How can we not think of ruins amid the political and social tearing apart we are experiencing, haunted by catastrophe? A theme dear to the photographic imagination, ruins have asserted themselves as protagonists and keys to interpreting the urban context since the 19th century. Not only because they have been repeatedly depicted, but also because no art has been as decisive as photography in sanctifying belief in the future.
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Until the late 1920s, the image of the ruin was not a forewarning of the end, because it retained the power to make present what is alive in death, as Walter Benjamin wrote in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. It nurtured an idea of the future, even if that future was projected into a past that never was. But today, faced with daily collapses, fires that consume heritage, and ecological and political disasters that swallow lives and bury landscapes, what prevails is a sense of catastrophe, of a time that will have no afterward. Brazil’s National Museum, Notre-Dame and Brumadinho are some signs of this new time of catastrophes dominating our present.
It appears in apocalyptic tones, as in artist Alex Flemming’s new series, whose exhibition opens June 15 at the Kirche am Hohenzollernplatz (Hohenzollernplatz Church) in Berlin; or in skeptically disenchanted ones, as in Ana Ottoni’s photographic essay on São Paulo’s brutalist ruins (featured in this post).
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In this context, artworks that draw on images themselves to deconstruct the soothing meaning photography has acquired under the influence of networks gain relevance. This happens in Disruptions (2015–2019), by Palestinian photographer Taysir Batniji, based in France since 1994. On view at MAC VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine) through August, the series consists of 86 screenshots of video calls with his mother and family, who live in Gaza, where he was born and raised but has been unable to return since 2006 because of the Israeli blockade.
Pixelated, corrupted and fragmented, the images bear all the marks of contemporary interruptions: exile, nomadism and displacement — above all social and emotional. They resonate with glitch, the aesthetics of communicational noise and technological ruin. It acts as a counterpoint to linear visions of progress and allows us to rethink technology from less euphoric and conservative viewpoints, contextualizing it in relation to perspectives of instability and social disorganization.
Read the full text at https://revistazum.com.br/colunistas/futuro-das-ruinas/