In celebrating the renovation of a derelict church in inner city Chicago, Nike’s recent advert “The Church” unapologetically elevates the brand to God-like status.

Earlier this year sports brand Nike released an advert documenting the transformation of a derelict church in inner city Chicago into a basketball court. While it’s no doubt a valuable refurbishment and clearly useful to the local community, the advert betrays several underlying problems with the adaptive reuse project.

The advert begins with a young teenager explaining that “Chicago is my home, where I grew up all my life. There’s a lot of gun violence and stuff, it’s not really safe to play basketball outside.” His account is then supported by clips from various local news reports describing the epidemic of gun violence in inner city Chicago. As another teenager explains, people get killed playing basketball outside, “I don’t want to be one of those people” he says.

With the scene set, text appears over shots of dilapidated buildings (presumably those in the surrounding neighbourhood): “In inner city Chicago, a condemned church was given new life, a place for Chicago’s youth to restore their faith in community”. The advert treats inner city decline and gun violence as a given, spending no time dwelling on their causes. Instead, it jumps right into introducing the project that will, in its own small way, help solve the problem.

Outsourcing as a Cause of Inner City Decline

And yet, it is not a stretch to say that brands like Nike have had a hand in such inner-city decline. Prior to the 1970s most US garment companies had their manufacturing operations located in industrial cities like Chicago. Whole communities were built around such industries and whole communities were destroyed when they left to set up shop in other parts of the world where workers were cheaper and less organised.

Nike was one of the early adopters of this practice of outsourcing. Its success led other companies to follow suit. Now, like many other American brands, Nike’s US-based factories account for a fraction of its global workforce (in Nike’s case less than 1%). Aside from its devastating impact on formerly industrial cities in the US, outsourcing has also had the effect of separating people’s consumption habits from the underlying production process, thus enabling the miserable sweatshop working conditions in factories elsewhere in the world to go mostly unnoticed.

Take me to Church

Throughout the advert, “Take me to Church” plays on the soundtrack, beginning with its composer, Hozier, singing gospel-style the words “Amen! Amen! Amen!”. As the advert cuts to scenes of the renovated church, the song reaches its euphoric chorus:

Take me to church
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life

If this song and the name of the project hadn’t already convinced you of the sacred connotations this advert is attempting to impose upon the project, we later hear from local Reverend Ricardo Bailey, who explains that the church may have been made into a basketball gymnasium but it’s still a church building: “It’s a place where people gather together and share their hopes and dreams. And who knows, what kind of seeds are going to be planted in the lives of those young people when they leave from that place.”

Nike as God

But if this court is the church then surely our God is Nike. Like a God, Nike’s presence in the advert is distant, although there are three subtle clues of their benevolence. Firstly, the advert talks to Heter Myers from Nike Communications, who says that the Church is intended to inspire the next generation “to go after their crazy dreams”. Secondly, all the kits and equipment are produced by Nike. And thirdly, a Nike swoosh merged with “The Church” briefly appears at the beginning and end of the advert. None of these clues, however, tell us definitively that Nike is responsible for the refurbishment.

However, unlike the Christian God who first taketh and then giveth away, Nike taketh and then giveth away. Which is to say, it’s only after its economic practices have ravaged inner city America that the brand has deigned to give a small thing in return. The Church is a good renovation, but it pales in comparison to the damage the company has caused over the past several decades.

A timeless atmosphere defines the dreamlike setting, located somewhere in a rural landscape in Russia. The ruins of a church emerge like landmarks on the horizon. Sprawling vegetation has gradually overgrown the fragmented remains of the building. However, there is more to see: the appearance of this derelict church is complemented by abstract modernist forms. A large area painted black marks one of the façades of the church and renders the actual composition of materials and forms illegible. Yet another intervention includes various three-dimensional black spheres that seem to hover weightlessly above the neglected remains of the building.

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These lightweight structures were created by Russia-based visual artist Danila Tkachenko. In his most recent project titled MONUMENTS, Tkachenko artistically appropriates various former orthodox churches that were abandoned during the Russian Revolution in 1917.

