The ‘industrial’ structure of feeling: ‘Slow memory’ and cultural creation in Asturias (Spain)

Abstract

Asturias, a region located in northern Spain, is suffering a permanent crisis which was triggered by the dismantlement of its industrial and mining foundations. The deep consequences of that process have left their mark in society, economy and culture. This paper includes several excerpts from interviews with artists who express what, according to Sherry Linkon, can be defined as the ‘half-life of deindustrialisation’ as long as in the realm of cultural expression the memory of the industry and work is kept alive. Representations and cultural narratives of Asturian creators deal with aspects such as uncertainty, nostalgia, resistance and working-class identity. In collective imagination, it configures a rich, intangible heritage that acts as a source of inspiration for artistic creation in many different ways. The paper aims to show and analyse, from a sociocultural perspective, the contributions of Asturian creators in the last years, emphasising two dimensions that seem useful to understand the transition from an industrial society to a post-industrial one. The first one focuses on how cultural creation has re-signified the culture of the working class and the legacies of deindustrialisation in Asturias. The second one deals on how memory of the past is remembered and its influence in the present and the future. To do so, we will make use of Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘Structure of Feeling’ to understand the currency of certain codes and references that continue working within communities shaken by deindustrialisation. In the same way, and precisely due to the persistence of references and codes tightly related to memory and remembrance processes, the concept of ‘Slow Memory’ gives key aspects to contextualise the importance and validity of past memories and their connection with current challenges from a critical approach and slow thinking.

Introduction

It was sociologist Alice Mah who, based on the evidence that ruins (material and immaterial) are built and not simply found, developed the concept of ‘industrial ruination’ (Mah, 2008). Mah analysed how the decline of sectors that once spearheaded the development of the Western world had left deep traces at the individual, collective and spatial levels. This concept is useful to address the breadth and variety of effects and consequences of industrial decline and the transformation to a post-industrial economy and society and to frame the causes and consequences, as well as the long-term effects of the changes resulting from this transformation by comprehensively analysing endogenous and exogenous factors, as well as economic, social and political parameters (Mah, 2008). Along with this approach, the dimension in the form of narratives, discourses or representations of that process, the emergent concept of Slow Memory has made it possible to broaden the scope to tackle deindustrialisation as a slow process. In this regard, the Asturian deindustrialisation process shows how interruptions and continuities live together, both affecting the analysis of the long-term economic and political evolution, but also the studies and analysis of the process itself. It is largely for this reason that the concept of Slow memory becomes so useful in dealing with the role of the past in the present (Jones and Van de Putte, 2024).

The process of ruination in Asturias shows some features that are common to other regions or countries of early industrialisation where coal, steel and heavy industry were the key sectors. However, there are as well other features that mark notable differences, especially as the Asturian process has been extraordinarily protracted, workers have retained considerable bargaining power, social protection has been comparatively generous and social cohesion has held up.

Asturias, together with Catalonia and the Basque Country, was one of the three regions of the so called ‘early’ industrialization in Spain that took place in the first half of the nineteenth century (Ojeda, 1985), but it entered in the sixties of the twentieth century a process of decline that started in mining and became more acute during the seventies when the crisis spread to the iron and steel industry as well as to shipbuilding (Köhler, 1996). Since then, the severe reduction or even dismantlement of these three sectors, together with other industrial sectors, has created a situation that could be defined by a peculiar combination of economic and demographic decline, deep social pessimism and, paradoxically, maintenance of living standards (Alonso-Domínguez, 2021; De Lillo, 2015). There has not been in Asturias the effect of urban and environmental degradation, social devastation, marginalisation and violence that has occurred in so many other places after the closure of industries and mines. The Asturian economic restructuring model, based on generous compensation in the form of early retirements and investments in the territory, has allowed extra time for the transition to a post-industrial scenario (García García, 2007). Nor, for the moment, has there been a rise of xenophobic or extreme right-wing movements; on the contrary, the traditional organisations of the working class – trade unions and parties of socialist and communist heritage – have retained their strength even when the foundations on which they had historically been built were being cracked (Díaz, 2025).

