This is a former leather factory. It was founded in the late 1910’s and its buildings have been built in several phases between the 1940’s and 1960’s. It first declared bankrupcy in 1997 and closed for good in 2003 after which it has been abandoned.
This is the prelude for one of the most personal posts in this blog so far. Perhaps the most personal since the story with The Place Where My Nightmares Were Made.
In recent years I’ve been wondering a lot about one question. If you let a child express themselves, can you guess, what they want to do with their lives when they’re adults?
Back when I was in kindergarten in the early 1990’s and we’d go on a holiday with my family, I would spend weeks after our return drawing autobiographical comics. I managed to complete I am in Spain, parts I-VI and I am in Helsinki parts I-IV. I apparently wasn’t satisfied with the second series, as I began it all over again only to state after part two that I had ran out of memory. My most detailed drawings were always about cars or buildings, people were very crudely drawn.
A few years later I was in primary school. We were visiting a family friend, who had a daughter about my age. I was 7 or 8 when we decided to start making newspapers using WordArt (90’s kids remember). She made the horoscopes, pet news and entertainment, I wrote about crimes, politics and polls, as I was already reading daily newspapers at that age. We printed the newspapers until the printer ran out of ink (back then it was extremely expensive) and sold them to our parents.
Flash forward to the date of this picture in August 2020. I am a foreign affairs journalist in a nationwide newsroom, who drives around the country in a carefully selected car model photographing architecture and abandoned buildings. Doesn’t it really look like I had this coming as a kid?
Now what does this have anything to do with the factory in the picture?
This is the village our family friends lived in, the very same place, where we made the newspapers more than 20 years ago. They moved away in 1997 or 1998 and I haven’t visited since except for one time. But I still remember that building. I was really fascinated by it as a child, when it was still functioning as a factory.
And I sure would like to visit it one day.