Where Things Go

In the mid-60s, in the small Belgian town of Verviers, most of the textile factories that had contributed to the town’s prosperity closed down. On witnessing the end of an epoch, the town council decided to put together a collection of old textile machines that is now stored in an old industrial shed. The film portrays a group of retired men spending their free time repairing the machines and creating a Lieu de mémoire where they relive their former professional activity. Imitating their passion, I created my own collection of former industrial objects. By buying old weaving shuttles from flea... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Baptiste Aubert
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
Reihe/Periodikum: Journal of Anthropological Films, Vol 7, Iss 01 (2023)
Verlag/Hrsg.: Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA)
Schlagwörter: Belgium / Memory and forgetting / Social life of things / Cultural heritage / Textile factory / Postindustrial territories / Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology / GN301-674
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-29354290
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://doaj.org/article/dc41e5763378432a982c06898e0f5eaa

In the mid-60s, in the small Belgian town of Verviers, most of the textile factories that had contributed to the town’s prosperity closed down. On witnessing the end of an epoch, the town council decided to put together a collection of old textile machines that is now stored in an old industrial shed. The film portrays a group of retired men spending their free time repairing the machines and creating a Lieu de mémoire where they relive their former professional activity. Imitating their passion, I created my own collection of former industrial objects. By buying old weaving shuttles from flea market sellers that wanted to get rid of them, I sought to give a sense of the fragile collective memory of the city inhabitants where memories compete with oblivion. Like the warp and weft of a fabric, these two filmic materials weave together to form the film Where Things Go—a film that questions the attachment we have to things, to memory, and to the past.