R H's List: Ruined, Lost, Hidden

Duke University Press 2010. Some chapters appear to be open access.

ABSTRACT:
Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the premodern past. ...

"July 1, 1958 is remembered as Inundation Day in the region near Cornwall, Ontario. At 08:00 a controlled explosion tore open a cofferdam and four days later an area that had been home to 7,500 people disappeared under the waves of Lake St. Lawrence, part of the newly created St. Lawrence Seaway.On the Canadian side, twelve communities, some dating back to the 1700s, were affected. Following the old King’s Highway No. 2, upstream: Maple Grove, Mille Roches, Moulinette, Sheeks Island, Wales, Dickinson’s Landing, Farran’s Point and Aultsville were entirely destroyed; Iroquis was demolished and moved a mile to continue on in name; and, about half of Morrisburg – including its waterfront and most of its business district and main street – were levelled.On the American side in St Lawrence County, the community of Croil’s Island disappeared and, along Highway 37B, Louisville Landing and Richards Landing ceased to exist, and parts of Waddington were dismantled. ..."

"Louis Helbig is a Canadian aerial art photographer. He brings his unique perspective – as pilot, as artist, as thinker, as citizen – to the various stories he pursues.In his work, Louis Helbig uses the evocative power of art to create space for viewers to reflect, imagine and think for themselves. This philosophy is best evidenced in his ongoing projects, “Beautiful Destruction – Alberta Tar/Oil Sands,” and “Sunken Villages” about the communities destroyed by the St Lawrence Seaway in 1958."

Text of talk given at Apocalypse Now event in Manchester on 28 Nov 2012.

"[T]hese tunnels were made necessary by simple fact of physical geography: a palisade of hills separated L.A.'s historic core from the upstart suburbs to the west.

Beginning in the 1890s, the towns of Hollywood, Colegrove, and Sherman began attracting residents and businesses to the once rural Cahuenga Valley. Further west, Santa Monica and Venice drew tourists and pleasure-seekers to their beachside resorts. For these fledgling communities, a connection to downtown--then still the center of commercial life in the region--was vital."

Abandoned monuments from the former Yugoslavia.

"During the 1630s, Inigo Jones, by royal commission, surveyed Stonehenge and concluded that the ancient stones had remained in situ for millennia only on account of their “weight and worthlessness” (Webb & Jones 1655, via Chippindale 2004: 46). This blog-essay ruminates upon the life cycle of stone as a building material – the way in which it has both a tendency to circulate through a succession of buildings, and also an inertia that can shape and restrict future constructions and/or uses of places.
I’ve spent the last week variously in the company of heritage regulators, development surveyors and psychogeographers, so what follows draws across those divergent perspectives on ruination, reclamation and regeneration. ..."

"... In recent years, Los Angeles has worked to rediscover elements of its lost, wild geography. Activists have transformed the long-neglected Los Angeles River -- once dismissed as a storm channel -- into a 50-mile-long symbol of the promises and frustrations of Southern California environmentalism. In western Los Angeles, scientists, geographers, and other researchers have mapped in precise detail the locations of vernal pools, marshes, meadows, and other wetlands that once dotted the Ballona Creek watershed. ..."

"The trailer for Lost Rivers has been released, a film I've been looking forward to seeing since meeting Katarina Soukup, the film's producer, way back in the summer of 2010. 

'Once upon a time, in almost every city,' the film states, 'many rivers flowed. Why did they disappear? How? And could we see them again? This documentary tries to find answers by meeting visionary urban thinkers, activists and artists from around the world.' ..."

Paul Talling's photographic record of derelict London.

"... The site is obviously not taken to illustrate London at its most beautiful or most successful, the name derelict London is a memorable name for a website though not everything within this site is of derelict areas and everyone has their own definition of derelict......99% of these pictures were taken by myself during many miles of walkabouts around the great capital. After years of travelling via car or public transport I realised just how little I had seen of London. (ie just stepping back and looking at buildings and people). I've enjoyed putting this site together and will continue to add more pics. Try not to be too critical because I'm no professional photographer. Neither is this some trendy art student project..............Any places you think should be on this site? Let me know! Also info (however trivial) or stories/personal memories on any of the buildings would be appreciated. ..."

"An enormous number of artists, urbanites, and even archaeologists have begun to focus their attention on the aesthetics and materiality of ruin in a discourse commonly dubbed as “ruin porn.”  The pornography metaphor invokes the focus on a purely self-centered gaze and seeing urban and industrial ruination for sensationalistic if not purely emotional and instinctive reasons.  Some commentators are unnerved by the implication that the mostly visual documentation of ruination simultaneously shares with pornography the un-expressible and purely self-centered satisfaction of voyeuristic viewing.  Yet artist Matthew Christopher thoughtfully defends his photographic “autopsy of the American Dream” as a “sort of modern archaeology,” making a truly persuasive case for the political might of documenting urban devastation with images and archaeological analysis alike. ..."

