(grundlegende Informationen zu Pyramiden siehe Kurzinfo)

Bedingt durch die geografische Lage, war es nur in den kurzen Sommern möglich, Pyramiden per Schiff zu erreichen. Nur in dieser Zeit fand ein Austausch von Gütern und der Abtransport der Kohle statt. Diese Umstände, und die Tatsache, dass alles Lebensnotwendige durch das Unternehmen »Arktikugol« gestellt wurde, sorgten dafür, dass sich nach der Perestroika sowohl das Erscheinungsbild Pyramidens als auch das bauliche und gesellschaftliche Umfeld kaum änderte.
Als die Mine und der Standort 1998 aufgegeben wurden, nahmen die Bewohner nur ihre persönliche Habe mit. Geblieben ist eine »Sowjetische Lebenswelt«, die die arktische Kälte konserviert.

Mehr als 10 Jahre später besuchen wöchentlich hunderte Touristen Pyramiden, die diese Welt u.a. auf tausenden Fotos mit nach Hause nehmen. Mitarbeiter des Betreibers, Arktikugol, sind dabei, die Infrastruktur teilweise wieder in Betrieb zu nehmen und die bauliche Substanz zu erhalten.

Ausgehend von diesem Zustand gibt es zahlreiche Ansätze, sich mit der ehemaligen Bergarbeiterstadt zu beschäftigen. Beispielsweise liegt die gesamte Infrastruktur dieser autarken Siedlung sichtbar an der Oberfläche. Die Rohstoff- und Versorgungsleitungen verlaufen oberirdisch und sind, holzummantelt, als Wege nutzbar. Die Stadt als Netz wird sichtbar.

Das Team um den norwegischen Archäologen Bjørnar Olsen war eines der ersten, das die Hinterlassenschaften in Pyramiden innerhalb des Projektes »Ruinmemories« wissenschaftlich untersuchte, ihre Ergebnisse veröffentlichte und somit auch das Interesse an der verlassenen Bergarbeiterstadt weckte.
Teile ihrer Abeit wurden für die Präsentation im VIMUDEAP neu aufbereitet. Es handelt sich um Ausschnitte aus den Ergebnissen der 2006 erfolgten Feldforschungen und die Reflektionen über Pyramiden aus dem Jahr 2012 nach dem Einsetzen der touristischen Nutzung:
→ Das Projekt »Ruinmemories«
→ Persistent Memories: »MAKING A HOME«
→ Back in Pyramiden, Svalbard

Deutsch nicht verfügbar - alternativ die englische Version.Workers that came to live and work in Piramida were normally hired on two-year contracts. The contract period was followed either by a free visit home or a long summer holiday for those who signed on or were offered a new contract. During the contract period, the Trust supplied food, housing and working clothes for employees – wages were deposited in their bank accounts for the benefit of their closest family members. In the most active years, Piramida housed a family society, with couples and children, but for the most part the inhabitants (especially the miners) who lived far away from their families in Donbass, Donetsk and Tula were single. How did such people cope in Piramida? How did they relate to the dominant materiality and the »bio-politics« it facilitated in terms of appropriate public behaviour? To what extent was Piramida – also during its phase of human occupancy – a contested place?

The public spaces in Piramida were conspicuously free of any manifestations of opposition and resistance. Despite the seven years of post-Soviet existence, the town’s facade revealed little other than a wealth of Soviet »affordances« [I]: monuments, kitsch, and posters. In the administration building the collected works of Lenin were still on the shelf in the director’s office. Signs of »otherness«, deviant behaviour, were conspicuously absent. Perhaps what was most amazing was the lack of graffiti, even from the post-Soviet years. The built-in hallway that ran for several hundred metres from the mine bath to the cable car, and which provided a sheltered walkway for hundreds of shift work miners every day, literally begged for graffiti – yet none was found.

