In the first few years after the end of World War II, the newly established Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia mobilized masses of people to build new industrial plants, among them Litostroj in Ljubljana, whose construction was depicted in several works by Tone Kralj.
At the time of its construction, Litostroj was the largest factory in Slovenia and a symbol of Yugoslav industrialization. Kralj’s painting shows it being built on a barren field in the middle of the Šiška district. Despite the noticeable skepticism and fatigue on the faces of the builders, the monumentality of the foundry and machine factory reflects the optimism about industrial progress that was prevalent at the time.
Similar factories were built all over Yugoslavia, with visible consequences today in the pollution of the environment, including in Ljubljana. The city lies in a basin, and polluted air lingers over it, with the industries built in the postwar era contributing to its creation. There is no trace of these effects in Kralj’s painting, which gives no hint of the long-term impacts of such construction. Today, Litostroj is a major noise and emissions polluter in the northern part of the city, where the concentration of particulate matter in the air is increasing. In the years after its construction, the workers who had built the factory and then went to live in the new apartment buildings next to it were the people most exposed to emissions and noise. The long-term and often invisible consequences of pollution, mostly affecting the lower classes, are what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” In this context, Litostroj and postwar industrialization represent aggressors whose impact is still felt today.