"Numerous studies have focused on modernity’s destructive effect on traditional life- worlds, the desertion of villages and the ruination of rural areas. However, the fact that the modern condition also produces its own ruined materialities, its own marginalized pasts, is less spoken about. Since the 19th century, mass-production, consumerism and thus cycles of material replacement have accelerated; increasingly larger amounts of things are increasingly rapidly victimized and made redundant. At the same time processes of destruction have immensely intensified, although largely overlooked when compared to the research and social significance devoted to consumption and production (González-Ruibal 2006, 2008). The outcome is a ruined landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers and redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally left out of academic concerns and conventional histories.

This ruin-landscape is the topic of the current research project. Based on selected case studies of industrial ruins, abandoned fishing villages, war remains and mining sites in Norway, Russia, Iceland, Spain and the United States we want to explore how the ruins of modernity are conceived and assigned cultural value in contemporary academic and public discourses. Our research will cover three main themes: the aesthetics of waste and heritage, the materiality of memory, and the significance of things. Through these themes we want to develop theoretical arguments that help to understand why the derelict materiality of the modern to such an extent has been devalued and marginalized, but also to suggest possible means for reaffirming its cultural and historic significance."

"This website is part of a collaborative project-- a collaboration between me, you, and I hope many other people as well.




So what are we collaborating on? We're trying to find the old streams and watercourses of New York City. That means two things: first, researching and finding out what used to be there; and second, looking at what's there now, and trying to understand what the things we see now communicate about what used to be there. ..."

Text of a talk given by the blog author (a Classics teacher) to their school's sixthform Classics society.

"... Classics is ruins – it has never been anything but ruins. It confers grandeur upon the subject – they’re really old, supposedly untouched, which makes them almost sacred. Why are they left as ruins? They are a reminder of what used to be there – something has let go, but they are still there in some form, a looming presence."

"Gothic Past is an open-access resource for the study of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture. It is part of a research project in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin, which is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS). The site showcases images from three significant collections of image archives housed in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College. They include the Stalley Collection and the Rae Collection of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture: photographic images that were created and collected from the 1930s to the present day. A third archive contains the O’Donovan collection of Irish Gothic moulding profiles. These image collections have been a key primary resource for investigations carried out as part of Reconstructions of the Gothic Past, a thematic research project carried out in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College from 2008 -2011. The project research and the website have been made possible through the provision of an IRCHSS research grant."

European Review of History / Revue Européenne d’Histoire 18 (5–6), 2011.
Double Special Issue 'Antiquity and the Ruin / L’Antiquité et les ruines', edited by Ahuvia Kahane. (Paid access only)

Contributors include Catherine Edwards, Page duBois, Pietro Pucci, James I. Porter, Richard Alston, Salvatore Settis, Alain Schnapp, Jean-Pierre Vallet, Edith Hall, Andreas Wittenburg, Rüdiger Zill, Ahuvia Kahane.

Hales, S.; Paul, J. (eds), 'Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION
"The city of Pompeii has had an enormous impact on Western imaginations since its rediscovery under the ashes of the volcano that destroyed it in 79 CE. In the 250 years since excavations began, Pompeii has helped to bring the ancient world to life for everyone, from music hall audiences to gentleman scholars, and it continues to have an impact on the way in which we think about the past, and the human condition itself. The contributors to this generously illustrated volume, who include the novelist Robert Harris, in a recorded interview, investigate how Pompeii has been used in film, fiction, and art on both sides of the Atlantic over three centuries. They explore the many different ways in which Pompeii inhabits our imaginations: as ghostly relic of human suffering, romantic ruin, model of cultural inspiration, home of a distant, decadent culture, and comforting model for everyday life."

Podcast of 'The Jewish Ruin', a paper given by A. Kahane at the conference 'Civilizational Collapse: Dystopian Imaginings of the Past, Present, and Future (1880–Present)', organized by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC) at Royal Holloway University of London and held in the British Library on 1 March 2011.

"There is a distinctive Jewish relationship to the ruin, different from that in Greek and Roman and modern cultures. Whereas in Classical cultures the ruin is a flat and lost place (Troy) barely discoverable, in Jewish thought the ruin is present. The ruin carries with it the memory of the violence of its destruction. But the memory of destruction on destruction becomes a way of constructing the past. Benjamin’s Angel of History looks back on history as ruin upon ruin, and destruction on destruction. But instead of this being a series of ends, it is a fundamental means in which Jewish time is constructed. Absence is central to the story of repeated ruination that is at the centre of Jewish time. In a continuous looking backwards through the sequences of destruction, the future is a forbidden object of speculation. Yet in the continuous process of ruination there is also a continuous prospect of the emergence of the messianic moment. Redemption is in the potential of destruction."