The workers' apartments, however, provided a very different impression. We had the opportunity to survey apartment block 38 located on The Street for the 60 Years Anniversary of the Great October. The block contained 72 small flats, and apart from those on the first floor they each consisted of two rooms: a small front room with an annexed bathroom and a larger combined sleeping and living room. These flats were designed for singles or couples without children. The corridors and stairways of the block mirrored the public spaces: standardized, orderly, and, of course, no graffiti was to be spotted. However, as we approached the doors, differences were revealed to us: glued-on labels, signs, paint, handcrafted door numbers, and, in one case, even an elaborated wood-panelled door. Inside each apartment we found an amazing wealth of differences and decorative inventiveness. Inevitably, elements of the official discourse and body-politics were also manifest there: dumbbells are found everywhere, as are training bars above the doors.

Nonetheless, what was striking when entering the apartments was their otherness. Despite their spatial uniformity, no two of them look alike. Creative use of wallpaper, floor coverings and paint made each apartment unique and individual. Flowers, potted plants, self-produced furniture, and inventive bookshelves added to these idiosyncrasies, while the wall embellishments made manifest the sublime bricolage of using whatever was at hand for decoration and difference. From cigarette boxes, beer bottle labels and advertisements to pin-ups and air cargo package tape; in short, most materials seemed feasible. All this made the interiors of the apartments stand out in astonishing contrast to the purity and disciplined utterances dominating the public spaces.

At one level, the explanation for the expressiveness of the interiors in contrast to the bleak public spaces seems obvious. As argued in several studies of home decoration [II] people may have symbolically appropriated their flats to fight alienation and boredom. By adding their personal touch in the form of wallpaper, paint, flowers, and home-made furniture and decorations, the occupants turned the uniform flats into potentially inalienable and creative possessions. In other words, they made them into homes, into something that helped secure their personal identity and well-being. The workers that arrived in Piramida from places such as Donetsk, Donbass and Tula clearly found themselves very far away from home, and they faced a potential threat of alienation that should not be disregarded. Considering Piramida’s dominant materiality, there was obviously a need to carve out something closer and more personal.

However, such an explanation is hardly sufficient to account for the variety and specificity of the domestic materials. For instance, we often forget that such manifestations also are expressions of skills. In a society where so much relied on what was home-made [III], there was pride in being a skilled door maker, a talented glass painter, an adept shelf builder, a resourceful bottle-house builder, or a creative cigarette box decorator. In short, there was a silent competition of being the best bricoleur. In Piramida possessions and relative social status were, to some extent at least, more dependent on skills than money. This, of course, also involved the skill of networking and bartering, obtaining access to the »prestige-goods economy« where the desired raw materials – advertisements, magazines, cigarette boxes, paint, panels, labels – were circulating. Some of these goods were accessible only through the Norwegian society in Longyearbyen, while others came from local workshops and storehouses and were embedded in their own networks of restricted exchange.

The actual materials mobilized to decorate these interiors suggest other agendas as well. There were subtle – and some more overt – political messages in Piramida’s home decoration. In one apartment, a portrait of Karl Marx was found properly framed on the wall, while on a sofa bed in another apartment laid a poster of an over-decorated Leonid Bresjnev being awarded even more cut-out paper medals, and with a bullet-like glue mark in his forehead. Furthermore, the »raw materials« used for decoration were not chosen arbitrarily. As already noted, what they displayed and offered is very much what public space and Soviet ideology is not about. The imagery of the apartments represents a kind of inversed expression of official living and ideology. Wall decorations were dominated by glamour pictures and advertisements for capitalist consumer goods: images of Seiko watches (»The last you will ever need«), Opel cars, a remote-controlled Shivaki TV with built-in video. There were, of course, the compulsory pin-ups, but there were also images not complying with the dominant heterosexual regulatory ideal. There was variety and some enigmas in these expressions, such as the pictures of polite bureau members found on the inside of a closet door. However, it may have been significant for the tropes of domestic performance in post-Soviet Russia: pin-ups [IV] were moved to front stage and the images of the old regime were moved backstage.