The feeling of frustration is, however, evident in opinion surveys and oral interviews (Díaz, 2018). The Asturian scenario is far from being that which anglophone literature has depicted for areas such as Detroit or the rust belt in general in the United States or the old British mining areas. In this way, contradictory feelings are generated, which are crossed by a complex relationship with a past that is both a source of identity and a reason for pride, and a reference point for models of response and collective action that are no longer applicable to the new situation.

Cultural creation, in the shape of literature, cinema, photography, plastic, visual arts . . . has been extraordinarily fertile in this context. The emergence of creativity in a context of industrial crisis and traumatic change can be explained to a large extent by a first generation that can no longer reproduce the life and professional itineraries of their parents, but has received a heritage from them and from the workers’ struggles that sustained ample opportunities for training and access to culture (Vega, 2018) the result has been an intense and varied cultural creation around themes that refer directly to the past of the territories where they have grown up, to the memory of previous generations and to the legacy of industry and mining. All of this amid the need to reinterpretate or give new meaning to that past (Vega and Díaz, 2024).

The prolonged process of industrial ruination in Asturias has driven artists to generate narratives and representations that move between disaffection, pessimism and criticism, but also identity, pride and the vindication of a working-class memory of hard life, collective struggles and social improvements (Castro Cabero, 2023). However, whether the accent is placed on the more negative aspects or on the epic and the legacies of workers’ conquests, what is unquestionable is that the former Asturian industrial world remains very present, in such a way that industry and the legacies associated with it allow us, taking the concept coined by Linkon, to speak about a ‘half-life of deindustrialisation’ (Linkon, 2018). The concept, which stems from the observation of the literary wealth born of industrial loss, refers to the profound social and cultural consequences of deindustrialisation and, above all, to the persistence of the legacies associated with it. Legacies which, like radioactivity, persist even after the industrial world has disappeared or is on the verge of disappearing (Linkon, 2018: 5–6).

Similarly, the interest in the cultural codes of the past and how they are re-imagined and endured in the present was also addressed by historian Raymond Williams (1988). In his enquiry into how particular events were lived and felt (or are lived and felt) in a particular time or place by a particular generation or community, Williams coined the term ‘structure of feeling’. It was a challenging and complex concept, a ‘cultural hypothesis’ which, in the quest to capture ‘the vital pulse of an era’, provides clues to understand how identity and culture are embedded in historical time. Williams further explored the concept by distinguishing between dominant, emergent and residual structures of feeling, all of which are interrelated but which, in sum, are repositories of meanings that communities and individuals draw upon to understand themselves and their place in society (Williams, 1988). ‘Residual structures of feeling’ become particularly useful for the purpose of this text to the extent they make it possible to note the maintenance of links with the past and the preservation of cultural elements and codes that remain important for certain groups or communities, even if they are no longer widely accepted. In this regard, the survival of industrial and working-class culture in the post-industrial era makes it possible to speak of an industrial structure of feeling. It was David Byrne who added the qualifier ‘industrial’ to the concept by noting how these structures of feeling, ‘the feelings that inform and construct ways of life’ remain a feature for many social groups and not just the proletariat beyond the period of industrialism. These are experiences, codes and meanings which remain alive and practised, although the dominant culture tries to marginalise them (Byrne, 2002).

These approaches which, due to their close link with the memory of the past, with the forms of remembrance and their validity in the present, have found in the emerging concept of ‘Slow Memory’ an enriching and at the same time renewed – from a cultural, social and political point of view – look at the analyses that call for a resizing of the scales, the great memorial milestones and the ways of being and behaving in a society like today’s, marked by immediacy, consumerism and likewise by individualism with its consequent impact on a planetary scale (Wüstenberg, 2023). All of this is determined by the dynamics of globalisation and neo-liberalism, which dismiss or question those aspects of the past that may raise uncomfortable questions or make demands that contradict their assumptions (Clarke, 2015). In this sense, the approach to deindustrialisation and productive transformation and how cultural creators endure it and feel it, or under what social or labour conditions they have shaped it, refers directly to calls to reflect, think and act slowly. In this respect it is worth remembering, as High also points out, that around the processes of massive industrial closures, and the impact not only on the workers but also on their communities and abandoned spaces, it is unavoidable to spot a kind of structural violence (High, 2019, 2021), a dimension that is enormously enriched by the approaches to the manifestations of ‘Slow violence’ that is addressed precisely through the contributions of the notion of ‘Slow memory’ (Nixon, 2011; Wüstenberg, 2023).

