SPUTNIK PHOTOS

Krzysztof Racon, Pipe

A dozen-kilometre conveyor belt lurks within the pipe, starting at the iron ore handling station and ending at the Katowice Steelworks. It cuts across forests, roads, races over fields, and finally runs a short stretch over a small town, whose name is difficult to pronounce or remember. This terrestrial steel structure dominates the town’s landscape: even when you close your eyes, the noise of the raw material being transported will reach you.
This is an extremely unfriendly place in which the air, soil and water have all been poisoned by a garbage dump adjacent to the town, as well as medicine incinerators and chicken slaughterhouses.
Like in a broken mirror, you see deformed objects in a degraded landscape. At this point, you start to believe the tale of a cat with two heads. The bang of locked doors, baying dogs telling you that you should run away from here.
But you go inside – you believe and don’t believe at the same time. Do you want to understand why people stayed here, did they simply get used to it, or are there some common unspoken secrets at work? Among the many contradictory stories, cruel stories, and brutal events accompanied by incestuous relationships, one thing is certain: this space fills the inhabitants with apathy, a feeling of helplessness, indifference, putting them into a state of suspension.
Any attempt to change the surrounding reality ends in failure. Founded a few years ago, the small zoo is today a depressing picture. A goat and wild pigs are the only animals that managed to survive on this “happy ranch”. Left unattended, they live in crumbling cages a few metres from the pipe.
When you leave the town, you see prostitutes standing by road 94. They seem quite a normal element of the life that goes on here.