ROUTES

Marisa González

Route 1:

This factory's history goes through 3 centuries. It is born in 1.898, like the macro-factories of the industrial development's architecture, cathedrals of the 19th Century. It dies a century later, and sees the light again as a document in the 21st Century.
This exhibition does not intend to reconstruct the life of this singular witness, this factory which produced "our daily bread", that of all the inhabitants of Bilbao until the end of the 20th Century. It's a voyage to our historical past, to our collective memory, seen through the eyes of a Bilbao factory which was witness of my childhood. Its destruction has been the origin for the idea of this work.
The 19th Century's industrial architecture was a part of Bilbao's Ría. The dominant presence of the metal industry, tall ovens and shipyards, among others, gave the city its dimension and character, which made it a basically industrial city. These great industries' product was something oblivious to Bilbao's dailiness. It was its landscape, its architecture which brought together its life. This was not the case of the Harino Panadera de Vista Alegre factory, given that what transcended in the day to day was its product. The building of the factory, its architecture, its image, passed unseen in the city's urban life, given it was hidden behind the Bull-fighting Arena.This was the most important factory, and the one with the most sophisticated technology of its kind in all of Spain. A monopoly until the mid-70's, it managed to have up to 1.000 employees, but the economic crisis and restructurings followed each other. Its monumentality made its adaptation to today's processes, requisits and market demands impossible, those which impose a concept and diversity radically opposed to the historical processes of manufacturing and mechanization. This monumentality was what destroyed it. The project The Factory comes from a visit to Bilbao, my native city, in Autumn 1998, after finding out about its immediate destruction. My first reaction was of curiosity about seeing and taking photographs of the inside, the details of something which had a daily presence in my childhood. I felt something mysterious, powerful, overwhelming. Though it had, for me, the personal weight it had for all the people from Bilbao, this factory supplied the basic food during almost the whole century, and became a part of the collective memory. It hasn't been important to me only for its production, it was placed side by side with the Bull-fighting Arena, where my father took me to see numerous corridas, and with the Franciscan Fathers' Church, where I had my First Communion and all the later sacraments. So that its physical and mysterious presence was a permanent constant. Nevertheless, I had forgotten it until it was reborn for me when its productive process had already ended.
I went on another trip just to document it, to trap it, so that my document of all that which no longer worked would stay, and in registering it, retain and contain its disappearing, the disappearing of and outdated know-how, of some artisans today function-less, displaced by the new technologies, which, though introduced as an advance, end up invalidating and annuling the production techniques and process alive yesterday, and unused in our days. When, with my cameras, I went through the isolated place, abandonned, with not just remains of the mechanization, but also of human presence, I begin to build and reconstruct its life.

Route 2:

On a light day, atypically from Bilbao, I went through the factory to register it with my camera's. I went up and down stairs of elaborate forges, I encountered immense machine halls which looked more like locomotors, the giant rolling pins to knead the dough by hand were still perfectly lined up according to the size. The scale of everything was monumental. Immense oven naves allowed me to reconstruct the situation awaiting the order for someone to move the lever or press the button so that the action would begin and everything began, even the heat could be felt, the motor's noise and the dough's smell.
I went through the spaces where the great kneading boilers rested perfectly aligned up in long rows. Among the different silos in the inside, some were huge as chapels, others like big tents. The cube-shaped artifacts, of mahogany, with white tubular canvases in the inside, were for the breathing in the yeast's fermentation process. Functioned by machines, they seemed to be impossible machines, and so sophisticated that it seemed amazing that they would have had such an elemental functioning at some moment. The manipulation and production premises were perforated and vertically communicated with slides, invisible wells, multicolored tubes which intercrossed and in which each had vertically transported from the sixth floor to the basement, all the different sorts of grain which descended from the silos to the factorys. In this process the white powder became a fermented dough to enter the ovens and go out the trucks which awaited the dawn bread to begin their route to the over five hundred sales points, be early and supply the bread before the city wakes.