All these theoretical and conceptual frameworks that enrich the social understanding and cultural imbrication derived from deindustrialisation have been particularly useful in exploring how Asturian cultural creators have reflected on the legacies of deindustrialisation.

To explore these expressions, we have undertaken, as part of a broader research project, a systematic plan to collect oral testimonies between 2019 and 2024 (I + D + i Project Sociocultural change, memory, heritage and identities in context of deindustrialisation). Within this framework, we have undertaken a series of interviews with, up to date, around 80 Asturian artists and cultural creators whose work takes into account the region’s industrial and mining references. All of them are creators who have built different models of memories and recollections based on their personal experiences to shape a collective memory closely linked to the local context. Using different means of artistic expression, they share a common concern, which is the loss of heritage, as well as the industrial, identity and social crisis that this process entails, and whose artistic proposals are linked to the territory to which most of them belong.

The interviews belong to the collection ‘Cultural Memories of an Industrial Past’ and are available for consultation at Archivo de Fuentes Orales para la Historia Social de Asturias (AFOHSA), the oral archive of the University of Oviedo (www.unioviedo.es/AFOHSA/).

All of them are well-known cultural creators on the Asturian cultural scene, and some have even made the leap to the Spanish scene. Those who work in the most accessible arts to the general public, such as musicians or comic book artists, have become figures of some public relevance beyond artistic circles, although not all of them rely on cultural creation as their main or exclusive means of livelihood. For those artists who live exclusively from their work as such, there is a mix of benefits obtained through the sale or exploitation of the rights to their creations with the existence of a certain amount of public support in the form of grants, competitions or exhibitions supported by public funds. In other cases, artists combine their creative activities with other jobs of different nature.

With this in mind, for this article we have selected, based on their public impact in different creative fields, the testimonies of eight artists within an age range that places them as direct witnesses to industrial decline during their childhood and youth, including Ramón Lluis Bande (Gijón, 1972, writer and cinematographer), Avelino Sala (Gijón, 1972, visual artist), Maxi Rodríguez (Mieres, 1965, writer, dramatist and actor), Alfonso Zapico (Sotrondio, 1981, comic book illustrator) and César Frey a.k.a. El Séptimo Crío (Brussels, 1970, graffiti artist) are professionally involved in cultural activities in their various forms, while Vanessa Gutiérrez (El Entrego, 1981, writer), Chechu García (El Entrego, 1970, writer) and Natalia Pastor (Laviana, 1970, visual artist) work mainly in the fields of teaching and journalism. In most cases they continue living nowadays in those same spaces shaken by the impact of deindustrialisation and the accelerated and unequal transformation of production. All of them have in common the fact that they have turned these experiences, as well as their memory and legacies, not only into the driving force that feeds their creation but also into a means that has allowed them to reflect on the past, how it is remembered, but especially its projection and ‘usefulness’ for the present and the future. It is precisely from these premises that we designed a questionnaire conceived in a very open and flexible way, developing the interviews in the format of an informal conversation. Their oral testimonies were recorded in video and audio format and the length of the interviews is between 1 and 2 hours. All of this with the aim of investigating and delving deeper into what led them to project these concerns and on what anchors (family, social, political. . .).

Based on an understanding of deindustrialisation as a slow process, the following pages are organised around headings that delve into the legacies, trauma and resistance of this process. We do not do this through an analysis of the deindustrialisation process itself, but rather through the memory of artists whose works and reflections revolve around ‘continuity within discontinuity’ and who, largely for this reason, become interesting references for the approach based on the concept of Slow Memory.

Legacies

Artists have found a source of inspiration, but also a way of understanding and expressing their position with respect to the reality from which they come and in which they live or with which they have not lost contact, and it is this facet that situates Asturias and its rich and varied cultural fabric as an original experience (Vega, 2019). A rich heritage, both tangible and intangible, in terms of landscape, constructions, ruins, stories, identities, work culture and workers’ memory continue to act as collectively shared referents in the present, albeit subject to profound (re)significations and (re)valuations.

