In November 2024, Andrej Kiripolsky filmed the final closure of the historic Nováky Coal Power Plant. For decades, the towering smokestack dominated the skyline of Slovakia’s Upper Nitra region, standing as a testament to post-war industrial ambition. In this video, we see a helicopter lowering a prefabricated cover over the smokestack, closing it off forever.

The closure of the plant was a provision of the 2019 EU Green Deal. Suffering from energy insecurity and economic stress, Slovakia could not negotiate exemptions as other EU member states did, and continued to phase out coal as part of the deal. A reparative tool called the Just Transition Fund was meant to help coal-reliant regions like Nováky but, in reality, little meaningful reinvestment has happened, leaving this region in an industrial, economic and energy limbo.

A Power Plant extends Kiripolsky’s ongoing engagement with industrial afterlives and landscapes in transition. The video does not frame the plant’s closure as an endpoint but as an interrupted process. The smokestack, once a symbol of coal-driven progress, is now an empty marker of an era that has not yet fully disappeared and a region that has been left behind. The power plant’s physical remnants resist erasure; they now stand as a monument to the plant’s history and legacy marking decades of labour, pollution and economic reliance.