Remixing Industrial Pasts is a collage film that explores the evolving landscape of the Minett region — the heart of Luxembourg’s steel industry — and investigates the relationship between territory, memory, and transformation, raising questions around identity and its representations.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, the discovery of iron ore deposits transformed southern Luxembourg from a rural area into a key site of European industrialization. Landscapes changed, cities expanded, and thousands of people migrated from abroad — but the boom also brought invisible hierarchies and cultural tensions. That seemingly solid world imploded when the industry collapsed in the 1970s and ’80s, leaving behind industrial ruins, social conflict, and scars across the land.
The film creates a mosaic through fragmented and poetic language in which industry, people, and landscape intersect in a visual and sonic palimpsest, uncovering overlooked narratives and challenging dominant representations of regional identity.
With no single narrative voice, Remixing Industrial Pasts relies on the rhythmic montage of archival materials — corporate films, fiction and vernacular films, documentaries, TV reports, and photographs — and on a soundtrack that generates a constantly shifting soundscape, inviting viewers to reimagine industrial heritage as a space of memory, conflict, and possibility.
COUNTRY : Luxembourg, Italy YEAR : 2023 DURATION : 23m ARTISTS, DIRECTORS : Chiara Ligi, Mauro Macella PRODUCTION : Tokonoma
Director Statement : We’ve been working on the relationship between memory, community, and territory for years. In Luxembourg, where we have developed several installations and exhibitions, we focused particularly on the Minett region, shaped by deep industrial, urban, and social transformations and long marked by migration and labor, where different cultures, languages, and destinies have intertwined.
Remixing Industrial Pasts, initially conceived as an installation for Esch2022 European Capital of Culture, was born from the desire to use sound and moving images to convey the complexity of this region’s history and the construction of its multiple, shifting identities, while revealing the power structures that decide what is remembered. The Minett has often been portrayed through an industrial epic, and our aim was to shift the gaze towards small gestures, personal memories, and silent tensions.
Through archival materials — industrial films, TV reports, documentaries, vernacular and fiction films, photographs — we built a non-linear narrative that questions dominant representations. With this film, we do not intend to offer answers but to raise questions, looking at erased landscapes, everyday lives of those who arrived seeking a better future, and identity conflicts embedded in the region’s visual heritage.
Identity is understood as a “remix”, a process made of layers and overlaps, and the film weaves industry, people, and landscape along a shifting timeline. The multi-screen installation and triptych film format evoke a palimpsest where each juxtaposition of images and sounds becomes a trace and a possible reading of what remains invisible, while the original soundtrack by Max Viale actively dialogues with the images, amplifying the emotional dimension.
Bio:
Mauro Macella is an Italian visual designer and media artist who collaborated with Studio Azzurro from 2006 to 2015 on multimedia installations and museum exhibitions in Italy and abroad. He later worked as a freelance motion designer and video editor and in 2017 co-founded the Tokonoma collective with Chiara Ligi.
Chiara Ligi is an Italian media artist, creative producer, and researcher whose work focuses on community memory, intangible cultural heritage, and social issues through participatory practices. After years with Studio Azzurro on museum and exhibition projects, she pursued her own artistic path, took part in ESoDoc – European Social Documentary, and collaborated on the films Devil comes to Koko and La Consegna. Since 2014 she has been experimenting with live cinematography in the FILM-LIVE project and co-founded Tokonoma in 2017.
Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved.
Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.