In this respect, some issues regarding links to spaces and with a sense of belonging and identity arise. There is, as the filmmaker, writer and audiovisual producer, Ramón Lluis Bande remarks, a ‘matter of skin’ that emanates from the fact of having been born and raised in spaces of former industrial strength and being sons and daughters of former industrial workers:

There’s something from under the skin. In my working-class origins, there are automatic responses that I don’t need to think too much about. When you belong to a working-class family with a certain degree of class consciousness, and having lived moments where this really meant something. . . My father was a shipyard worker, and when I was a kid, we lived many weeks on strike, so there are many concepts that naturally develop within you. The solidarity of shops, strike funds, grabbing food at the grocery store without paying until we had the money. . . A foundation of solidarity as something real and necessary. The importance of collectiveness. Having experienced the importance of solidarity, words that don’t mean anything in our days, although I know that they’re fundamental in hard times. This is testament to how we need to continue claiming and understanding our history as a class. And we must look how to project that to the future. (Oral Testimony of Ramón Lluis Bande)

Growing up in a mining area or in a working-class neighbourhood with a deep-rooted working culture is the main reason they point to for the issues they deal with and, to no lesser extent, a defining element of their ideological position as citizens. As writer Vanessa Gutiérrez expresses, there remains a latent feeling of not living up to certain values that previous generations considered an inalienable asset:

You constantly hear from older people that solidarity is disappearing. When there is a social conflict, they reproach you: ‘where are you? Why aren’t you in the street? Where are you, young people?’ In their way of being and being in the world they don’t understand the lack of solidarity. They don’t understand we don’t take a public stance when something is going on, because they understand that this is what we have to do: to choose a side, to take a stance. And they reproach us for that. There is pain because these values are being lost, because they are not being maintained. (Oral testimony of Vanessa Gutiérrez)

The vast majority of these artists and creators are of working-class origin and fully aware of that fact. Their access to education and culture and a certain democratisation of means for cultural and cultural circuits (making films is cheaper and technically easier, publishing books or exhibiting in physical or virtual art galleries is also more accessible than in the past) creates opportunities to tell stories that are related to their roots and their concerns:

My father worked for a shipyard. Family roots are closely linked to the memory of working. Also, I think that in art if you tell stories close to your own life, they’ll have more honesty. One could also tell them from a more general point of view, but telling universal stories from an individual perspective makes more sense, has more roots. (Oral Testimony of Avelino Sala)

This rootedness in working-class origins and intergenerational connections, the strong shared identity and sense of belonging, distances them from the approaches that can be found in aestheticist manifestations that elsewhere have been defined as ‘ruin porn’ to emphasise the growing taste for industrial voyeurism removed from any social ties or even context that these ‘beautiful terrible ruins’, in the words of Dora Apel, have for communities affected by deindustrialisation (Apel, 2015). Far from the disaffection of ruin porn, therefore, what predominates in the works and motivations of Asturian creators is rather place attachment (Edensor, 2005).

The intergenerational connection acts as a strong motivational driver. Although none of them have followed their parents‘ careers, they were favoured by the salary levels earned by the workers’ movement and the early retirements as a counterpart to the adjustments and closures. They are artists who have had access to university degrees that have provided them with cultural tools and possibilities of expression that they use to channel this uneasiness and uncertainty and construct discourses and aesthetic forms that give meaning to the spaces and that are accompanied, at the same time, by reflections on the duty and obligation to preserve and learn from these legacies. Artists are often aware of this:

The less important factor is access to technology, but from where we tell stories, what stories are we interested in telling, how do we tell them and for what purposes. It’s a big change. Every day it is easier to have the means to produce a film and anyone can make it. (. . .) A very strange phenomenon has been taking place in Asturias in recent years, which is that in Asturias we can only speak of a national cinematography based on non-fiction. Many filmmakers started to make films and chose non-fiction, on the other hand, it is probably the most enriching cinema of the last decade, but it is born from that impulse to try to relate and record reality using that tool. In Asturias very little escapist cinema is being made. (Oral Testimony of Ramón Lluis Bande)

This legacy to be passed on even becomes a moral obligation, as part of a debt to their elders. The past, whether in collective terms of the working-class community or in family terms of recognition of parents and grandparents, is explicitly or implicitly present:

