From 11-13 September, 2019, lovers of big industrial machinery will gather at Katowice in Poland for the sixth Big Stuff conference. With the theme “Preserving large industrial objects in a changing environment”, the conference will address the future of large scale industrial heritage in the face of a rapidly changing environment, where social relations, architectural and urban design, landscape environments, mobility infrastructures, spatial functions are all being transformed, and where climate change adds another unknown to the preservation of historic buildings and machinery.

The conference welcomes heritage professionals and academics, private machinery owners, heritage volunteers and students. Registration is 200 € . To register please go to the conference website at: https://www.muzeatechniki.pl/bigstuff/

The conference will start with a tour of local industrial heritage, followed by a day of papers showcasing projects and raising new ideas for the preservation of heritage machinery. The final day will be spent working on plans for transitioning a local colliery from a working commercial operation to a heritage site. This follows the tradition of holding practical workshop sessions at Big Stuff conferences and will provide the Colliery team with ideas from an international audience, and conference delegates with the opportunity to experience idea generation and project planning for a real site at a world class level. Big Stuff particularly welcomes students and emerging heritage practitioners, as well as people working with heritage machinery in a private or volunteer capacity who are looking for ideas to take back to their own sites and projects.

For those who would like to explore more of the industrial heritage of the region before and after the conference, there is a nearby Steam Gala on the 7-8 September. We also hope to offer an optional tour to Petrila, the oldest colliery in the coal basin of the Jiu Valley in nearby Romania.

The conference presentations will be in English, and papers will be made available in both English and Polish. After the conference abstracts will be publicly available on the Big Stuff website at http://bigstuff.omeka.net/ and selected full papers will be published in a university journal.