It is also interesting to note the contrast between the miners' homes in block 38 and the flats occupied by the officials. The latter were located in the big apartment block constituting the southern confines of the town square. This block was set crosswise to all other apartment houses, sharing orientation in the town centre proper only with the Cultural Palace located at the opposite side of the square. The semiotics of material differences was also otherwise crude. The higher ranking staff lived in bigger apartments with the comforts of separate bedrooms and proper kitchens. Even the compulsory bars for training the occupants« biceps were bigger and more elaborate. The signs of distinction also included such extravagances as wallpaper on the ceiling, later increasingly victimized by the joined forces of crumbling glue and gravity. More important, however, none of the officials« flats contained the cheap advertised images of Western consumer goods found decorating the walls in the worker’s flats. This may have been due to the fact that the officials could afford to buy the »real thing«, or, more likely, because such acts were politically incorrect. The surveillance and control over these spaces was probably far stricter than that of the miners« flats, and a wrong touch in your home decoration could have proved fatal for further career moves. Hence, no pin-ups or pictures of film stars, no glossy Seiko advertisements, and no artwork based on the cut-out boxes containing Brooklyn cigarettes. The walls seemed mainly to have been kept clean and if any decoration remained it consisted of huge wallpaper-posters depicting secure images of pristine Russian nature.

In 2006, we had stayed here with Bjørnar, doing field studies in the mining town that was shut down in 1998. At the time, we could observe the accelerating decay, rivers running wild undermining buildings, water penetrating roofs and walls, broken windows and smashed doors, visitors robbing for souvenirs and making a mess, stinking seagulls nesting in window ledges, crumbling paint and varnish, gravitational forces bringing down wall paper and ceramic tiles. Naturally, we envisioned a prolonging of the observed trends, and that the destructive forces would sooner, rather than later, succeed in bringing the town down. However, trends are for the past, not the future. Things happen, and even small things tend to enforce each other in redirecting the unforeseen trajectories of reality. In fact, »Persistent Memories« ^[117], the book we made about our Pyramiden studies is one of them, contributing to the general interest of abandoned places and thereby increasing the number of visitors and necessary facilities at ruins.

It was a lonely week, our field work in Pyramiden back in 2006. Bjørnar, Elin and Hein were the sole »guests« at Hotel Tulip. Our suites in the 4th floor was the only inhabited rooms among the hundreds that once housed the more than 1,000 employees that had ran the Pyramiden coal mine at the peak of its 50 year long history.

We had come to study the abandoned town and how this world of »over given« things revealed itself to their human companions. We were not disappointed. Abandonment mean that one may study without prying, going places without invitations, open doors without asking, looking inside closets, behind curtains and under carpets; a dissecting, almost endoscopic view that would never be possible in a living settlement. Things may be misinterpreted, but will never deceive, hide or lie. They are the indisputable exhibits.

We could see for ourselves how the town was a meticulous construction of innumerous parts cooperating in a functional whole. The coal-fired power plant a steaming heart amidst the vast network of pipes and cables that connected all and everything. Without its people, the world of things came to light. It was like being on the inside of the overhead projector in Bruno Latour’s classical example ^[119] of how malfunctions bring awareness to things, illuminates their role and function in their contexts, and make us see that most things are many things, parts that are carefully fitted, tuned in accordance with input and output, voltage and watts, gears and RPMs, HPs and BARs, all directed toward producing whatever outcome the thing is designed for, as well as safety precautions for their vulnerable, and not infallible, human companions.

However, Bruno Latour had not prepared us for living in a world of malfunctions. After some days, it was painfully evident that there is more to the human touch than making things run. Without us, things fall apart. Living in houses that resemble urban normality but lack their function is something different. Houses that keep you out of the rain and wind, but still are more damp and colder than the outside. Sinks and faucets everywhere, we brought our own soaps, but there was no water; hundreds of toilets not only missing paper, but also water to flush and drain. Lamps without light; thousands of electrical switches that were »off« in all positions. No movement in the hundreds of kilometers of cables and pipes, roads and rails before our eyes.

