Decommissioning the Twentieth Century artist commission
How to Say Goodbye to a Power Station is a socially engaged art project by Dana Olărescu, created in response to the decommissioning of mid-to-late 20th-century energy infrastructure. Working with communities connected to a power station facing closure, Dana uses tools such as posters, prompts, workshops and shared conversations to capture the emotional and social dimensions of decommissioning.
Rather than treating decommissioning as a purely technical or economic process, the project foregrounds the human experience: workers, local residents and young people whose lives, family histories and futures are intertwined with the power station. Through collective gathering, writing and image-making, participants explore grief, pride, anger, relief and uncertainty — the mixed feelings that arise when a landmark employer and landscape feature is shut down.
The work reframes decommissioning as a moment of transition, memory and possibility. It asks:
How do we say goodbye to infrastructures that have shaped our identity and sense of place?
What stories risk being lost when sites are demolished or sealed off?
How might communities imagine new futures for these landscapes?
By turning questions of closure into an opportunity for shared storytelling and speculative thinking, How to Say Goodbye to a Power Station challenges dominant narratives of decline and invites communities to be active co-authors of post-industrial futures.
Further Reading – Creative Decommissioning Report
This project sits within the wider Decommissioning the Twentieth Century programme, which spans multiple industrial sites. For a fuller picture of how creative practice has been used to explore power station closures and industrial transitions, see:
Creative Decommissioning (PDF, 31 May 2022) – by Professor Ceri Morgan and colleagues:
Download Creative Decommissioning report