Telling Ruins (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Contracorriente, 2010
How can we explain that at the center of the project of modernity lies a pile of ruins? Modernity, with its wars, its mechanized visions of progress, its consumption, is nurtured by destruction, the constant demand to keep constructing, to keep looking ahead, propelled by its storm. Ruins invite us to remember, and that ethical imperative becomes a political standpoint in Latin America. From the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu and the Aztec ruins swallowed by the modern landscape as in el Templo Mayor and Tlatelolco, to commemorative sites such as Chile's Villa Grimaldi and its hidden bodies in ruins, that remind us of the many desaparecidos in Latin America, ruins have always a story to tell. Enjuto Rangel 398 Jean Franco suggests that contemporary Latin American reality challenges us to reconsider our notions of community, identity and subjectivity "from fragments and ruins" (The Decline and Fall 190). In response to this quote, Michael Lazzara and Vicky Unruh present their collection of essays, Telling Ruins in Latin America, as one that "forcefully argue(s) that ruins are dynamic sites… palimpsests on which memories and histories are fashioned and refashioned. Ruins, for these authors, do not invite backward looking nostalgia, but a politically and ethically motivated 'reflective excavation' (Unruh, "It's a Sin" 146) that can lead to a historical revision and the creation of alternative futures" (Lazzara and Unruh 3). The ruin as a palimpsest of sorts reveals the multiple cultural connections and intertextual allusions prevalent in most of the texts, films, performances, architectural and archeological projects, and cultural debates discussed here. The contributors' analysis and critique of progress reside in how "ruins challenge modernity's imposed narratives" (8), and one of the central premises of the book is that the ruin as "a merger of past, present, and future, and as a material embodiment of change-offers a fertile locale for competing cultural stories about historical events, political projects and the constitution of communities." (1) Lazzara's and Unruh's introduction serves as an excellent theoretical backbone for the volume, and it clearly sets the tone for the central questions and issues that connect the multiple, diverse chapters of Telling Ruins. The book is structured into four parts. The first one, "What Are We Doing Here? Ruins, Performance, Meditation," intelligently incorporates and tackles the ethical dilemmas posed by cultural products that ruminate on ruins, like Telling Ruins itself. The authors of these essays distance themselves from an aesthetics of ruins that aims at a restorative project and its preservationist agenda, in dialogue with Svetlana Boym's definitions of a restorative versus a reflective nostalgia. Diana Taylor's "Performing Ruins" is a superb way of initiating the reader, almost taking you by the hand, into this journey through various ruined sites, from the glorious ruins of Mexico's el Templo Mayor and the dark ruins of Chile's Villa Grimaldi to the renovation ruins of Colombia's art group Mapa Teatro and their performance Testigo de las ruinas on the destruction of El Cartucho, an
Ruins, Bodies, and Other Palimpsests: Performative Memory in Francesc Torres' Installations
2015
In the last decade, contemporary ruins have awakened great interest in the different social and human sciences fields, broadening the very concept of the ruin and its meaning, both aesthetically and politically.1 The wastelands on the outskirts of cities, as well as abandoned factories, hotels or public shelters, have become the motive of an inquiry that affects key dichotomies in the study of contemporary culture, such as those of memory and history, trauma and oblivion or nature and culture. When these new ruins are portrayed in the arts and literature, they force us to rethink the possibilities of converting the rubble and wastelands into an object of contemplation or the possibilities of beautifying processes of abandonment and degradation that often reflect complicated social circumstances. In this article, I aim to show how the artistic portrayal of dilapidated settings can have great political potential and contribute to defining what I refer to as a performative memory. To b...
Before, During, and After the Ruins: Jorge Tacla’s Hidden Identities
Metales Pesados, 2016
In this essay I examine the ways in which Jorge Tacla, in his recent series of paintings "Hidden Identities", builds a narrative on the psychological complexities that emanate from the relationships between mind and space, making visible the development of the humankind from the blurring dualities of victim and victimizer, aggressor and attacked, or any other possible binaries. In so doing, I also examine recurring concerns within Tacla’s art and thinking, such as the representation of memory, history, spatiality, painting, and human suffering.
How can we explain that at the center of the project of modernity lies a pile of ruins? Modernity, with its wars, its mechanized visions of progress, its consumption, is nurtured by destruction, the constant demand to keep constructing, to keep looking ahead, propelled by its storm. Ruins invite us to remember, and that ethical imperative becomes a political standpoint in Latin America. From the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu and the Aztec ruins swallowed by the modern landscape as in el Templo Mayor and Tlatelolco, to commemorative sites such as Chile's Villa Grimaldi and its hidden bodies in ruins, that remind us of the many desaparecidos in Latin America, ruins have always a story to tell.
Strictly speaking, a haunting is distinct from memory, for it is not reducible to narratives articulated linguistically; it is, rather, an affect created by an absence that exerts a hard-to-articulate, non-discursive, yet positive pressure on the body, thereby turning such absence into a physical presence that is felt and that thereby affects. Most places are haunted by absences one way or another, and with different levels of intensity … the haunting that defines la frontera is that this is a region without Indians that nevertheless is not indifferent to their absence, and that has not fully broken away from this absence because of a twofold, ongoing, presence: the material debris that once defined the frontier and the " indigenous blood " of its population.
Joy Amidst the Ruins: Gabriel Levine's Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings
Theory and Event, 2020
I write from Canada. As Levine, similarly situated, observes, these are lands marked by “the dispossessions of colonial modernity” (18) and “the hurt of history” (5), including often-occluded legacies of slavery on Canadian soil and associated contemporary racisms. Although our relationships in Canada, like other settler colonial states, are marked by “white supremacy, genocide and lived oppression” (7), Levine follows anti-racist and Indigenous scholars in arguing that the present, like the past, is not exhausted by these dynamics. Instead, diverse Indigenous and racialized peoples challenge these relationships of domination, as they “retell stories, learn languages, and reclaim everyday life practices, in the service of creative flourishing in the present” (18). In this book, Levine acknowledges persistent racist, colonial injustices and continuing uprisings against them such as Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and the Standing Rock protests. Yet his focus is neither on structural inequities nor the more spectacular, mediatized challenges to them. Instead, Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings explores everyday, often under-the-radar vernacular expressions of renewed artistic traditions, emphasizing how these playful reinventions of the past may presage emancipatory futures.
Around Ruins: Some Notes on Feminist and Decolonial Conversations in Aesthetics
Arts
Although using different strategies, Portuguese artists Mónica de Miranda and Filipa César make us think about and reflect on the ruins of the Portuguese ‘empire’ but also on the ruins—and the remains—of European colonialism and its patriarchal backbone. Their work opens the possibility of discussing aesthetics from feminist and decolonial perspectives, departing from the category of ‘ruins’ and considering the many ways through which these ruins and their multiple inflections contribute to the creation of potential affective geographies and memories.
In this chapter, I will be walking through contemporary ruins such as empty buildings and abandoned airports. I will also be dealing with fragments of the lives of the numerous others who have recently been in the vicinity of these buildings and of ourselves, leaving behind them material fragments such as musical instruments, toys, bicycles, and clothes, but also snapshots of their faces, voices and odours. I will be doing this in the context of cultural and critical responses triggered by the so-called refugee crisis. These responses are numerous: one can think of initiatives such as the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN 2019) which, as explained on the homepage of its website, has been conceived of as "an independent organization of cities and regions offering shelter to writers and artists at risk," or initiatives undertaken by institutional actors such as curators, galleries and museums, but also grassroots initiatives. The crisis has embedded itself, leaving an ongoing mark, in such diverse initiatives, often above and beyond their conflicting positions