Back in Pyramiden in July 2011 we could see that the town had developed differently than we had envisioned in 2006. Trust Arcticugol had established a staff of c. 30 workers to fight decay, to redirect and counterbalance natural forces, and also establish a down-scaled infrastructure for the new pyramideans: increasing numbers of tourists, of visitors with an agenda, and the staff to serve them.

Managing the 7th »best ghost town in the world« ^[120] is a juggle with oppositions; and paradoxes are mounting. Visitors arrive many times a week to explore the abandoned town, only to experience that a town full of visitors is not as abandoned as they expected. In the wake of all the visitors is the need for facilities and services; new installations and infrastructure that are also in conflict with their visions of a ghost town. The Trust Arcticugol staff does their best to maintain the town. They have managed to control the melt water that during our visit in 2006 had invaded the streets and was threatening to undermine several of the principal buildings. Broken windows were mended to protect the building itself, and presumably, all things therein. Unfortunately, in the process all too many of the delicate and touching details we encountered in 2006 were torn down, displaced or destroyed. It is understandable, the urge to clean and tidy when visitors are expected. Unfortunately, the untidy chaos of things also harbors the intimate and delicate objects and constellations that are valuable encounters with the former citizens, with the living town. Making the settlement presentable, paradoxically, also means to insert a barrier between now and then, between the spectator and the attraction, a veil that blur the authentic integration of humans and things. On the other side, the recent displacements and destruction are likewise authentic and true, and reveal new episodes in the human-thing history of Pyramiden. Visitors to ghost towns are their own worst enemies, and their caretakers not far from it.

Another lesson from the ex-ghost town is the art of down-scaling, an increasingly relevant exercise in our world of expanding materiality. This is also a telling picture of how human-thing constellations are fine-tuned clockworks of interrelations, and that diminishment is as challenging as expansion. One may not simply reduce speed, turn down the heat, bring it down from »10 to 1« in accordance with reduced activity, volume and new functions. Cables and pipes that were made to serve a coal mine are not applicable for a dozen reading lights, a stove and a couple of TV-sets. The cost of maintaining the former waterworks is not in accordance with the new function of the settlement. The response to this challenge was to establish a new micro-waterworks inside the former, covering the few buildings that are in use. The Blue Lagoon reservoir, roughly 3km up the valley, is still the source, but now water have to be transported by tractor that fill up local tank in the former garage. The source of cheap fuel vanished with the shut down of the mine, and the big coal-fired power plant is by all means useless. The once almost independent, self-reliant organism-like Soviet Pyramiden we described in our book is beyond resurrection. The new Pyramiden is dependent for almost everything: all food (except for the two tiny tomatoes) must be shipped; likewise diesel to run the el-aggregate. The former symphony of concordant things cannot produce otherwise than it was designed for. It may be turned off, but not down to 5%. The 5% community is not possible.

The World Wide Web reveals an expanding variety of interests and relations to Pyramiden. Some seem to rely on information from late nights in the Longyearbyen pubs – dubious claims about set tables and plates with remains of the last supper of the pyramideans. These stories all elaborate the ghost town myths of Pyramiden:

»The decision to abandon the settlement was sudden, its implementation even more so. The inhabitants were given just hours to pack their bags and leave. Remnants of that hasty departure are visible everywhere«.
sophiesworld.net/pyramiden-arctic-ghosttown-svalbard

Others are attracted to the spectacular surroundings, like »Powderwhore”, riding the steep slopes of Mt. Pyramiden, using the town center as an exotic base camp. noahhowell.com/2011/07/norway-part-3-pyramiden

In addition to the musicians in Efterklang (that were also part of Reher’s film, see images below) is Aggie Frost, profiled high-latitude artist and granddaughter of the famous Svalbard photographer Herta Grøndal (go-svalbard.no/grondalfoto). Aggie is planning performances in Pyramiden this September, see frostnorway.com/media/video/.

»Dance for grown ups« (dansforvoksne.no) is definitely among our favorites – their non-audience performance in the Cultural Palace of the abandoned town (March 13, 2009) even included putting up posters announcing the arrangement, see flickr.com/photos/dansforvoksne