Freedom in the Mines

In the communist period the mines created a modernized and industrialized space for daily life. People’s actions and the objects and technologies they used were controlled from above by an external system. After restructuring the mine industry, the unemployment rate enormously increased, the technology and organization of the Wałbrzych mines has risen to the surface with the birth of bootleg mines, scrap colleting, gathering and all the other improvised forms of earning a living. The ex-employees of the industrial basin were forced to construct their own work sites and tools. The author analyses relations which came into being between environment, objects and people within the framework of informal practices of demolition and gathering. After the liquidation of the mines ex-miners began to perceive the material world in a whole new light, looking at the things and the environment through their capacity to be used and utilized. In their experiences a paradox reveals itself: the fascination for objects procures during the widespread demolition of old industrial cities. The author argues that in the post-industrial reality there has occurred a kind of “liberation” of material beings/testimonies which caused that “biographies” of things grew longer and assembled into entirely new patterns, crossing well beyond the production-monetary exchange-consumption/use formula. The perception of time has also been changed. In deindustrialized town of Wałbrzych memory underwent local mythologization and structural amnesia which collapse all history and factography, prompting many flights of fancy. Phantasy – a problem-free access to imagined goods/riches – becomes a way of defence against painful realities in which ex-miners found themselves as well as a tool which helps to analyse and understand their experiences.