Pioneer Railway
The Pioneer Raiway was a 4 km long narrow-gauge railway built in 1948 by pioneers and youth work brigades. Pioneer railways were intended as educational toys to strengthen children’s love of technology, responsibility, diligence and hard work, to prepare them for life in society and to provide them with entertainment. In 1954, it was closed down, its remains dismantled and relocated, and the line forgotten. In 2019, the Nonument Group carried out an intervention on the route of the former railway on the occasion of National Youth Day.
Nonument Group
The Nonument Group is a multidisciplinary artist collective founded in 2011. Starting as a research group focusing on hidden, abandoned, unwanted or otherwise forgotten 20th century monuments, architecture and public spaces, the group has since carried out several artistic interventions in public spaces.
Nonument
The term nonument describes architecture, public spaces and monuments that have been given new meanings by time and changing conditions. Nonuments are hidden, abandoned, unwanted or forgotten spaces, architecture and monuments of the 20th century that have lost or significantly changed their symbolic meaning through processes of social and political change.
Register of Nonuments
The Register of 120 nonuments at www.nonument.org is a living archive of continuous research on twentieth-century spaces whose meaning has radically changed. Rather than a reference for particularities and architectural styles, the register is created as a tool to study changes in public space, to examine changes in the perception of architecture and the role of politics in a space where dominant narratives are woven. It gives special space to the testimonies collected in the archive in the form of sound recordings.
www.nonument.org