The Spectacular City: Rotterdam, Bilbao, and Trenčín

September 26, 2025

Last night I went to an exhibition opening for the Trenčí-anian painter Juraj Toman . It was held in one of the last remaining structures of the former Merina textile factory , a recently deceased beauty of a complex that was unceremoniously plowed over in favour of a few parking lots, a Kaufland (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and not much else. While I am not calling to freeze the past, preserving history as a peon (1) to some lost glory, I am concerned about sites such as Merina and its expulsion from the urban imagination that mirrors a broader disappearance of labour, work, and collective history from cultural representation. I have been asking around and talking to locals: when people think of Trenčín, what comes to mind? Nearly all of them said, irrespective of age, that their city is tightly connected to the manufacture and production of textiles and fashion. Throughout the ČSSR , Merina was a leading source of fabric for various industries. Even today, years after Merina was smashed to dust ( this happened twice: first in the 1980s, when the bulk of the facility was destroyed, and then the remaining rumps finally eliminated by a private developer in 2019 ), people still associate their city with the textile industry. And yet, there is zero material reference of this past; it only exists as a memory, some fragments of past association and probably, in the eyes of youth, an inherited memory (and yet they still associate with that memory). Merina was. It is not.

This is nothing new; Trenčín is not a nefarious actor. I can think of my former hometown of Rotterdam, which, to me, is no better than Houston or Dubai, an urban environment seeking spectacle first and foremost, the manufacture of image over reality. Trenčín, and Rotterdam, are exemplary landscapes that once bore witness to industrial history and class struggle and opted instead to sanitize and aestheticize themselves for middle-class consumption. This is no quarrel against economic progress, we all love Levi’s, but I do lament the way such progress is plowed asunder. It is, to some extent, an erasure of labour through a re-manufacture of a sanitized past that never really existed, a chintz reproduction that is barely proximate to its reality.

Allan Sekula wrote and photographed all about this. In his work (texts and photographs) about the Guggenheim Bilbao, he noted the irony of such a spectacle built on the city’s past of shipbuilding, steel, and militant unions. Its future, reimagined by the extractive and exploitative wealth of the Guggenheim, is instead repurposed by global finance in favour of luxury tourism and symbolic capital. The strike is struck from memory, and the factory becomes a mausoleum for investment — er, art. Rotterdam, Bilbao, Trenčín, each in their own peculiar way, are like funeral homes, embalming the industrial past and put on display, stripped of any meaningful history.

Allan Sekula, Bilbao, from TITANIC’s Wake

1999/2000 © Estate of Allan Sekula

Oh my, I am getting bleak! But this city is just another participant in the restructuring of global capital — it’s not special in this case — where cities compete for visibility in the world system regardless of their size and importance. They do so not by making things, but staging themselves for the consumption of spectacle. I mean, I could probably write a whole second dispatch on this stupid museum… (2) but I won’t.

Anyway, I’m back at my unofficial HQ, Coffee Sheep, and as I write the cafe keeps filling up and up and up. The din is now a noise, a total cacophony of Friday night. It’s nice. I look around and in here there’s a somewhat cross-section of the city, albeit it skews youthful (I won’t mention the most rudest salespeople I ever encountered today at a shop; I doubt they even know this place exists, but that’s another story) but they are, for the most part, from here. Merina is a part of them, even if they’ve never ventured out that way. I think of Sekula, again, (always) and his idea that the public only ever get to have a “heritage” version of themselves and their built environment. Industry has been off-shored, or razed in favour of private development, the expansion of capital (for others), hidden from view, ignored for a castle, forcing eyeballs to look in one direction, which, always, is spectacle. Cities — Rotterdam, Bilbao, Trenčín, all of ‘em — in this day and age are not manufacturers anymore of stuff ( that’s reserved for the forgotten hinterland, well beyond the domain of the city ), but they re-manufacture themselves through the aestheticization of obsolescence: labour history and all its complicated, dirty histories are repurposed into a consumable image and, ideally, aligned with the circuits of finance and tourism.

Hello, mayor 😬!

(1) This is probably not the right word, but it sounds right.

(2) Part of my ire directed at this museum is not at the museum’s idea, but its execution. I literally used to live across the street and remember the vibrant, grassroots, local community that once thrived there, forced out and turned into a spectacle with a dumb stainless steel staircase that took years to build. And it goes nowhere. It really bugs me and, in my opinion, is indicative of the kind of striving city Rotterdam is; in my view, the city of workers, labour, logistics, and industry is displaced in favour of an image of such a past.