Padua: “Deceptions” exhibition at the Altinate San Gaetano Cultural Center.

Völklingen Hütte: from dark satanic mill to tourist spaceship

On display from January to March 29 16 2025, to Terrace 35 of the Altinate/San Gaetano Cultural Center, the works dedicated by Elizabeth Susanni to this alienating place are part of a personal research lasting more than twenty years around the material and immaterial testimonies of anthropization, which has its fulcrum in the sites considered World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

This colossal steel plant, the only one entirely preserved in the world, was the first example of industrial archaeology to be admitted into the coveted World Heritage List, in 1994.

Founded in 1873 in the historic mining region of the Saar basin, during its heyday, the 1960s, it took up to 17.000 workers. During the Second Word War, was the scene of extremely dramatic historical events: in addition 12.000 skilled workers, men, women and children, were subjected to forced labor, in hellish conditionsIt has been found that at least 60 children lost their lives inside the factory.

The artist's visual investigation, carried out in 2017, explores the metamorphosis of this illustrious product of the first age of the machine, place of production and exploitation of workers and popular tourist destination.

By questioning the profound meaning of this transformation, it appears as a kaleidoscopic meditation on the dialectic between memory and representation.

The tableaux on display are calibrated “pretenses” that ride the aestheticizing apologia of the site, inspired by a lucid fascination for the industrial ruin, of matrix Piranesian, where “to evoke the unacceptable fates of enslaved humanity, trapped in that scrap metal, only faded ghosts remain”.

Proposing a imaginative narration, the artist deliberately evokes the cinematic vision which is offered to tourists at dusk, involving us in the process of spectacularization of a historical document, paradigmatic of the toyization of reality and ideology of technique, that “it clouds and anesthetizes us”.

Heartbreaking metaphor of the great deception that pervades us, the colonna sonora è listen here.