Picture
Photos may been viewed at the Permanent Tourist website (copyright Mark Howells-Mead): http://permanenttourist.ch/articles/2008/07/autofriedhof/

While watching the news in France,  I heard about something that I thought might be of interest to the group: a carpark near Bern that has been put up for auction.

The car cemetery has existed since the 1930s and has accumulated, over 80 years, hundreds of cars. As you can see from the photos on the website above, the cars have been left completely untouched. They seem to have never been moved since their arrival. They have become part of nature: a forest of cars. Before the auction started, the owner invited scientists and industrial archaeologists to search for car parts which are now obsolete, and also to study the deteriorating process of the cars.

The peaceful afterlife of the cars has now been brought to an end. This cemetery serves as an example of what happens to objects once they are no longer used and when they are thrown away. The fact that the cemetery has been ordered to be cleared suggests that these kinds of places where old objects are stacked can no longer exist, as they might harm the environment. Nowadays, dead objects must be properly preserved for collection, or recycled, or destroyed.

Here’s an article on the cemetery (in French):

http://bit.ly/s3IAZ

Here’s a blog with pictures of the cemetery (there is a translation into English of a German article from the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger):

http://permanenttourist.ch/articles/2009/09/death-of-a-cemetery/

and the original German article:

http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/leben/gesellschaft/Es-ist-ein-Scheissgefuehl-Genau/story/25438512

 Here's an amateur video posted to Youtube with
 a slideshow of photos taken a year ago at Kaufdorf:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ugamat#play/all/uploads-all/1/FvXAZAD3nBY

--Sheena Scott

 
 
 
Each journey on the Paris Metro fills me with a little nostalgia. Perhaps it's not really nostalgia as I never knew the now vanished green Sprague-Thomson trains, which ran from the 1930s to early 80s, or the ticket collectors - the poinçonneurs - that began to die out with the introduction of the first automatic ticket gates in 1973. Perhaps it's because I see a more recent but aged set of trains that are being phased out, and that I know the stiff little handles that you need to turn to open the doors will soon be gone forever as automatic doors take precedent. And also perhaps the reason I feel regret when I travel is because as each station is redecorated as part of the 'more beautiful metro' renovation project, brash geometric tiles from the 1960s, 70s and 80s are being chipped away and replaced by neat shiny white replicas of tiles from the 1920s. Yes, the old tiles are damaged, covered in grease and mould from leaking tunnels, but it's sad to see a layer of design history being lost as each station is renewed. On some lines from station to station you can enjoy many different examples of platform design, and see how during each decade designers had different ideas about lighting, seating, signs, tiles etc. Let's hope this is not entirely swept away by the homogenising renovations currently underway, and that some stations keep their eccentric/garish look.

What I really wanted to say here was the RATP, that runs the transport network in Paris, including the Metro, is currently  celebrating its 60 years with a small exhibition next to the Centre Pompidou until 5 October 2009. The exhibition is also available online. The photographs and posters displayed offer a glimpse of now obsolete objects such as the curious poinçonneur ticket punch, and open backed buses. Once so familiar to passengers these have become relics over night. Providing 3 billion journeys a year, the ever innovative RATP obviously feels it needs to keep up with the times.

www.ratp.fr

Jacob Paskins
 
 
Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) Annual Conference

"Objects--What Matters? Technology, Value and Social Change," 1-4 September 2009, Manchester

CRESC is an ESRC-funded international research center bringing together Manchester University and Open University academics from disciplines as diverse as Accounting and Finance, Business, Census and Survey Statistics, Geography, History, Media Studies, Social Anthropology and Sociology to analyze socio-cultural change. The centre's research is separated into four themes, and this year's conference was put together by Theme 4, 'Cultural Values and Politics,' and focused on objects. (http://www.cresc.ac.uk/research/theme4/index.html)

The academic planning committee, consisting of Penny Harvey (University of Manchester), Hannah Knox (University of Manchester), Elizabeth Silva (Open University), Nick Thoburn (University of Manchester) and Kath Woodward (Open University), put together panels on 'Artefactual Pleasures', 'The Materiality of the Image and Knowledge', 'Objects, Art and Time' among many others, and each panel was based in different disciplines. Travelling between rooms, I was confronted with wildly different approaches to objects, a panel of art and cultural historians might contest whether a machine could be classed as an object, while another comprised of
sociologists and anthropologists might refer to something as diffuse as the BSE crisis as an 'object'. How these different disciplinary approaches complemented and clashed with each other was one of the major challenges
facing both panels and audiences. Keynote speakers included philosopher Graham Harman, sociologist Patricia
Clough, art historian Griselda Pollock, philosopher Annemarie Mol and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart. Pollock's paper on 'Sarah Kofman's Father's Pen: Trauma, Transmission and the Strings of Virtuality between
the Psychoanalytical and the Aesthetic Understanding of the Object as Link not Lost' was particularly moving, analyzing the object's role as focus for memory, a subject explored further in two panels addressing 'Objects
and Memory'. Artists, curators and art historians took part in 'The Object Research Lab' which sought to allow the audience to interact with a set of 'neutral' blob shaped objects brought along by the artists and to respond to a number of questions about their interactions. Curator, Dieter Roelstrate, discussed 'Thing Theory' with artist Yvonne Droge Wendel. Yvonne Droge Wendel's (http://www.yvonnedrogewendel.nl/index.html) work engages with things, be they sticks, pieces of furniture or broken down cars. Roelstrate has recently curated an exhibition on 'The Thing' as part of a larger event 'All that is solid Melts into Air' in Mechelen. ( http://www.muhka.be/toont_beeldende_kunst_detail.php?la=en&id=2807 ).
Both discussed the differences between objects and things and grappled with whether objects can speak or listen, and when and how they die. Peter Buse of Salford University spoke on the fast dying media of polaroids in his paper, 'Polaroid Mosaics: On Photographic Tiles'. He has recently finished working on an AHRC project on 'Polaroid Cultures'. Artist Hilary Jack (http://www.hilaryjack.com/) both exhibited and spoke at the conference. She also works with dead objects. She collects broken umbrellas, discarded and broken jewelry, repairs them and then puts them back where she found them. She recently took part in an exhibition at Manchester's Castleford Gallery entitled 'The Social Lives of objects'
( http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/Archive.asp?eKey=310&eP=2 ).
Another paper of particular interest was anthropologist Nicole Vitellone's on 'Just Another Night in the Shooting Gallery'? The Syringe, Affect and Space' which studied the social life of the syringe through an ethnographic study of heroin users and their relationships with the syringe. These different disciplinary encounters with objects demonstrated how, and why we should, study the object and specifically the object's death.

Abstracts of all the papers can be found at  http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/conference2009/documents/ABSTRACTSCRESCCONFERENCE2009FINAL.doc

--Karolina Kendall-Bush, 14 September 2009