At the end of the 16th century, the Russian Orthodox Church founded its own patriarchate in Moscow. However, when the Communists took power in 1917, religion was declared an enemy of the state. Of the nearly 80,000 Orthodox communities that still existed in 1917, only about 3,000 remained thirty years later. Today, the separation of church and state has been laid down in the Russian constitution of 1993. The reality, however, often seems to be the opposite. For instance, in the year 2000 Vladimir Putin’s election as president was celebrated in a church ceremony.

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“We come up with new interpretations and build additional structures to manipulate images of past history”

Especially in relation to political regimes, the artist Tkachenko points out that “every single one of us is individually inclined to exploit images of the past for the sake of our current needs or future goals.” For this purpose, according to Tkachenko, we design “new interpretations” and build “additional structures to manipulate images of past history.” For MONUMENTS, Tkachenko makes the process of appropriating historical images visually and physically perceptible. By concealing, supplementing or altering the ruins of Orthodox churches, he manipulates their image. By doing so, he asks how a society perceives its historical heritage. Tkachenko calls this undefined space the “area between fact and fiction”.

With MONUMENTS, Tkachenko shows that an artistic interaction with historical heritage is one possible way of becoming witness to historic events. For his project, he approaches abandoned Orthodox churches in a sensitive way as existing testimonies of Russia‘s multi-layered history and identity.

Two landmarks in the Belgian City of Liege offer a cautionary tale about the superficial nature of future-focused urban development.

Arriving by train to the Belgian city of Liege brings visitors into contact with a remarkable central station, whose steel and glass canopy makes for a truly exciting entry into the city.

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Designed by architect Santiago Calatrava and complete in 2009, the station has been widely praised for its impressive fusion of cutting-edge engineering and sculptural finesse, with no walls and a generally effortless flow from the platform to the station square. It’s a fitting contemporary (high-speed) counterpart to the monumental 19th century stations that defined the first great age of rail, giving the visitor that same sense of awe at the possibilities offered by inter-city train travel.

Amidst all this spectacle, it’s easy to think you’re entering a city that’s fully in the throes of future-focused urban development. Yet beyond the boundaries of the station square another landmark rather obscures this picture: the Église du Sacré-Coeur de Cointe.
You can easily make out the church’s green copper-clad dome from the station square: stood looming on top of the hills that rise steeply above the station’s rear exit, it accompanies a tower that forms part of the city’s Inter-Allied memorial to the First World War.

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“It is derelict”

From this vantage point, the church looks like a proper landmark. So, it comes as a surprise to find that it’s nowhere to be found on the lists of places to see. As you get closer it becomes increasingly clear why: the monument is derelict. On top of that, covering one whole side of the building is a massive mural, painted by Bonom (the Belgian Banksy) featuring dozens of giant doves. For the unprepared, seeing the mural for the first time is quite a shock, a remarkably audacious desecration that invariably prompts questions as to how on earth someone was able to get away with such a daring piece of graffiti.

“The whole sorry saga”

Building of the church began in the late 1920s, but lack of funds meant construction ceased in the mid-1930s before it could be completed. While enough of it was finished for it to be consecrated in 1937, it was still not complete before the Second World War began. Continued lack of funds meant that it was never fully completed. A quick scan of the news articles on the church convey a recent history of successive abortive attempts to find funds to properly complete the building, or at least achieve some closure on the whole sorry saga.

“The fate of Église du Sacré-Coeur de Cointe says something about how superficial urban development can be.”

This is where the mural comes in. In 2014, with the centenary of the beginning of the First World War fast approaching, the church’s concrete cladding began to fall off, exposing the red bricks beneath. Since celebrations were set to occur at the nearby Inter-Allied memorial, the government hastily enlisted Bonom to paint exactly 100 doves on the church, in paint that can be washed off at any time. The temporary fix has now remained there for almost five years.

The fate of Église du Sacré-Coeur de Cointe says something about how superficial urban development can be. Sure, a city can gladly find €300m to build a beautiful, shiny new station, especially if it helps beat a new path toward hi-tech industry. But all the while, just down the road, it can also leave a monumental piece of cultural heritage to rot.

With its weathered, cracked and broken façade, this abandoned church reminds us that Liege, and the wider French-speaking region of Wallonia in which it is situated, have a history as well as a future. Like many other post-industrial towns, this is a history of industrial decline and disinvestment. No amount of development can obscure the deep wound this inflicts upon a city.