Editorial
Revolution? De-industrialization?
My name is Eduardo Cruces, a Latin American artist and writer. I have lived in Istanbul since 2021. I was born in Lota, a coal-mining town in southern Chile by the sea. After the shutdown of the coal mine in 1997, however, I grew up in a post-industrial zone—the same place, but in a completely different context—where I witnessed the social dismantling and the cultural impacts of economic reconversion on working-class communities and the landscape.
In fact, the contemporary phenomenon of deindustrialization—and, centuries earlier, the implementation of the Industrial Revolution—has had different characteristics and impacts in the so-called Global North and Global South, or in what we may call rich and poor countries.
Deindustrialization is also a term that is rarely used in the field of art, and there is little literature on it, as it comes mainly from economics and the social sciences and includes several associated concepts that are still under discussion. One aspect of this debate concerns the variations of the term through the addition of prefixes: in addition to deindustrialization, post-industrialization and even trans-industrialization are currently in use. This is further complicated by a broader conceptual dimension that overlaps with other terms used to describe our contemporary condition as a stage after industrial society: information society, informational era, post-Fordism, postmodern society, knowledge society, and so on.
In general, the standard definition of deindustrialization refers to the decline of manufacturing production and the rise of a service-based economy. However, this definition also includes variations depending on geographical context and historical moment, which can give the term either positive or negative connotations depending on how its effects are evaluated.
For this reason, at the beginning of my artistic research, I explored other coal basins in Chile as well as in other countries across Latin America, Europe, and Oceania, in order to identify both differences and synchronicities. The result of this research took the form of an artist’s book, in which I collected coal waste and transferred it onto paper using a frottage technique. The book also includes poems and photographs of drawing performances carried out around ruins and mining dumps.
During this process, I felt a desire to slow down production and reduce my capacity as an ecological gesture, working with minimal materials. It became a search for coherence in the conditions of making art. I began to ask myself whether it still made sense to produce more artistic objects.
As I recognized the limits of individual practice, it became necessary to share this question collectively and to explore alternatives and possibilities together.
Between 2018 and 2022, in collaboration with academics and artists, we organized a public seminar and performance festival focused on the relationship between art and deindustrialization. The outcome was a three-volume publication containing essays, documents, and records addressing the tensions between different communities and the transformation of their environments into sacrifice zones. Artists, activists, and researchers from Latin America, Europe, and Africa contributed to the project. It also included a series of public-space performances connected to the seminar’s themes, such as human rights, children’s rights, food sovereignty, artists’ labor, and buen vivir.
During the Covid period, I also participated in the creation of five glossaries, once again with artists and researchers from the Americas and the diaspora. Each glossary was developed through a different collective method—sometimes as a manifesto, sometimes as a game, or as the outcome of a seminar, meeting, or shared meal. This stage included workshops in Switzerland and Türkiye, where we translated a list of 300 words from Spanish into English, Turkish, Greek, and other languages.
Since 2021, I have been developing a third stage of poetic collaboration, this time working with both living and deceased artists and thinkers. The aim is to expand the notion of collaboration by engaging with works, texts, poems, or songs that already exist in history as sources of inspiration for continuation. Together, we reflect critically on the impact of industrialization on artistic practices since the early twentieth century, including the emergence of Cultural Industries, Creative Industries, and today’s Content Industry. The goal is to challenge the ideological narratives of progress and consumption promoted by these systems.
Within these archives, in a looping movement, I return to my origins—the shutdown of the coal mine in 1997. On the cover of my book Des-Terra, I appear as part of a massive miners’ strike in Santiago, the capital of Chile. On a banner, one can read the phrase El Presente—The Present. From this memory, perhaps we can learn something: to question the nostalgic dimension of the past, to look at the present, and to make space for the present to look back at us, in order to open a future.
As you can see, these projects unfold across multiple layers, dimensions, and collaborations, forming a long-term artistic research process. Now, I feel it is necessary to find a form through which I can transmit an experience of these questions to you within a framework of revolution. Yet even that concept remains, here, a provocation—an invitation to imagine together other ways of living in the present...
-
More info: https://revoluciondesindustrial.blogspot.com/2025/02/introduccion-la-revolucion-industrial.html
