Arenberg: from a coal mine to a film and arts hub

Rene Lukasiewicz, 78-year-old former miner, who rose to managerial rank later in his career, sits quietly in a sprawling meeting room of the non-operational Arenberg coal mine, near Lille region of Northern France.

His broad frame and muscular hands reveal his years of hard work and arduous life. The carbon-laden air of the mine has triggered fibrosis in his lungs, a serious medical condition.

The mine in which he worked all his life has been shut for the last 25 years as producing coal became unprofitable by 1990s in the region.

But Lukasiewicz is not bitter because the mine is getting a new lease of life.

The mining shafts no longer bring up coals from depths of the earth but the 32-acre mining complex is rapidly getting transformed into a centre for filmmaking, digital and audiovisual arts with €6.5 million investment from European Union and another €14 million investment from local and state authorities.

The site is also a French heritage monument and after July 2012, a designated World Heritage Monument by Unesco.

Lukasiewicz says he is more than happy that the buildings housing the mining infrastructure would be transformed into auditoriums, digital media labs and film sets. “We have managed to preserve this site. It is a memorial for our children and grand children and it exemplifies our struggle,” he said.

“In 1985, when we realised that the mine would be closed, we fought hard to keep it. There was a law which said that the mine had to be shut and all other buildings and infrastructure had to be bulldozed. But we wanted to keep the mine because great work was not only below the ground but also on top,” Lukasiewicz said.

For the last 25 years the mine has been a popular site with many French and Canadian filmmakers.

Celebrated French film Germinal , based on a novel by Emil Zola, was shot around the Arenberg mine. Chief Project Manager, Catherine Prouveur of the Arenberg Creative Mine Project, said that the site is undergoing a metamorphosis from a coal mine to a hub for filmmaking and digital arts.

Reconstruction work started in April 2013 with €20.5 million investments for developing the site and the first phase would be operational by September 2015, she said.

Many such industrial sites around Lille region of Northern France are getting transformed. The region is shaking the stupor of industrial slowdown, which has afflicted it since 1970s and 80s. Old mines and spinning mills, which represented Industrial economy, are getting transformed into technology parks and innovation centres.

However, given the French taste for art and architecture, the local business houses are not simply razing the old buildings and putting up new glistening towers. The old external shells of the buildings are maintained and reinforced but the internal structures are rebuilt for modern use.

TCS, the Indian IT giant, already has an office in Euratechnologies High Tech Cluster, which is closer to the city of Lille.

This office is located in a building, which was a closed cotton mill. Sales Director for TCS in France, Nicolas Sohier, said the building used to house a mill with 5,000 workers but due to international competition French textile industry started shutting down by the 1970s.

But, 20 years ago, the local government thought that IT would be the new engine of growth and started taking steps to train people in that field.

Today, the companies are getting new talent from the universities due to that decision, he said.

Sohier said that TCS zeroed in upon the building as it had an IT ecosystem with skilled manpower and where companies could network with other companies.

Euratechnologies is an incubator for companies with a headcount of less than 10 on one hand and on the other, there are big companies such as TCS, Microsoft and IBM.

The writer was in France at the invitation of L’Agence de Promotion Economique du Nord-Pas-de-Calais