If you’ve driven down Main Street in Chelsea, you might have noticed a decaying factory building just south of downtown. For decades that factory housed Federal Screw Works, but in 2005 the company shut it down. It’s been maxin’ and relaxin’ ever since, taking up space and looking all hip and run-down like that weird guy at that too-cool-for-school coffeeshop. (However, redeveloping that guy would be a lot easier than redeveloping the old factory site.)

One Sunday afternoon my editor called and wondered if I was free to join her at FSW. She said the University of Michigan was putting on some sort of event there, but she couldn’t really explain it over the phone. I don’t know about you, but I don’t get invited to abandoned warehouses very often — probably because my name isn’t Horatio Caine — so I said I’d be there.

When I arrived, I realized why she couldn’t really explain it over the phone. Here’s an excerpt from the brochure that accompanied the event:

In the collective optic, oscillating between fetishism and lament, ubiquity and monumentality, engagement and distanciation, a state of being and coming undone, the ruin has resurfaced as a site of symbolic appropriation, chimerical exploration, material contestation, and fabricated desire. Welcome to Federal Screw Works.

Later:

Can the self-reflexive cultivation of enthusiasm for the ruin help build support for its transformation; can the pluralistic reimaging of ruin help concerned constituents speculate about alternative futures for a derelict site? In consideration of these questions, Federal Screw staged an event and collective exploration, a first step in a forthcoming master plan for Chelsea Common.

Make of that what you will. To this decidedly non-academic layperson it appeared to be an art exhibition housed in a crumbling factory. It might hold more meaning to all y’all in the academic or art worlds, but I’m just a guy in the taking pictures for money world. I don’t fly in that stratosphere.

When I walked into the factory I was greeted by raucous percussion echoing through the cavernous main room. The source of that percussion? Santa. No, seriously. Santa was playing the drums. What, you don’t believe me? Here’s a picture.

You can get a sense for the level of decay the factory has suffered by the standing water on the floor. The roof, the roof, the roof doesn’t do its job very well anymore.

Here’s the whole scene. If the wall on the right side appears to be a bit newer, that’s because it is. It was hastily constructed after the original wall suddenly collapsed a few years ago.

Okay, fine, that wasn’t actually Santa playing the drums. How do I know this? Primarily because Santa is a jolly old fraud,* but also because his name was in the brochure. His name is Leo Denoyer.

*(Hey, if your Santa-believing child is reading this blog, he’s old enough to know better.)

On the left side of the above photo you can see a low wall. On the other side of that wall was a display of balloons.

This had nothing to do with barrage balloons in World War II, though that would have been a nifty historical reference. The brochure lists the balloon display as “Phytoremediation forest doppelgänger“.

A couple rooms away was a mildly disorienting display that involved optical illusions and disposable shoe covers. (The shoe covers weren’t part of the display. They actually were for covering shoes.)

When I sent the photos to my editor, I provided the following caption for the above photo: “Optical illusions: fraud for your eyes.”

There were people wandering around with cameras, but I have a sneaking suspicion I was the only oddball getting paid to take photos. Here’s one of those other camera people taking a picture of the mildly disorienting display.

The FSW factory is a very large building, and the gentleman in charge indicated they had a very limited budget for the project. This meant most of the building was simply left in its naturally dilapidated state, as seen here:

Though I may not be able to explain the event that was taking place in the building, I can tell you that I was excited to see the interior of the old FSW building. Having lived in Chelsea for 30 years now, and having watched the building slowly decay over the past six years, I’ve long been curious to see the interior of FSW. Now I’ve seen it.

…And, like few others, I’ve seen Santa playing the drums in it.

(In case you’re curious, here’s the article my editor wrote. She did a much better job of making sense of it all.)