
Remaining without preservation: The unfitness of Kino Rodina as zombie heritage. In Connecting with Ambivalent Heritage. T. Äikäs and T. Matila (ed.)
Bloomsbury 2024
What to preserve and how to do so are key challenges of the present. As heritage is past socially made durable, contingent elements of the present have to be cut off. Then, they are presented as something that has to be sacrificed for clarity and fixity. The question is how, and by whom, and the answer has to be found in situated, empirical cases. For instance, there is a building in Sillamäe that has been listed as heritage for twenty-three years; however, the resources to fix its forms and reduce its material instability have not been found and mobilized since. In this chapter, I examine a case of postindustrial ambivalent heritage that is not a factory, but a cinema built for its workers. Industrial activity, closely connected with modern infrastructural ideas, often came along with venues such as cinemas, theatres, sport halls, military bases, hospitals, schools and media offices. Thus, industrial heritage can also be found in sites that are related to factories only indirectly, such as electrical grids, roads and ports, but also schools, hospitals and leisure facilities, such as cinemas. Also, we can define ambivalent heritage as everything that failed to go away and remains against the grain, creating discomfort in those around. Indeed, a sense of annoyance, and even embarrassment, is associated with Kino Rodina, one that is not necessarily related to the original function of the building, or how it was constructed (mostly by war prisoners), but because of its condition of decay.