cannot look back and an uncertain future they cannot envisage, their paths going astray before their eyes as if a dense fog covered everything. A fog that, sometimes, seems grey too.
With the decline of the coalmining and other industrial activities, the property sector, tourism and the services industry became the pillars of the economy in the region; three of the most damaged sectors after the recession.
They are well educated, one of the first generations. Their parents wanted them to go to university, to get a career, to be someone. So did they. Now they are part of one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe. Trapped in this era of decadence and recession they try to find alternatives- and then that old phrase starts to make sense- to beat a future that looks “blacker than the coal� their ancestors used to extract.
For Jobs for the youth, vote SOMA-FIA-UGT ( Worker’s unions)
In a society rooted to traditional values and customs the family has always played a key role that nowadays is more important than ever. It works, not only as a safety net providing economic support, but also as an emotional refuge from the inclemency of current times.
Nobody sells tickets anymore at the bus station. After two decades of steady migration one might think that it is because nobody needs them, anymore. Years ago some politician said that all those people were “urban legends”…Just during the first six months of 2013 the equivalent to five people per day have left the region.
There is that silence typical of museums. Where there used to be the incessant knocking of wagons, the noise of the machinery taking people up and down, the murmur of conversations‌Now, there is only silence. Some of the old coalmines have been restored. Where there was nothing to restore new buildings have been erected. They were going to be museums of all kinds: nature, history, industrial archaeology‌Instead they have become museums of the void, empty and quiet like their surroundings.
One of the posters, almost covered, reads Asturias stands up (Against unemployment, corruption, cutbacks and repression). On top of it another one promotes what seems to be a cheeky comedy about the advantages of being a widow over a bad marriage. Such juxtaposition serves as illustration of the culture of entertainment predominant despite of the recession. The generous compensations received by part of the population have created an illusory welfare state where people keep prioritizing their leisure time over their daily worries.
Cinema Hope
Imperfect future For generations, everything revolved around coal. This source of wealth, pulled from the core of the earth, sustained the life of the region and forged a work-based culture, a way of understanding the world and a collective identity. The coalmines ruled the community and the relationships between classes, with death ever present… This was a unique society, united as it was by a single activity, yet it managed to reach beyond its boundaries, its struggles inspiring people of all professions and classes. The miner became an archetypal proletarian hero, in its chemically pure state, creating a myth that would turn into legend when in October 1934 they began a revolution and, armed with dynamite (their work tool), took over the skies to build a new world. With the recession of the coalmining industry an entire way of life was threatened. The initial reactions followed the same course that had always characterised the fight for workers’ rights and civil liberties: social protest. An energetic collective resistance was mounted that managed to postpone for decades an end predicted as inevitable. Later, the government applied the formula to anesthetize the pain and buy social peace with generous subsidies in return for the acceptance of a slow death for the industry. The present kept feeding on the political and moral resources accumulated in the past but the future became uncertain and the previous experiences useless in the new reality. Nothing would be the same for the new generations. Thus the past became as much of a burden as it was a valuable legacy. The need to balance the values of
the past against the needs of the present was difficult to manage for those who felt defeated and forced to redefine themselves in a way completely different to that of their ancestors. A dense fog came down over the mining areas bringing echoes from other times. The slender silhouettes of the Castilletes1 now stand, with redundant strength, over a community that sees its material and symbolic foundations cracked. There is no collective identity able to replace the previous one which came from the sense of belonging to a mining area and any other past –close or distant – cannot provide a similar source of artistic inspiration. Nevertheless, the frustration at what has been lost, the depression of the present and the pessimism when facing the future are combined with a seam still extraordinarily productive in terms of literary, musical and audiovisual resources. Though its origins may now be extinct the legacy of coalmining is that a mine never truly closes, it keeps giving life to those ideas, that archetype, as a reference for a collective imagination. Rubén Vega
1 Metallic structures in the shape of a tower that accommodate the elevators used to descend to the mine.
Futuro imperfecto
se tornó incierto y la experiencia entró en un creciente desajuste con la desasosegante realidad. Nada podría permanecer igual para las nuevas generaciones. El pasado devino así, casi por igual, en una pesada carga y un valioso legado. Un difícil equilibrio nada fácil de gestionar para quienes se sienten derrotados o abocados a redefinirse bajo reglas diferentes a las que habían interiorizado siguiendo la estela dejada por sus mayores. Sobre las cuencas cayó una espesa niebla en la que resuenan ecos de otro tiempo. La esbelta figura de los castilletes se proyecta todavía con fuerza sobre una comunidad que ve, sin embargo, cuarteadas todas sus bases materiales y simbólicas. Ninguna identidad colectiva puede sustituir a la que proporcionaba el sentirse parte de una cuenca minera y ningún pasado –próximo o remoto- sirve de fuente de inspiración comparable para la creación cultural. La frustración por lo perdido, la depresión ante el presente y el pesimismo de cara al futuro se conjugan con una veta todavía extraordinariamente productiva en términos de recurso literario, musical, audiovisual… La herencia de la mina ye un pozu que nun cierra y que sigue dando vida, siquiera sea como referente de un imaginario colectivo, más allá de la extinta vida que le dio origen.
Durante generaciones, todo giró en torno al carbón. De las entrañas de la tierra se arrancaba la fuente de riqueza que sostenía la vida en las cuencas y con ese mismo material se forjaba una cultura del trabajo, un modo de entender el mundo y una identidad colectiva. La mina regía la comunidad, las relaciones entre las clases, la muerte siempre presente… Una sociedad muy endogámica, cohesionada sobre una única actividad productiva y afirmada sobre sus propias singularidades, se mostró al mismo tiempo capaz de trascender sus confines y lanzar fulgurantes destellos que por momentos conmovieron a muy remotos espectadores que no por lejanos se sintieron ajenos. El arquetipo del minero como proletario en estado químicamente puro creó por igual un mito y una leyenda negra de resonancias multiplicadas cuando un mes de octubre intentaron la revolución y, provistos de dinamita (su herramienta de trabajo), asaltaron los cielos para construir un mundo nuevo. Cuando la minería entró en retroceso, todo un modo de vida se vio amenazado. La respuesta siguió las mismas pautas que habían regido la lucha por los derechos de los trabajadores y por las libertades: la movilización. Una enérgica resistencia Rubén Vega colectiva que logró retrasar durante décadas el fin que se adivinaba irremediable. Luego, el Estado aplicó la fórmula para anestesiar el dolor y compró la paz social con generosos subsidios a cambio de la aceptación de una muerte lenta. El presente siguió alimentándose de los recursos políticos y morales acumulados en el pasado, pero el futuro
To my parents who have given me everything. Thanks to my family for their continuous support and kindness and my incredible friends who always encouraged me to carry on. Thanks to Beatriz for always being there to listen and Juanma for believing in me. Special thanks to those who agreed to help me with this book: Bego, Dudu, Rocio, Sara (and Lucia), Vanesa and Ruben Vega, Professor of Contemporary History at University of Oviedo, for the extraordinary kindness of writing the afterword. Thanks also to Petros Gioumpasis and Nick Pembury for their editing and editorial advise, I could not have made it without you. Without forgetting Max and Ben for their mentoring and support.
Black
Asturias: A future in ruins ŠPhotographs and text Naomi Soto Andrino 2013 Printed in August 2013 by Graficas Covadonga/ Millenium, Gijon, Asturias