It is late afternoon in the outskirts of Bytom, a polish city who is slowly collapsing into a labyrinth of centuries of coal mining tunnels. I came here because of this- the sinking-ness after careless exploitation of it´s resourceful subterranean coal-environment. Now, after two days, I am no longer sure what I am doing here, how I can get beyond the role of a being tourist of decay. I have been driving through empty building areas, worn out brick buildings, closed down and abandoned mines, landscapes dominated sand-mountains -remains of the mining activity, and through randomly dumped garbage on the sides of every remote roads. I have stopped in all these places, stepped out of the car with my recording equipment hidden in a shabby shoulder bag, listened and tried to sense-understand these places, to capture the sonic ambience imprinted with history, the waves that alliance this places with their past, this attempts to connect to their zona of memory. This impossibility which only persisting artistic activity might make possible.

I am mostly met with suspicion if I am observed recording here. A new and uncomfortable experience. I imagine people get a flashback to the surveyed communistic past or simply find it unpleasant that someone observe their region´s tragic destiny. Upper Silesia was once a flourishing area on a ground of black gold. It is just that their economic abundance clashed with time: it takes the earth millions of years to produce black coal but only minutes for us to consume it. And they, the people Bytom and the surrounding cities, literary have to deal with that clash as the earth below has been hollowed and not properly reinforced. Bytom is a place where buildings, roads and fields fall in on themselves. 20 meters in 50 years. Not all in once, of course, but suddenly here and there. This physical and social collapse is not pleasant to have observed, I guess, at least by me without any promises of giving something in return and even incapable of explaining what I am doing here.

Sometimes I envy the traditional field recordists who steps out alone in remote landscapes to record and make audible fantastic, obscene natural phenomena, often unknown or overheard. These phenomena could have been caught anywhere that they occur, they are placeless in one sense, still their placement often gives another layer, often a dramatic layer: like Elin Vister´s beautiful recordings of the diminishing bird colonies at Røst in Northern Norway. Often, at least when the work is good, you don´t need to know where the recording has been done to give a contextualising layer, it is all there in the recording. Hmm, it is all there but traces of the recordist and often even all disturbing sounds are cut out, like sound of motorised vehicles or similar. With my recordings, I tempt to work with all these elements which I guess Watson would consider as mistakes or sound pollution. On the other hand, my main artistic interests are in manmade landscapes, in waste and noise, less as phenomena in itself but in connection to place. For example, my way to Silesia was through an increasing interest in coal and coal mining, rooted in my experience from the coal mines in Longyearbyen, by seeing mine areas as ever growing scars in the earth´s surface and by reading Ester Leslie´s Synthetic Worlds. Leslie´s book tells stories of how the poets and scientist from the german Romantic era, like Novalis and Goethe, “fantasised a new world into being” (to use her words), how the poetic imagination was preliminary for scientific innovation, and the importance of coal in not only the industrial revolution as fuel for it´s machinery but for the synthetic revolution by the exploitation of coal´s waste: the coal-tar. The book also treats the artistic reaction on this new synthetic dimension infiltrating the lifeworld in the accelerative capitalistic society by discussing works by Benjamin, Sinclair etc. I can highly recommend this book. Coal is a complex, controversial matter. It consist of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulphur and nitrogen in different constellations. When burned, we all know it´s effect on the environment. It´s presence in synthetic dyes, and the E´s – the chemical substitution-substances in food etc are maybe less known, maybe not. I am interested in tracing the places where coal is being carved out. The places after coal has been emptied out. Then I heard about Bytom and here I am.