Introduction: Ruinas modernas: untimely spaces and multiple temporalities in modern and contemporary Spanish culture

Ruins and ruination have long been a source of fascination and speculation, but they hold more relevance than ever in our contemporary moment. As Gareth Williams argues, the current state of contemporary globalization should force us to confront the ongoing ruination “of the inherited modern (bourgeois, and therefore also proletarian) political and cultural forms – subject, history, nation-state, ‘People’, fraternity, equality, liberty, etc.” (2021, 65). It is only by facing this cultural and conceptual ruination that we might uncover the crisis of limitations, decontainment, and “modernity’s ongoing perishing”, which Williams defines as,

a continual immanence of mortality, as an ontological challenge that, thanks to the rationalizations of contemporary technocapitalism, comes at us and to us as the living demise of the Enlightenment justifications of a system of guarantees and representation, freedom, rights, citizenship, subjectivity, economic and human development, the legitimacy of the Westphalian interstate system, etc. The list is endless. (2021, 99)

With the aim of bearing witness to such varied forms of modern ruination, this monographic issue explores “ruins” as material and conceptual instances of exposure, vulnerability and openness. In a depleted present defined by an overwhelming sense of catastrophe and our inability to envision a/the future, ruins compel us to think. Through an engagement with the conceptual productivity of ruins, this collection of essays attempts to reimagine Iberian cultures and their futures. In particular, we use the untimely character of architectural and economic ruins to challenge the modern teleology of progress, of the assemblage of the past, present and a recovered sense of multiple futures in modern and contemporary Spanish culture.

Every ruin is an unwieldy formation of materiality, of the ideological, economic, artistic and community-building programs that brought about that physical reality, and of the historical events and natural forces that have shaped each ruinous space. Unlike a finished building on the day of its dedication, a ruin is not a finished product, but a work in progress. Thus, caught in time between its past and its many undetermined futures, a ruin establishes a strange atemporal juncture of both pessimism and promise. In this sense, ruins are sites of dispossession and absence that also conjure up multiple alternative futures. As Andreas Huyssen argues, “real ruins of different kinds function as screens on which modernity projects its asynchronous temporalities” (2010, 19).

At the center of our consideration of these screens, constructions and projections, we find the sense of catastrophe conjured up by Walter Benjamin in his essay “On the Concept of History”, in which Paul Klee’s angel keeps his eyes fixed on the ruins as he is carried away “by the storm blowing from Paradise” (2003, 392). Commenting on this image and elaborating on our understanding of ruins, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle write that:

Ruin gazing always mirrors the terror in the angel’s wide-open eyes. It always involves reflections about history: about the nature of the event, the meaning of the past for the present, the nature of history itself as eternal cycle, progress, apocalypse, or murderous dialectic process. And as Benjamin – who transformed what Arendt called the “shock of experience” into an enduring and enduringly beautiful image – knew, the aestheticization of ruins is unavoidable. (2010, 1)

Apparently, according to Hell and Schönle, “to be seduced by the beauty of ruins is an experience as inescapable as it is old” (2010, 2). Similarly, such aestheticization of ruins does not seem to have a geographic specificity. Juan Ramón Jiménez’s mention of “gloria de ruina” in Lírica de una Atlántida implies a uniquely irresistible aesthetic experience (Jiménez 1999, 23). Meanwhile, Luis Cernuda, in that devastating indictment of progress in his poem “Otras ruinas”, criticizes modern city life and “blames its apocalyptic end on modern humanity’s ambitions” (Enjuto Rangel 2010, 40). Yet Cernuda still paradoxically concludes with an ironic, disenchanted assignment of otherworldliness to the crumbling, decaying materiality of ruins: “Del dios al hombre es don postrero la ruina” (1993, 403).

