Sindi

from 03.07.2021

The factory is work. The factory is home. The factory is joy. The factory is education. The factory is politics. The factory is life.

This is how the industrial age dreamt of a rational society. Like engineers, who made production lines work with millisecond accuracy, so were carefully planned factories meant to lead to the flourishing of human communities. Such utopian experiments abound across the globe. New Lanark, Scotland. Fordlandia, Brazil. Kimberley, South-Africa. Magnitogorsk, The Soviet Union. Sindi, Estonia.

The urban tour “City of Dreams” takes the visitor on a journey of factory towns across three centuries and four continents, all hidden in different parts of Sindi. An audio guide introduces the visitor to people whose lives have been entwined with the Sindi textile factory since birth. Informational displays scattered around the town show how the same industrial currents that shaped factory towns across the world, also shaped Sindi. Did factory towns offer workers with previously unimaginable comforts, welfare, and education or did they hold their workforce in an iron grip? How were capitalist and socialist factory towns different from one another? What remains of a factory town, once the factory is gone?

Are the dreams built into factory towns fantasies… or nightmares?