Geography of the Pause: Doel and the Industrial Horizon

2025

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Doel is a peripheral village situated on the estuary of the Scheldt River, lying next to the Port of Antwerp. Once home to a thriving local population, it has been gradually depopulated to make way for industrial expansion. Towering over the landscape is the controversial monument to progress: the Doel nuclear power plant. Is it an archetype of sustainable development, or does it signal the onset of a harmful paradigm shift?

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In these photographs, Doel appears as a boundary marking the transition from the anthropogenic to the post-industrial. It becomes a place where the resilience of the land confronts the encroaching continuum of human-made structures. The bowels of the leaden sky turn into a canvas on which earthly elements: steel, concrete, stone. Merge and pour out exhaust in unison. There is no sense of dynamism among the cranes, transmission towers, and newly painted rusted structures; rather, they impose a slow tempo that evokes progress within the broader spectrum of transformation.

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Here, Doel becomes a landscape of pause, a concept far from empty of meaning. One wonders what remains of that distant acceleration we experience in the 21st century, made visible not through speed, but through erosion. In the space where a village once stood, we now find energy corridors, infrastructural blueprints, and outlines of latent potential.

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In this context, the term pause suggests movement in a different direction: toward slowing down. It is a call to reflect, perhaps to look anew at how visual culture captures change. In this imagery, the industrial is not just a backdrop; it becomes the body, the body of time, of history, and of unresolved tensions.