Even if Hell and Schönle are right (or partly right), and even if we agree with Ramón Jiménez and if we take Cernuda’s bitter line at face value, there is (or should be) more to ruin than just transcendental melancholy. Benjamin’s gaze was not only imbued with sadness, “but also with a profound moral revulsion” towards the ruins produced by progress (Löwry 2005, 66). As the angel is blown away, he would like to provide a cure. According to Bolívar Echevarría, the gaze of history is placed “en el pasado, en aquello que no, por quedar atrás en el tiempo, merece ser solo ruina, en aquello cuya redención es indispensable para la vida” (1997, 55). A gaze that merely delights in destruction or languishes in melancholy at the sight of ruins yields to feelings of inevitability or powerlessness in the face of the historical injustices that produce ruins. The melancholic gaze must be cast away, then, in favor of a gaze that commits itself to evaluating and dwelling in the ruin in terms of death and rebirth. This critical, speculative gaze considers what is no more but could (or should) have been, and the potential that could come out of what still lingers and stands in front of us.

Ruins may also be understood as the starting point for some form of liberation. At least, that is what María Zambrano argues:

La contemplación, la visión de la historia misma, trae en algunos momentos la liberación. Porque lo propiamente histórico no es ni el hecho resucitado con todos sus componentes … ni tampoco la visión arbitraria que elude el hecho, sino la visión de los hechos en su supervivencia, el sentido que sobrevive tomándolos como cuerpo. No los acontecimientos tal como fueron, sino lo que de ellos ha quedado: su ruina. (1973, 250)

Liberation comes from embracing the impression of infinitude that results from witnessing a tragedy without an author, a tragedy whose author is time (Zambrano 1973, 251–252). In this, she both replicates by the letter and reverses in the spirit Georg Simmel’s formulation of the ruin as the loss of human mastery, as the dying of “the work of art” means that “other forces and forms, those of nature, have grown” (1959, 260). Instead of Simmel’s anxiety, Zambrano offers a celebration of the ruin as a site where destruction can be studied and the continuous and seemingly unstoppable flowing of time, with all the avatars of the unexpected that it might bring along, can be experienced. In ruins we find the inscription of historical time and its conversion into something else: “Lugar sagrado donde el tiempo transcurre con otro ritmo que el que rige más allá, a unos metros tan sólo, donde la actualidad se agita” (Zambrano 1973, 254). According to Zambrano, ruins celebrate the victory of failure (1973, 254). And this failure is what potentially liberates us. As Pedro Aguilera-Mellado has explained, Zambrano invites us to think of a subject that is not subsumed under a vision of history as sacrifice, not subjected to a vision in which the self is tied to liberal progress and capitalist accumulation and the determinism of sacrifice is asserted, all of which creates what she calls the tyranny of the future (2018, 202). Instead, it is in ruins, in the collapse of an oppressive human-made order, according to Zambrano, that “la esperanza ha quedado liberada” (1973, 255). The endless potentiality of ruins’ untimeliness, we may conclude, is what catches Zambrano’s eye when considering the crumbling remains of the past. In reading a liberatory end in collapse, Zambrano’s thinking, in some ways, paves the way for more contemporary posthumanist thought on the ruin and the impending threat of the Anthropocene.¹

The anthropocentric vision of ruins, with its insatiable desire to assign meaning, is uniquely tied up in ideological formulations. The Argentine anthropologist Gastón Gordillo has explored the ways in which “ruins”, understood as such, are material and conceptual sites for the reproduction of power, the cancelation of politics and intervention. In ruins, according to Gordillo, “the pastness of the past is crystallized in efforts to present ruins as objects separated from the present” (2014, 8). Gordillo differentiates between “rubble” and “ruins” and emphasizes that turning “rubble” into “ruin” is nothing but “the attempt to conjure away the void of rubble and the resulting vertigo that it generates” (Gordillo 2014, 9). “Ruin”, in Gordillo’s understanding, is “rubble that has been fetishized” (2014, 8). This dichotomy between rubble and ruin is explored in a number of the essays in this special issue and is a powerful reminder that the very concept of “ruins” is a historically bound construction, and that considering specific material remains “ruins” may be the result of complex ideological processes that glamorize destruction and seal up the past, closing it to interventions from the present. Highlighting the constructedness of the very idea of ruin, the assignment of “ruin-value” only to certain debris formations is obviously helpful, even if we allow for slippages between “rubble” and “ruin”. We should also point out that rubble is not immune to similar processes of fetishization. In fact, as Michael Tuscello argues, “rubble can also be fetishized in dangerous ways that accommodate people to gentrification and war, forms of violence that advantage the death spiral of capitalism” (2020, 155). Still, whether we accept Gordillo’s ideas wholesale or not, his emphasis on the constructed nature of “ruin” and ruins is remarkably useful.

