European Health Spa

For years, we've been driving down Westchester County's Central Park Avenue, and I've told myself that one day, I'd stop and take photos of the European Health Spa in Scarsdale. Last month, that day finally came. Husband, daughter, and I had a surprisingly good time for an exploration that wasn't natural in its nature and one that we explored in a surface way. As you can see below, daughter now likes to imitate the gestures of statues, which is what really made this pit stop interesting. And, of course, getting her in a "No Trespassing" photo. It's obvious that at one point, the European Health Spa was "visionary" for its creative use of architecture on a strip mall street. But now plants have taken over in much of the inside, and upon a closer look, that fantastic statue is plastic. No wonder it hasn't been taken by vandals. I found a post about this abandoned site dated 2004. I'm curious to see how long it will be before this buiding actually gets demo'd.

I went for the abandoned buildings, and I got Iceland and community as well.

I'm a fan of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós' music - I own a few CDs but have never seen them in concert - but ever since hearing raves about Heima, I've been waiting for the opportunity to see the film on the big screen.

First, I heard that Heima was a great rock doc, and then I read the following sentence in press materials for last night's screening at Scandinavia House: They played in deserted fish factories, outsider art follies, far-flung community halls, sylvan fields, darkened caves, and the huge, horseshoe-shaped Ásbyrgi Canyon (formed, legend has it, by the hoofprint of Odin's six-legged horse Sleipnir). Wow! Since I've also been daydreaming about visiting Iceland, well, that's a lot of reasons to see one movie, right?

Heima was astoundingly beautiful and wonderful. The film documents Sigur Rós playing two weeks of gigs across its country. Each show is incredibly different: the concert in Reykjavík is a large, crowded outdoor event; the band plays at a community center in Kirkjubaejarklaustar at a Thorablod meal (extreme foodies take note!); a protest against a dam is the site of another show; etc.

The music was wonderful, and the movie does provide an overall context for the band's sound. At one point, one of the band members talks about the Icelandic need for "space", and SR's music definitely conveys Space (not the extraterrestrial kind, but the one of topological space, distance, area, and volume).

But moving past the music...the two sites featured in Heima most relevant for this blog are the abandoned fish factory in Djupavik and an artist's former home in Selardalur.

The band's tour journal describes the visit to the abandoned fish factory moderately well, and I'm sure that many of this blog's readers can appreciate the desire to crawl through the pipe leading to the site. (Is this how the audience entered the space?)

A detailed excerpt from the tour journal brings some intimate details:

the pipe is too small for the guitar amp to fit through into the tank and it stands outside in the grass pointing towards jonsi some metres distant. occasionally the gulls and arctic terns wheeling overhead outside are audible through an open square in the roof and these will probably be evident on the finished recording being captured by ken and biggi on the other end of the pipe.

once this is over, the band move to the factory for the first time, where they discover their gear is too tightly arranged between decaying and anomalous american automobiles in the dark concrete skeleton of dead building.

The fish factory looks like a hip nightclub in some shots, and the song's churchlike sound ends with a cacophonic burst of energy.


Performing in the abandoned fish factory. (movie still)

An internet search provides little information about the site in Selardalur, except that it is indeed a tourist destination in the West fjords area of Iceland. The concert segment is filmed at an artist named Samuel's former farmhouse. Looking at the site, I can't help but wonder how much longer that farmhouse is going to stand upright, hence GO VISIT SELARDALUR NOW!


This shot was on the screen for about two seconds, and there was no information about where it was located. (movie still)

Besides these two locations, I enjoyed two other things about the movie: the nature and audience shots. The audience at most of the shows was pretty diverse, age-wise. Senior citizens, infants, adolescents, teenagers, young adults...you name it. Everyone looks beautiful while listening to music. These concerts were community get-togethers.

The following notes reflect the nature seen in this film: strong sense of narration with the sea, waterfalls, fields, mountains, birds in caves, birds in sky, iceberg floating in water, footprints drying in the sand, landscapes of houses/boats/communities, fog & mist moving across mountains, stones, a man who makes instruments from rhubarb.

The trailer for the movie can be seen here.

