RUINOPHILIA

by Beatriz Arcoverde

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In the first moment, I am looking for answers as to why to record in images the ruins of Olinda's beaches. What attracts us, as artists and researchers, to a mapping of the city's coastal ruins? 

 

As cultural studies theorist Svetlana Boym points out, while half-destroyed buildings and architectural fragments have existed since the beginning of human culture, ruinophilia has not. There is a historical distinction for the "ruin gaze" that can be understood as the particular optics that frame our relationship to modern ruins by raising awareness of the darker sides of progress. The ruined city is, and contemporary ruins are, attractive for historical and cultural reasons: emerging in frames of interpretation as a result of developing notions of the picturesque and nostalgic. The 'attraction' of ephemeral beauty is eroded, revealing the essential structure, whether of object or idea.

 

Ruins escape definition. It is difficult to determine the moment when buildings become ruins. Essentially, there is the question of a semantic investigation, which is also a quest of contemporary art. There is only the understanding that something that was conceived in the space of ideas and materially by "humans" has been taken up by "natural" forces, which thus blend colors and textures back into its raw, initial state. Ruins are also sites for new exploration and meaning-making.

 

As Boym also points out, "ruin" literally means "collapse" - but in reality, ruins are more about remnants and reminders and that is why they are so fascinating to us. They make us think about the past that could have been and the future that did not take place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time. Ruins "collapse" both the exceptionalism of modernity and the disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, archaeology, architecture, and approaches to the arts and humanities. Historical descriptions of ruins hitherto encompass notions of the sublime, picturesque, romantic, nostalgic, and recount with an integrality of the past, according to Boym. But today, they are also changed to blend with the cultural and psychological effects of the neoliberal economy.  

 

In the early 20th century, sociologist Georg Simmel formulated a theory of ruins that resonates with the contemporary concerns presented here. According to Simmel, ruins are the opposite of the perfect moment, steeped in potential; they reveal in "retrospect" what this epiphanic moment had in "perspective." However, ruins not only mark decay, but also point to a certain imaginative perspectivism in its hopeful and tragic dimension. Simmel saw in the fascination of ruins a peculiar form of "collaboration" between human and natural creation. 

 

The contemporary ruin gaze demands an acceptance of the disharmony and counterpointed relationship of human, historical, and natural temporality. More importantly, the current ruinophilia of which we speak about is not just a malaise, but is said to be a reflection of our inner landscapes. Ruins are in an architectural moment of transition; they have been said to be "the physical form of tragedy".

 

The theorist Walter Benjamin said that "human history is physically fused into the natural setting." In "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," Benjamin's conception of the ruin is shown as a means of exposing "the truth buried under layers of false romantic aesthetics. " And thus it provides the basis for further examination of the interrelationships between aesthetics and politics; allegory and symbol; monument and ruin.

 

Perhaps ruins are processes, rather than a state of being. According to architect Betül Demir, ruins, and images of ruins, have held a moral, emotional, and aesthetic fascination throughout history, and this is due in part to their ambiguous status as half building, half nature, but also to their unique value as physical manifestations of the destructive effects of time, and thus as representations of history itself. 

 

On Olinda's coast, from almost the banks of the Beberibe River, on the border with Recife, to the modern waterfront, where dikes hold back an advancing sea, there are remnants of a past that has almost been swallowed up. Decades ago, there were four streets that ran parallel to the horizon. On Milagres Beach, there were well-known nightclubs. Today, they are carcasses of concrete and chipped stones. And also other relics that appear from the sand, which perhaps fit the validations of archeology; pieces of tiles and structures that seem to come from a certain antiquity. Everything is mixed with the garbage from the city's daily life, a part of the coast that has been almost abandoned.

 

Ruins can also be in the eye of the beholder - they are a creative claim to be symbols of a break with the past, or, paradoxically, of continuity. Moreover, because their meaning cannot be controlled, they present a resistance to the commodification of history, which, in the art worlds, is of immeasurable value. While ruins still exist, they fulfill a critical function, asking, "what has ruined the past?" and tantalizing us with visions of the future.