This is why the definitions of ruin must not be considered as mutually exclusive but as complementary in an endless proliferation of criteria, giving credence to the conceptual work they both perform and reveal when certain material structures are accorded the status of “ruin”. Let us put two recent classifications side by side. For Peter Lamarque, “not just any destroyed building counts as a ruin”, for “a destroyed building is classed as a ruin only if the ruin itself has acquired some significance and the destruction of the building in some sense mattered” (2020, 84). Furthermore, ruins are different from ruined buildings, according to Lamarque; their state is permanent, as they are beyond repair (2020, 84). In that permanent state, ruins have non-exclusive, often overlapping significations: as a memorial of the past, as an evocative immersive environment that elicits powerful emotions, as a source of awareness of a vanished past and as the source of a feeling of the sublime (Lamarque 2020, 87–90). While Lamarque’s examples mostly come from the heritage industry and state-formation programs that create or reinforce national identities, Tanya Whitehouse turns her attention to what she calls “the detritus of the manufacturing age” to assert that these are ruins too, that they legitimately “invite a timeless aesthetic attention” (2018, 2). In that sense, Whitehouse has a quite expansive definition that can be applied to much more modest examples: “structures that have been abandoned and have sustained some degree of damage or neglect, and are no longer used for their intended or customary purposes” (2018, 12). Structures can become not only more appealing in their ruinous state, but acquire value as new uses are given to those modern remains that have lost their original shape or functionality (Whitehouse 2018, 72). The life of a crumbling building does not end when it is declared a ruin, for the ongoing process of ruination becomes the key element in the definition of ruin. Here, the material, to a certain degree, is replaced by an abstract intent.

Of course, ruination is more than a material process or event. “Ruin” also refers to economic ruin, a short-circuit of economic activity or a failure to produce growth. Economic ruin in capitalist societies indicates two failures: the exhaustion of the commons and the exclusion of political subjects. As Félix Duque explains, in Latin “ruin” was used to refer to loss and, by extension, it came to signify an individual deprived of their influence over others and of any kind of power: “En la ruina, uno queda como ‘decaído’ de sus derechos” (2002, 136). For Saint Augustine, Duque reminds us, the existence of a ruined person is worse than that of a dead one (2002, 136). Those who experience ruin undergo a process of re-subjectification that, in its negativity, may be so extreme as to annihilate them as political subjects and expel them from the political community to which they formerly belonged. On the supposedly immanent, secular plane of economics, the end of the circulation of goods and services reveals the presence of transcendental principles, such as the fabled “invisible hand of the market” (that swats the ruined subject like a fly) or the ghosts of alternative political configurations, that would not allow this ruin and deprivation to happen.

Material ruins and economic ruin are not necessarily divergent concepts, and both can be understood in terms of destruction but also new beginnings. Ruinous architectural structures conjure up abandonment, emptiness and, ultimately, the disappearance of those human beings that once inhabited and made use of those buildings. In this sense, ruins are intensely political as they are haunted by the absence of people. Precisely because of that absence, they push us towards speculative reconfiguration of the empirical present of decay, in a gesture that takes us to the past but is also particularly prone to activate what Ernst Bloch understood as the messianic a priori of perception, “an intent toward the not-yet that touches on every aspect of human awareness” (quoted in Beck 2019, 107). The moment of crisis of economic ruin holds the potential for new and different articulations of society and the individual.

