Kombinat. Industrial ruins of the Golden Era

We kept our promise. Igloo returning patrimony collection goes on with number 2 of the series, Kombinat. Industrial ruins of the Golden Era. The album came out in the month of May 2007 and it was released in the same warm, familiar atmosphere at Carturesti bookstore, whose teahouse was actually full of people with this occasion.

The book with purple covers gathers an ample collection of novelty images: wreckage, as if it was taken from a science-fiction movie, of a world where the absurdity is so ordinary. The communist mega-structures, the colossus with clay legs which they were supposed to be the gravitation centers of a utopian economy, lay down abandoned, while man and nature find themselves helpless in front of the reconversion and recovering. Phantasmagoric towers, earth's entrails burnt in acid containers, bunkers, broken windows, pipes, concrete, bricks or an entire field covered with overalls, these are images after the war of time with the world we are living in.

Cibinus' overwhelming pictures are explained by vast essays about the industry as (Re) source and ruin of a timeless architecture (Augustin Ioan); about the ruin of the industry as a metaphor of falling into ruin (Anca Nicoleta Otoiu), or, on the other hand, about an inchoate industry, an urban reconversion (Liviu Chelcea, Gabriel Simion).

On the day of releasing, I was wondering what the target audience of this book was. The fact that the book was sold out in just a few months confirmed to me that its' target was outrun. We, the ones who lived in the times of socialist realities, feel the need not to forget our wounds and also the duty of not letting them happen again.
(Madalina Mirea)