I realized that there were stories that he told me, for example, the story of my father, but also the story of my grandparents, the story of my wife’s grandparents, that if I didn’t tell them, nobody could tell them, and that it was a way of doing justice, because they went through a lot of hardships to give me an education, and one way of fulfilling that was to tell the story of how I came to be what I am. I am what I am in part thanks to all those sacrifices they made so that I could study and write. And so, in that sense, it is a commitment to them. (Oral Testimony of Chechu García)

These testimonies show the weight of that heritage and the complex relationship with it, a complexity that, in the same way, underlies in the reasons that move them to address it from and through art (Castro Cabero, 2023; Rock Núñez and Bretti, 2025). Thus, we see how there is an urgency to narrate and rescue memories that cannot be separated from a sense of loss that includes both material remains and identity or values, and with the fact that the creators are aware that they are witnesses and participants in an industrial world that is dying out, but whose legacies remain. Cartoonist Alfonso Zapico and writer Aitana Castaño make this explicit in the prologue to a joint work of stories and drawings about the mining area they both come from:

We belong to the first generation in a century of history of the Asturian mining basins that does not have a job related to mining. We are the first ones, in more than a hundred years, who did not go down to the bowels of the Earth, who did not wash with our hands the blackness of buildings and clothes, who did not tremble every time the sound of a siren bursts in the surroundings of some pit announcing the tragedy (. . .) We, who are children of those struggles, of those efforts, of those characters and those blackened bodies, and we know them closely, know that it is not coal all that shines and glittered in the mining basins. But as their heirs, we have the responsibility to tell the story. To tell them. (Castaño and Zapico, 2018: 9–10)

Cultural trauma

The impact of loss as well as the articulation of resignifications or the search for new ones about what was, and is no longer, allow us to talk about a cultural trauma (Ring et al., 2017). The sense in which we use it to contextualise the artists’ reflections would be that of a discursive response to a breakdown produced when the foundations of a collective identity are shaken by profound changes, where individual and collective actors try to define a situation and search for meaning, with what this implies in terms of working on discursive practices, memory and collective identity (Alexander, 2003; Erll, 2012).

This is how Jorge Rivero puts it:

What happens when a community loses its common signs of identity? What happens when stereotypes, with their truths and lies, with their narrow-mindedness and self-confirmations, fade away to become a memory somewhere between romantic and epic? How is reflected the loss of people’s identity in the spaces they build, inhabit and abandon? (Rivero, 2010)

For this filmmaker, these are the questions he tries to answer in his work. Through his documentary work, he seeks to understand not so much who he is, but what he is in relation to the place where he was born and raised, and which was suffocating him.

Like this reflection by Rivero, those of other creators lead us to investigate to what extent the working-class and industrial past is meaningful for those who receive it as an inheritance that cannot be reproduced in the same terms. The past acts as a source of identity and a constant reference, but it must be re-signified in order to be useful in the face of a future that looks very different, perhaps less harsh, but more uncertain.

Many of the creations reflect how the continuous migration of young people with higher education, the lack of job opportunities and productive stagnation have generated a profound disaffection, uncertainty about the future and distrust towards social and political agents. All of this introduces new meanings, incorporates states of pessimism about the present and the future that raise conflicts and re-signifies the past in a critical and unaccommodating way. For many, it also casts a shadow over a legacy of workers’ and social mobilisation that had been decisive in social and labour conquests (Díaz, 2018).

In this respect, cultural creators express frustrations in terms of breakdown with a past that is considered definitively lost and therefore irretrievable. It thus incurs the paradox of maintaining attention on the past while affirming its uselessness, revealing the traumatic nature of the loss.

A good example of this can be found in the work and motivations of the playwright and actor Maxi Rodríguez, who has portrayed an ageing society in various senses, including that of the will to fight collectively. Values and memory dissolve in an individualistic society that lacks a vital pulse and is built turning its back to its past:

An aging and empty Asturias reoccurs in almost all ways, and I’m not talking about epics. If I try to do something epic, what I end up creating is irony. I always say that the drunken and dynamite-armored Asturias is now attending saloon dancing classes. (Oral Testimony of Maxi Rodriguez)

In the rapper Arma X’s (his stage name could be translated as ‘X weapo’) best known song, ‘Patria sin sol’ (Sunless Homeland), he cries out: ‘It’s the basin that dies / or it’s me who dies in it / It’s the basin that kills me / it’s me who drowns it the hardest’. The feeling of having been betrayed, the lack of prospects for youth and drugs as an escape route that numbs rebellion are a constant in his lyrics. The graffiti artist Séptimo Crío expresses himself in similar terms, to which he adds forgetfulness:

We know that people tend to forget too quickly. Here, we lived the most important of all revolutions that took place in Spain, but ask any kid out there, and he won’t know a thing about it. Of course, it’s a shame. We’re a failure even if we’ve taken part in strikes. It was a failure, but a well-organized one. But we cannot blame the failure only on us, when we had such a massive influx of money, and I agree with those who say that what happened with crack in many North American neighbourhoods also happened here. It’s what I think: heroin crushed an entire generation. (Oral Testimony of César Frei a.k.a. Séptimo Crío)

From a view that puts in the foreground the physical spaces abandoned or in an irreversible process of depopulation, works such as the documentary ‘Nenyure’ (a word in the Asturian language that means ‘nowhere’) appear as a dystopian reality in which the only glimpse of life in an almost ghost town that has become a non-place are the echoes of the workers that resound in the emptiness of the ruins where they once worked and lived (Menéndez García, 2023). The physical landscape becomes a psychological landscape which works as a product of conflicting feelings, of rootedness and uprootedness, struggle and dejection, opposing realities in the experience of the place:

I’m the daughter of a miner, the niece of miners, and I live with a miner. I mean, I’ve always lived this entire transformation. And, on the other side, that image of hostility, of a landscape shifting towards uncertainty. . . I read it that way back then. Nowadays, when I meditate on the landscape, I try to find a glimpse of beauty among all that hostility. That’s what I’m into now, trying to find something to hold on to because in the different projects I’ve been working on there’s always a relationship of love and hate in this environment, of flight and constant belonging. Sometimes you think, ‘I’ve got to get out of this place’, while other times you say “I’ve got to stay here and fight to find a way out of this situation. (Oral Testimony of Natalia Pastor)

Resistance

Alongside the more critical or nihilistic assessments of the process of industrial ruination, other artists have found in the epic of defeat, workers’ struggles and social conquests a source of pride to claim that, at the same time, functions as a reference to look to in order to face the problems and challenges of the present, profoundly transformed by the changes in the dynamics of work and labour and community relations:

The mining basins are a place like any other working class area, but it is true that the courage of these people relies in the fact that they have going from defeat to defeat until their final defeat (. . .). There has always been a constant mobilisation because there was always a struggle and a feeling of injustice that did not change from generation to generation. There was, there is, a feeling that people were able to detect and diagnose: injustice (. . .) and there was always this mobilisation that I, in fact, when I lived there I witnessed and I didn’t realise it because it was so quotidian. . . This feeling of injustice has been passed down from generation to generation (. . .) We are always associated with trouble, with the discomfort that we cause to others, but this world disappears and many good things disappear: the world of the collective. There was a combativeness and a class consciousness that helped to raise the standard of living and to achieve social conquests, and all this goes unnoticed and is always covered up by criticism. (Oral Testimony of Alfonso Zapico)

The words transmitted by Alfonso Zapico refer to a memory of defeats, but also of conquests which, far from idealising the past, gives value to an identity closely linked to resistance, not only in the face of the closures of wells and factories, as irreversible processes, but also in the face of the dissolution of those aspects of collective memory and labour identities that appeal to the strength of aspects regarding the collective and the values of solidarity (Díaz, 2022). These narratives introduce into the theoretical debate the role of nostalgia and how it cannot fail to connect with the latency of the ‘structure of residual feeling’ in order to describe and understand the link or attachment of individuals and communities shaken by deindustrialisation that accentuates or justifies the problems of the present.

As a central dimension of the post-industrial imaginary, references and projections of nostalgia become a tool for the artists interviewed to explore loss, identity and social change, creating spaces for memory to be reinterpreted and used to make sense of the present (Berger, 2019):

If I work with this is because there’s a point of nostalgia on many levels. But there’s another part saying: ‘What do we have to do here? We have to find a way out’. Worst of all, or at least what is perceived as such in my work, is image of uncertainty. But it’s an uncertainty that goes on and on in this slow transformation that makes you think as you watch it, ‘How far are we going to go?’ It’s agony, and it’s so hard, but on the other hand, it’s the image of resistance. If this is a struggling community, we’ll have to find how to get out of this. The thing is it’s very complicated because while you’ve got that tradition of struggle, there’s also neglect. (Oral Testimony of Natalia Pastor)

There is indeed a certain nostalgia underlying Natalia Pastor’s story, but it is not an uncritical or mythologising nostalgia, but a proactive and reflexive one (Boym, 2001). Nostalgia, in short, appeals to the potential of mobilising certain resources from the working class and industrial past in order to face the future, even if the road ahead is full of challenges (Smith and Campbell, 2017).