If modernity itself faces ruin, as Williams and Huyssen asserted above, ruins provide a particularly apt frame through which to think Iberian cultures. The asynchronous temporalities of the ruin appeal to a Spanish culture that largely understands itself (rightly or not) as trapped in a mis-encounter with modernity; a case of incomplete or divergent modernity that is defined by the constant (though frustrated) arrival of what Germán Labrador calls “lo que nunca ha habido”:

Los discursos nacionales hegemónicos en la España contemporánea se articularían, así, desde un pensamiento de la carencia histórica que proclama el peso fundacional de lo que falta en la arquitectura simbólica de la nación pero que, al tiempo, promete su remedio. Sin embargo, el carácter imaginario de tales ausencias impide su satisfacción y compromete la viabilidad del relato modernizador que las convoca, frustrándose una y otra vez la posibilidad de su redención normalizadora. (2016, 165; emphasis in original)

A culture that sees itself as existing in a process of constant, though frustrated, becoming may find the dialectic relationship between foreclosure and openness, between endings and beginnings, quite productive. The complex temporality of ruin, its mix of cessation, absence and proliferation, helps us think the warped temporality of trauma; the trauma not only of political violence and the Francoist genocidal elimination of the “anti-Spain”, but also of the social and personal devastation caused by neoliberal economic projects, of which the Great Recession (which, as is widely known, hit Spain particularly hard) is the most prominent example. As Christine Martínez points out, “‘Ruin’ and ‘ruination’ – whether associated with architecture or financial bankruptcy – emerged as a common trope where the excesses of Spain’s late capitalist economy could be condemned, visualized and moralized” (2021, 1). In the ruins of the post-2008 period, past, present and future may seem to come together. Indeed, in some artistic reflections on the end of the real estate boom, the ruins of the dreams of the Francoist past and the neoliberal present go hand in hand with the foreclosing of development and change, with “the ruin of the future” (Sheean 2018, 332).

This productive use of “ruin”, however, comes “at a cost” according to Martínez (2021, 82). It “was successful at gaining attention and reflecting popular sentiment but limited in proposing alternatives” (Martínez 2021, 10). Mostly, one must be careful when considering the use of “ruin” to frame the (momentary) collapse of (a certain avatar of) Spanish twenty-first-century capitalism because, as Martínez convincingly argues, the “‘speculative ruins’ and its particular temporalities are born of a presentist experience of economic crisis and bound to the hope for eventual economic recovery” (2021, 85). Turning incomplete, abandoned or already decaying buildings into ruins to make them the visual manifestations of the unfulfillment of a projected future risks reinforcing the libidinal bond to the capitalist promise of collective progress and individual enrichment. Still, even taking into consideration that powerful warning, ruins may still prove useful as tools for our shared task of looking into the present and diagnosing its maladies.

This collection

The essays of this collection examine all kinds of catastrophic events ciphered in ruins, all related to the ongoing crisis brought by globalization and the perishing of the most basic notions we have inherited in modern times. The first group of essays focuses on the traces of genocide left in the production of ruins by the Francoist regime. The second group covers the different ways in which neoliberalism has devastated Spanish society and territory in the post-Franco period. Together, we try to map out the warped temporalities of trauma and failure while looking for some flashes of utopia: harbingers of a time to come, of the unenvisioned not-yet in which we still believe, in the undecidability of the messianic. Ruins, as Susan Stewart says, “call for the supplement” (2020, 2). This supplement, we may add, is a site for speculation, for considering what could have been but was not, what could not have been but should have been and what could still be within an incomplete process of transformation and reuse, both literal (in architectonic interventions of conservation, rehabilitation or transformation) and conceptual. After all, at the beginning of this millennium Svetlana Boym already called our attention to how reflective nostalgia dwells in ruins and attaches to them, articulating longings for other, not-here-yet futures, for a past that is inhabited by “a multitude of potentialities, nonteleological possibilities of historic development” (2001, 41, 50). Ruins are complicated, though, and as Boym herself reminds us elsewhere, “the ruins of twentieth-century modernity, as seen through the contemporary prism, both undercut and stimulate the utopian imagination, constantly shifting and deterritorializing our dreamscape” (2010). The Nationalist projects happily used ruins as a foundation for their genocidal, authoritarian undertakings, as some of the essays in this special issue attest while challenging those logics. And yet, while ruin-gazing can assert hegemonic views and shore up imperialist projects, it is nonetheless always haunted by the possibility of the cancelation of those projects and the resignification of those remains.

