Evoking the Industrial Past at the Urban-Rural Border Region: Social Movements and Cultural Production

Abstract

An exploration of industrial ruin sites has received sufficient attention in the past. Framed under the hybrid perspective of non-representational theory and paralleled with Ingold’s taskscape conceptualized terms, this study examines the TSA (train service area), an opencast mining ruins site in Gongguan town of Maoming, southern China, as a case locus to depict the ‘lives lived’ and the textures of the taskscape encountered by locales and to sketch out the iterative and eventful movements of human and non-human dynamic phenomena at the rural-urban interface from the 1960s to the 1980s, with the aim to re-examine the locality of one industrial city and regenerate the local culture. As actualized through ‘stories and dramatic episodes’, i.e., an art intervention of a new geographical historiography, the ‘thick’ landscape of mine transport comes to the stage as the self-landscape and of group-place scenes. In the first scene, the industrial past is evoked along the actor’s movement, through situated knowledge and through shared personhood; thus, the spirit of place is finally obtained through the aesthetic sublimation in the landscaping. In the second scene, the movement between the workplace and other rural areas, which are rural and seasonal, has balanced the gap between the urban and the rural, whilst the proximity of the village to the TSA accelerates the process of rural urbanization in this area. Among which, tea, as a non-human item, irreducibly produces a ‘structure of feeling’ and conjures up a sense of past people and past times and of customs, beliefs and localism.