Route 3:

On the last floor I found a white tiled section, windowed and luminous, empty. It was a strange space which could have belonged to a psychiatric because it only had ten numbered cells with their signs and lined up in pairs which recalled a time-less space out of the place, like sinister vertical containers for people. From this hall I exhausitvely registered overwhelmed, I went through some terraces onto the rooves. Those which were verticle to the ovens were a chimney forest, the others, were water terraces (used for thermal isolation), ponds where some plants grew, and hundreds of fish were responsible for the continuous presence of seagulls and other birds over the factory, creating a peculiar ecosystem. The walls were reflected and duplicated in these ponds, the windows, pillars, the sky and the clouds. When they demolished it, the water from the terraces flooded the Bull-fighting Arena's sidestreet, and all sized fish types were seen as they fell. The only high area with water between the sea and the mountain. From this area of difficult access, the whole city of Bilbao could be seen, upfront was the Bull-fighting Arena, almost complete, seeing half the ruedo, and the empty seat sections. The numerous railways from the North-South axis which joined the city with the rest of Spain,were also seen, on which trains passed every three minutes and the cargoes emptied their wagons filled with wheat which came from dry and sunny lands inside the silos factory. The city's surroundings filled with mountains could clearly be observed, and showed why the city was called the hole, el bocho. I remember when I lived there, I always had the city limits in mind, becuse at the end of the short streets, both the horizontal and the vertical ones, the mountain's green limit could be seen.

Route 4:

The guard kept on opening doors and closing then behind him, leading me through the labrynth, turning lights on, and in some cases torches, to illuminate the darkness of the abandonned spaces.
I didn't only trap the spaces, the objects and the machinery with the film, I also picked up maps, spare parts, tools, security and rule signs1 from the floor.
In the office wing, found the carved wooden offices, the great boardroom with a monumental wooden table, representing the power of the owners and the assistants to the board of trustees meeting, when founded at the end of the 19th Century, and throughout the whole of the 20th Century. The central space for the office workers was a large wall-less hall, grey and dark, lighted by sinister neons, where one could still breathe its history and the scent of having once been a space filled with activity and order. Given its decadent appearance, it could be observed that nothing had changed since its construction, where all of the administrative employees shared one same space, table against table, elbow aginst elbow at the large desks for four made of wood and oilcloth. The empty drawers were on the floor, where I found piles of documents, notes, wasted folders filled with documents, theoretic treatise on flour & freat from the 30´s2, reports, notary papers, letters, each section's small files, the nests each employee kept in his drawer throughout their whole lives, until the final hour of closure came, and they considered it to have no further use.
This employees froze history, held it back, kept what they believed necessary to keep, but which now only had meaning for themselves. The following generations which replaced them throughout the century also kept them with the same consideration and respect, without letting go of them, conscious of the fact that each of them was a part of the factory's history and in some way reflected whit the history of the city of Bilbao had been in the 20th Century. My fleeting pass through these offices was fascinating and frustrating at once, since I was picking up an improvised and random sellection of photographs, spare parts, opening drawers, and carving into the piles of papers which covered the floor, all in all, discovering the numerous left-overs which constantly appeared and that I wanted to posess.
In the exhausting tour of the six floors by foot, we passed through the sections of the great warehouse for the stuff kept locked up, where the objects piled up and the mountains of gadgets which had been disposed of and substituted throughout the century, remained carefully cornered by some employee who believed in recycling, awaiting some sort of use or function. Each element which drew my attention appeared in pairs, so that the need for its posession grew, flooded by the wreckless offer, overflowing and impotent, I picked up what my hands could carry, as well as those of the manager's who was collaborating. He was so surprised by my enthusiasm for the use-less, not quite understanding, though respecting it, he helped me carry and load my car to the limits, almost without light, and worried that I would end soon to start my trip back to Madrid, alone, before it was pitch dark, not before separating various boxes with those objects I could rescue and ask to be dismantled, and they sent me the silo with an inside of three and a half meter diameter I had photographed and taped in order to avoid its destruction by the excavating spades.

Route 5:

During the night, it was a micro-city. The flour and bread-producing factory had a life of its own. Its main activity had to takke place during the night. The powerful and monumental machinery worked full-strength each day of the week, mainly during the night. A frenetic activity forced the resolution of any problem, be it technical, sanitary, or human at times in which the city was parked. It had the most dissimilar jobs. The diverse reparation workshops, the well equipped dispensary with doctor and X-rays, the lab with chemists and technicians full of formulas. Transporters, sewers, cooks. The reparation workshops had careful engineers, mechanics, all working under the pressure of needing to solve the sophisticated machinery's errors and ruptures instantly. The artisan engineers and technicians were able to invent substitutions and parts for the machines to continue their production. The ingeniosity reached its peaks in order to reinvent and be able to repair a piece in an oven which had to continue working, the middle of the night. The production rhythm could not stop and leave the city bread-less. There was also an automobile fleet, with its own repair workshop for the distribution trucks. The gas pumps recalled the Western films from the 40's.