In this special issue, the authors suggest a dialogue between physical ruins (which are themselves indicators of economic and social ruin) and ruins as presented and processed through various media. Both physical ruins and their mediated representations invite deeply-charged visual – even scopophilic – engagements, opening all kinds of connections between the firsthand contemplation of ruins and the gaze of the subject in front of the screen. Ruins are there and not there; they flash meaning in the mode of Benjaminian image-fragments and invite the viewer to intervene and complete what cannot be completed; they expose their dispossession to draw viewers into acts of imaginative possession. That is, in a modern regime of vision, ruins both conjure up the totality of history and an irreducible uniqueness that resists technologies of assimilation and consumption. In an alternative version of this special issue, the immersive, visual engagement with ruins would have been explored through television, sequential visual art and even videogames. In another alternative version of this special issue, we would have followed Alexandra Prica’s project and have gone beyond the focus on the visual that compels most of contemporary scholarship on ruins, moving “one step away from the immediate visual fascination and material urgency” in order to engage with what she calls “the textuality of ruins” (2022, 5). Articles on works of fiction and nonfiction, literary works and written historical documents would have complemented the ensuing collection of essays, which evinces a decidedly visual and material approach to the ways in which ruins evoke decay and the diverse afterlives of objects and ideas. In the end, however, we must confess (and maybe apologize) that we found focusing on the modern image to be the most productive way to explore the concept of modern ruins.

In their inviting incompleteness, ruins are haunted by their original design, which pushes “scopic desire into overdrive”, according to Julia Hell, who finds that “with ruins something always threatens to escape the subject’s gaze, and because of this threat, ruins lend a particular urgency to the desire for scopic mastery” (2019, 13). This mastery, however, and the images it produces in an attempted appropriation and recreation of rubble constructed (as per Gordillo) into “ruins”, must be understood in the contradictory terms by which Jacques Rancière conceptualizes modern images. As Rancière explains, these images offer “the inscription of the signs of a history and the affective power of sheer presence that is no longer exchanged for anything” (2007, 17). In the immersive experiences produced through the confrontation with ruins, we find not only an apprehension of the historical moment that gives them shape but also a resistance to translation (to paraphrase Rancière) that radically escapes such apprehension. Driven by the constitutive incompleteness of ruins, this resistance to translation invites the endless production of supplements in a particularly forceful manner. Along with the destruction that ruins quite obviously convey, this sense of the supplement is what we are trying to invoke here in order to restore a sense of the future to a depleted present.

The first section of this special issue engages with the physical ruins produced by the catastrophe of the Spanish Civil War and the ruinous imaginaries and processes unleashed by the conflict. The section starts with Daniel Arroyo-Rodríguez’s essay “Más allá de la muerte y del olvido: reconstruyendo la memoria humana de Belchite”, which focuses on the Civil War ruins of the city of Belchite (Zaragoza) and Francisco Franco’s project to build a new city to commemorate what he described as “heroism”, a principle upon which National Catholicism developed a wide range of memory practices. While a new town was built, the old town of Belchite was left in ruins as a reminder of the crumbling of the political system destroyed by the rebels. Francoism imposed an epic gaze built on nostalgia for the heroic feats of arms of the fallen on the Nationalist side, a gaze that focused on the glorified past, even though these ruins were actually inhabited ruins that called for a reading within what Stoler describes as “wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and refusal” (2013, 9). Arroyo Rodríguez’s essay first explores the ideological productivity of these material ruins within the political-theological project of Francoism and then turns to the ways in which a number of late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of art (Carlos Saura’s ¡Ay, Carmela!, Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno and José Giménez Corbatón and Pedro Pérez Esteban’s photobook Morir al raso) have short-circuited any reproduction of National-Catholic mythification in order to instead rethink the site and recover the voices of the victims of genocide.

