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Cemented Narratives: The Catalan Cement Museum, its Exhibitory Regime and its History
Tue, July 14, 11:00am to 12:30pm, National Museum of Scotland, Seminar RoomEnglish Abstract
This paper analyses the politics of display at the Cement Museum in Catalonia. The museum, which opened in 2002 as part of the Catalan National Science and Technology Museum, is located in the Pyrenees, at the site of the Clot del Moro's old Asland factory, one of the first Portland cement factories in Spain. The factory, abandoned for 27 years before the opening of the museum, had been a key space for inhabitants of the area, and was the first of many more to use the power of the Llobregat, the most industrialized river of Catalonia, one of the industrial poles of the Iberian Peninsula. Although there is no more cement production, the old factory remains a place of production and distribution of narratives about this ubiquitous material.
A key marker of the Anthropocene, cement is a perfect interscalar vehicle (Hecht, 2018). Tracing it from the lungs of ex-workers to the current narratives in the museum, from the global impact of its production to the concrete construction of the authoritarian Francoist regime, this paper navigates between temporal and spatial scales. By following cement, and paying attention to both the history of the factory and its current regimes of display, it draws many connections that built the Cement Museum, with its emphases and its silences. In particular, the paper analyses the politics of display related to three different topics: the space surrounding the museum, once a densely populated industrial landscape in one of the most important industrial arteries of the country, which is nowadays overlooked as an idyllic natural space; the production and circulation of knowledge about cement, almost absent from the narratives of the museum; and the link between environmental destruction and major health issues the cement production causes.