These Sigur Rós videos were screened before the start of the movie:

Hoppipolla; Glósóli; Svefn-g-englar; Viorar Vel Til Loftarasa; Untitled #1 (aka Vaka).

'Echoes of Forgotten Places' DVD

As much as I love looking at urban exploration photo books, I dislike watching urban exploration videos. Or, to put it more succinctly, I anticipate disliking urban exploration videos. Often, the take that I want isn't on the video or DVD (for example, sometimes I'd like for the shot to start with the viewer approaching the building or structure, and the entrance would also be part of the segment as well) and other times, the lack of thoroughness is palpable. I don't experience these shortcomings in still photography related to urban exploration, mostly because I think of the medium as simply showing "snapshots of time".

Echoes of Forgotten Places is an intellectual love letter to urban exploration. The 43-minute DVD has none of the shortcomings listed above, because it doesn't try to recreate the joy of urban exploration firsthand. Rather, it serves as a great introduction of UE, an UE 101, if you will.

There are six chapters, each with a general-sounding title: Forgotten Places, The Record Keepers, Themes and Variations, Places of Work, To Bear Witness, and Endings and Beginnings. Footage of abandoned sites co-mingle with historical black and white film of factory work, modern color film of factory work, and interview segments with urban explorers as viewed on a television screen located in an abandoned site. Many scenes show a person walking around or taking photos as he walks from room to room. There is a lack of exploitation ("Let's talk to the oddballs who like exploring abandoned buildings!"), a rarity in most print articles written on the topic. Even the topic of ethics is addressed directly through interviews with several explorers.

There is a strong message presented, an ode to an industrial time of the past, and a respect for the abandoned sites and slap on society's wrist for not using the sites for current uses respectful of the buildings' history and aesthetics. ("We bury the evidence and build on top of it." "...saddest, most profound places I have ever explored") A historical context is provided but not really expanded upon.

I really appreciated the statement "Being undergound in a place like this tends to focus your attention rather than let your mind wander." This idea is really intriguing and important to me.

Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins provides the score, and Leesa Beales plays solo piano. The music is thoughtful and evocative, unlike the horror film music that could accompany the work.

The American-centric 1936 steel industry PR film Steel: A Symphony of Industry is one of the bonus features. (Note that this film is in public domain and can be accessed and viewed here via the Internet Archive.)

The second DVD extra is the "more typical" inclusion of an image gallery, this one including the work of 8 artists from around the world.

Urban explorers might find this video to be too much of a survey to be of much interest, but I highly recommend it for the UE novice or as an overall documentary. International urban explorers might get a kick out of identifying the unidentified places both in the doc and in the image gallery.

Shut Down in Vienna

Last night I had dinner with a friend who is not into urban exploration. She had recently traveled to Austria and found herself at the wrong museum. (She meant to take herself and her companion to another museum.) Her mistake was furtuitous, and the travellers spent over an hour in photographer Christoph Lingg's exhibition Shut Down at the Leopold Museum.

Exhibition shots of Shut Down: Industrial Ruins in Eastern Europe and the Far East can be found here. Shut Down looks like a straightforward photo exhibition, but the last installation shot is a bit confusing out of context. Are those flyers from the sites when they were operable? Is Mr. Lingg's message political? Looking at his website, it seems that his work combines portraiture and photojournalism, so it seems likely that there is a message and that this work is not just an aesthetic study.

I love the quote from Romanian poet Mircea Cărtărescu at the end of Susanne Schaeber's exhibition essay :

My occupation: ruins builder. My mission: ruins architect. My sin: ruins voyeur. Don’t ask me about forgotten places. Gather around me, open my skull and look at my brain: before your very eyes it will crumble like plaster. And its dust will be mixed indistinguishably with the dust of the ruins among which I have lived my entire life, as a lover of a harem of ruins.

My friend apologized for being unable to carry two copies (hers and what would have been mine) of the exhibition publication back to the States; she said it was too heavy. I thought she meant that the book was thick and not that rusty metal plates served as the book's cover!

Photo above by Christoph Lingg and included in Lingg's Shut Down exhibition at the Leopold Museum.