Miguel Caballero Vázquez’s “Ruina y realismo: la maqueta de los bombardeos fascistas contra Barcelona en la ‘Exposición circulante’ de 1938” examines an architectural model of the area in Barcelona that was bombed by Italian air forces in 1938. This model was produced as part of the propaganda efforts of the Generalitat de Catalunya and was meant for exhibition in Barcelona and, later, in Switzerland, although it is unclear whether it made its intended trip to this country, then the headquarters of the League of Nations. Building on Gordillo’s ideas on rubble and ruin, among others, and different conceptualizations of architectural models as performative and epistemic dispositifs, Caballero Vázquez explores how this visual representation of bombed, ruined Barcelona offers a different prefiguration of the future depending on the audience and the context of the exhibition. A rhetorical artifact devised for ideological persuasion, this architectural model was a forward-looking representation of past destruction that would have made it possible for visitors to the Swiss exhibition to get a glimpse of what was to come: the erosion of cultural memory and the cancelation of any sense of a “normal” time continuum – of past and future – that strategic aerial bombing would bring to European cities and consciousness in World War II (Santiáñez 2022, 111–112). Caballero Vázquez’s essay helps us understand what happens in the wake of sudden acts of industrial war, instead of what happens through traditional processes of decay guided by the erosion of time and nature. It also explores how rubble is conceptually processed into ruins that look forward, instead of backward into a mythical past of heroism and national glory, as in the Francoist mythification of Belchite.

Félix Zamora Gómez’s essay “Esconder la destrucción, mostrar la ruina: arquitectura, imagen e historicidad de la reconstrucción en la España de la posguerra” pays attention to two objects produced in 1939 and 1940, respectively, to explore the ways in which the process of material reconstruction was used by Francoism to articulate itself as an agent of redemption and to foster a process of ideological affiliation. By focusing on the architectural model of the rubble of the Alcázar de Toledo and the first “Exposición de la reconstrucción de España”, Zamora Gómez concludes that National Catholicism produced an ideological field in which the ruinous must be understood as a concept intimately linked to reconstruction. Through the examination of how a certain spectatorial gaze was generated, the article allows us to understand how the regime created cultural value around certain sites of historical and military struggle.

In Judit R. Palencia Gutiérrez’s “Why Didn’t We Know This before? Challenging the Culture of the Transition through the Concentration Camp at Castuera”, we encounter an intriguing question: how can we use different theoretical articulations of the idea of “ruin” to understand the productivity of sites of authoritarian and genocidal violence of which almost no material traces remain? In the face of such absence, how can we turn the radical frustration of the ruin gazer’s scopic drive into a foundational first step towards constructing a pedagogical program about the past and a haunted present? Palencia Gutiérrez turns to one of the Spanish concentration camps for Loyalist prisoners of war – Castuera (Badajoz) – to explore how, in the almost total absence of material remains, these sites can still be constructed as ruins that invite visitors to participate in experiential learning through different performative activities. The meaningful display of a lack of incomplete buildings onto which the imagination of the ruin-gazer must latch becomes precisely the basis for didactic guides that encourage the recovery of silenced historical events.

Turning to Spain’s democratic period, the second section moves beyond ruins produced by war to engage with the ruins produced by slower forms of economic and political violence. First, Jacqueline Sheean’s “Ruins of the Democratic Promise: Dystopian Cityscapes in Films of ‘el desencanto democrático’” examines two cinematic scenes of dystopia in Álex de la Iglesia’s El día de la bestia (1995) and Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (1997) that imply a ruin at the very foundations of Spain’s transition to democracy and the neoliberal structures that sustained it. Released only two years apart, both films set their most crucial exterior sequences in the same two locations in Madrid: the Gran Vía and the postmodern business development at the north end of the Paseo de la Castellana. De la Iglesia and Amenábar’s non-realist visualizations reveal a pessimistic vision of Spain’s capital in the 1990s, figuring these areas as desolate and degraded cityscapes in a way that evokes the iconography of ruins and sets an alienating scene of loss and foreclosure. Expanding upon the degraded and violent imaginaries of the Francoist and Civil War ruins studied in the preceding essays, Sheean argues that these democratic scenes of collapse and catastrophe suggest the non-arrival of the promise brought by Spain’s Transition and prefigure a ruin of the future.

Priscila Calatayud-Fernández’s “Montaje, imagen-escombro y disenso en Vikingland (2011) de Xurxo Chirro” builds on Gordillo’s conceptualization of the distinction between ruin and rubble to examine the archival material that Chirro uses to denounce contemporary exploitation and precarization under globalization. Following Hito Steyerl’s ideas about “the poor image” as “the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores” (2012, 32), Calatayud-Fernández approaches the found footage aesthetic of Vikingland as debris-images that activate a heterochronic gaze that resists neoliberal narratives about the present. The degraded images of Chirro’s film challenge teleological constructions and, if we read them in terms of the ruins that Benjamin envisions in his posthumously-published essay “On the Concept of History”, may even allow the author and the audience to “blast open” the historical continuum (2003, 395).