From a militant perspective, the past can also act as an argument to call for struggle, in a kind of lengthened shadow of heroic times of revolutionary attempts or anti-fascist resistances that would pose a demand to live up to that mythologised reference through an epic of the workers’ struggle:

If there is one thing I can be proud of in Asturias, it is of the countrymen and the workers. What they achieved for the next generations, something we are not doing. We are not even capable of defending what we have. So how can I not appreciate what a bunch of miners, of workers who had not even internet or nothing at all, did risking everything, in their day? They crossed mountains in order to carry a newspaper. We don’t have the complications they suffered. They risked their lives. We have the privileges. We are heirs to the better part. Not appreciating that and thinking that it rained down on us from heaven is the biggest mistake a worker can make. (Oral Testimony of César Frei a.k.a. Séptimo Crío)

It is precisely from the realisation, not without a certain amount of guilt, of not being able to live up to the inheritance received that the conception of cultural creation in itself as an act of resistance makes sense (González Menéndez, 2015). Avelino Sala, taking as a reference some of the episodes that marked the recent history of Asturias (the workers’ revolution of 1934, the civil war and the dictatorship) and one of the most iconic protest repertoires of the workers’ movement: the barricades, says,

I worked with black books. I made barricades with encyclopaedias that were the symbol of culture in every home, which was the Enciclopedia Espasa (a very popular encyclopaedia in Spain during the 60’s and 70’s). I painted them black and made a barricade, a metaphor for the barricade from culture, a symbol of resistance from culture. (Oral Testimony of Avelino Sala)

Conclusions

In Asturias, it is extraordinarily striking how photographers, writers, painters, filmmakers. . . keep the industrial world and its legacies as a source of inspiration for their creations. To the quantitative evidence, revealing by itself, we should add the qualitative evidence and, with it, the acknowledgement of quality, interest and projection that many of them enjoy at national level.

This paper draws on extensive interviews with these artists, who navigate themes of resistance, place attachment, cultural trauma and memory using art as a tool for social commentary and identity preservation.

Creators try to reflect the traces of the legacies (physical or intangible) of the industrial and both their works and their motivations feature a look to the past in search of answers to the concerns and uncertainties of the present. However, rather than reflecting a transmission from previous generations, what we find is a request or interpellation of the artists in the past in search of tools with which to face the challenges and uncertainties of the present. In this respect, we can point out that it is not the past that produces the present, but the present that shapes the past (Lowenthal, 2010). This observation is not to say that these are capricious choices or choices detached from the past, but rather that the past offers an extensive repertoire of possibilities to choose from.

Both in the works and in the reasons underlying their approaches, creators address aspects that have to do both with their perception and positioning of the process of industrial ruination and with the persistence of the legacies or ‘half-life’ of deindustrialisation. These are theoretical frameworks that, in turn, allow us to see the validity of an ‘industrial structure of feeling’ that is extremely useful for understanding the changing nature of ideas and their influence on generations to come.

Similarly, in the interviews we conducted, we observed how the artists carried out an exercise of reflection and analysis of reality that did not only respond to an aesthetic project, but also implied a commitment to the past, present and future. The fact that the process of creation itself entails ways of making and creating derived from an internalisation of why, how or for whom, appealing to the importance of the past, reflection and analysis and, closely related to this, the necessary connection between past, present and future, is linked to a good part of the premises sustained from the theoretical and conceptual framework offered by the notion of ‘Slow memory’ in its most literal sense of breaking or resizing everyday urgencies. It’s not in vain that the notion of Slow memory seeks ‘to capture, historicize and open debate about these contradictions at the core of current society and polítics’ (Wüstenberg, 2023). In the same way, and as we have tried to show in this text, memory does not work just as a record of past disruptions (Wüstenberg, 2023).