DEAD FACTORY
Kamnik, Slovenia · 2024
Audiovisual Installation & Live Performance
DEAD FACTORY
Kamnik, Slovenia · 2024
Site-specific audiovisual installation & live performance
Dead Factory is a site-specific audiovisual project created inside the abandoned former KIK industrial complex in Kamnik.
The work reflects on the decline of industrial heritage and on places that once shaped the economic and social life of entire communities, but were later abandoned and left to decay.
Through original music, film, translucent printed fabrics, light and spatial intervention, the project temporarily brings the abandoned factory back to life.
Rather than treating the industrial ruin merely as a remnant of the past, the installation transforms it into a space of memory, reflection and new artistic presence.
THREE PARTS OF THE WORK
THE LAST TRAIN
Original composition / live performance
The first part of the project is built around Simon Skalar’s original composition The Last Train.
Performed within the abandoned industrial space, the music evokes departure, disappearance and the gradual loss of a world once defined by work, production and collective memory.
THIS IS HOW IT WAS
Film
The second part is the documentary film This Is How It Was, featuring the testimony of Angela Golob, who worked at the KIK factory for thirty years.
Her personal memories connect the physical remains of the factory with the people whose lives were once closely linked to it. kamnik.si
REFORESTING INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE
Spatial audiovisual installation
The final part transforms the abandoned factory through translucent printed fabrics, original sound, light and moving image.
Organic forms and representations of nature enter the industrial architecture, creating a new temporary landscape inside a place marked by production, decline and abandonment.
The intervention raises the question of what happens to industrial spaces after their original function disappears — and whether abandoned heritage can acquire a new cultural meaning rather than simply vanish.
CONCEPT
Dead Factory is not only about the history of one factory.
The project uses KIK as a starting point for a broader reflection on abandoned industrial environments, the disappearance of working communities and the relationship between economic transformation, people and landscape.
The work seeks to reactivate forgotten spaces through art — not by hiding their decay, but by allowing their history to become part of a new experience.
CREDITS
Concept & Music: Simon Skalar
Visual Art & Printed Textiles: Irena Gayatri Horvat
Film: This Is How It Was
Location: Former KIK factory / Kreativna četrt Barutana, Kamnik, Slovenia
Premiere: 15 December 2024
Supported by: Dom kulture Kamnik and the Municipality of Kamnik kamnik.si