Route 6:

"Flash-backs". January 4th, 1999 Jung Frau ("mount young woman"). In one of Europes highest ranges, on the day with the highest temperature in this place's history, a blazing sun, I continue the ellaboration of the project for the interview overlooking the glaciars, sitting on the only stone not covered by the snow. It seems impossible to have been able to descend to the great bread factory's underground, in this cold and overwhelmingly white surrounding,the dark ovens, the nosie of the motors in action, imagining the personnel working full-speed during the grey Bilbao's dark nights... Thus began my childhood's reconstruction, recalling my link to the factory in destruction. The flour and bred factory became a part of the city's collective memory, not because of its physical presence, isolated from the urban life, but because it was the only one in the city to produce and supply all the bread eaten in it, until the end of the monopoly in the year 1973. The souvenir has other connotations for the children who, not having lived the war, suffered and participated in the rationing booklets with which we went to get the bread. I then lived the first samples of solidarity I can remember from my childhood, when still very small, after school, at lunch time, I would take two loaves of bread to a family friend, some houses below, who had less rationing than we did.
January 5th, again on the same white range, but now in the small observatory from where the monumentality of the area could be seen in 360o, I return to the factory to continue the reconstruction, recalling facts and planning the contents. I leave the notes and begin a walk through the funicular's ways. Screaming, an operator stops me, forbidding the pass: there was a sign written in German, I couldn't understand, he came closer to explain the reason for the prohibition, on the other side, something quite evident seeing the intertwining ways I was in. He saw me with a book in Spanish. He was Spanish as well, from the Leonese Bierzo, almost Galicia, with a deep accent and olive skin, used to the mountains' and the tongue's solitude. I talk to him, and ask him about the bread from his childhood homeland. It looked as if my question didn't surprise him, for he was very explicit, aside from his language limitations. In that surrounding, he told me that each one had a firewood oven in their home, his towns custom was of helping the nighbours, distributing the jobs among the families, sharing the cooking of the bread each 15 days, of one only magnificent, dense, dry and hard loaf. Such were the loaves I remember from when we spent the summers in Castilla y León's meseta, by medical orders in order to leave Bilbao's humidity behind and be relieved of the tuberculosis my brothers and I suffered when small. He also told me that his mother's illusion, when in town festivals, was to make bread with the same dough, but shaped like dolls, woth crown shapes to put on their heads and bracelets for his sisters. My last question was: "until when was that?". Not being certain, we supposed it was until the 60's when someone commercialized the oven and turned into a bakery. The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the funicular I had to take fark. We said good-bye and I left.

Route 7.

1. "NO SMOKING-DANGER OF EXPLOSION-SMOKING PROHIBITTED. Will be fired immediately, losing all his rights he who is found smoking in any of the factory's departments".
"SMOKING NOT ALLOWED. This prohibition dictated for hygene reasons was in all of the departments, (kneading, division, entabling, cameras, ovens, wheat wharehouses, cloth folding, boiler rooms, etc.). Not following it would be considered as a major fault by Vizcaya's work delegation, and would be sanctioned with immediate firing".
"NOTICE FOR DRIVERS. In order to facilitate a rapid exit if necessary, all the vans which spend the night in distributions hall be left with no gear fixed, and with the hand-break off. What is more, they will be placed perpedicularly to the exit doors, being the crossed linings absolutely forbidden".

2. Among the documents abandoned during the office emptying, I found a 400 page long document containing a treatise on flour and bread, which, given its out-dated language and the historical period in which it was written, becomes a peculiar and unbelievable curiosity which deserves too be fragmented and rescued. This treatise, typed, is a translation of the Italian treatise written in the 30's under the Duce's rule, by the president of the Italian fascist baker's association. The technicians and engineers used it in our countries in the years after, given the ideological y population similarity of both countries. This theoretical treatise is made up of very extense chapters on morphology, composition, social study, etc., of the grain, the flour, and lastly, a detailed document on the different processes of bread manufacturing.

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