Mónica López Lerma’s “Resisting Ruination: The Termites of Corruption in Democratic Spain” focuses on Xavier Artigas and Xapo Ortega’s documentary Termitas: El Observatorio DESC contra Bárcenas. Employing termite infestation as its central metaphor, Artigas and Ortega’s documentary presents political corruption as a relentless process that surreptitiously ruins the system. But, as López Lerma argues, this metaphor has serious shortcomings, for having termites as external agents of destruction veils the ways in which Francoist structures left in place after 1975 are fundamental to a correct understanding of corruption in contemporary Spain. Instead, along with ideas from the work of Rob Nixon and Camila Vergara, López Lerma’s reading of Termitas builds on Ann Laura Stoler’s distinction between ruin and ruination. López Lerma uses Stoler’s understanding of ruination as a “corrosive process that weighs on the future and shapes the present” (2008, 194) to show that those state structures left in place in post-Francoist Spain are themselves active agents of destruction. Analyzing Termitas in these terms allows López Lerma to dig up from a repressed past a slow-moving process of ruination that has been undermining, slowly but surely, both the present and the future of contemporary Spain.

Finally, Pedro Aguilera-Mellado’s essay “Escombros contemporáneos, estratos modernos … y secreto marxista de la ‘existencia’ en el cine de Tito Montero” studies three short films (El esplendor, Interraíl/Manhmal, Los ladrillos) and two feature films (La ciudad y los premios, El pasado presente) directed by the Asturian-born Tito Montero. These analyses bear witness to the ruin of modern capitalist discourse while also dealing with the ruin of the humanist and historicist Marxian answer to that capitalist discourse in the present. Montero’s cinematographic technique – his use of the camera and montage – and the work of his film-essay, help us to confront the multiple ruinations and exhaustions of modern times: from industrial offshoring and the announced exhaustion of fossil-fuel extraction, to the commodification and becoming spectacle of the image, all the way to the ruination of the symbolic bond of the human, ultimately leaving the reader wondering what that may mean in the present. The gaze at the ruins in Montero’s films forces the spectator to think through a non-representational image in which the most intimate and existential experience exceeds visual representation and questions the capitalizations of the image and the human in a global capitalist predicament. Ultimately this article argues for the need to attune to the existential register of thought and action after the ruin of the modern, in the wake of a certain Marxian register.

Coda

As we have tried to show in this introduction, the business of ruins is perplexing. One instant Pan’s domain, Mars’s the next, as Luis de Góngora imagines them (1993, 243–247), ruins exist between beauty and violence, nature and history, between the erosion that time brings about and its transcendence, resisting full integration into one or the other and prompting, instead, more and more questions. The unease and pleasure ruins can conjure up are deeply entangled with the experience of the threshold and non sequitur, of an excess that cannot be conclusively territorialized. Our sense of time gets warped in front of the ruin, and those who engage in ruin-gazing experience a process of resubjectification through perceptual encounter and rumination, a rumination that may be informed by Benjamin’s redemptive program and by Zambrano’s belief in the liberatory infinitude of the ruin. After all, we live in times in which “a peculiar form of wakefulness – of perception and understanding”, to invoke Williams once again, emerges in the face of contemporary planetary collapse, a generation of ruins that seemingly closes our present as a time without a future (2021, 19). The essays in this special issue intend to contribute to this wakefulness.

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Notes on contributors

Pedro Aguilera-Mellado

Pedro A. Aguilera-Mellado is an Assistant Professor of Spanish (Iberian Studies) in the Department of Romances Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame. His areas of interest are modern and contemporary literature and cultures of Spain and critical theory. He has published a number of articles in the intersections of political and continental thought, literature, and the cultural and political history of modern and contemporary Spain, dealing with questions such as: sacrifice, human finitude, capital accumulation, subjectivity, writing and existence, reason and Enlightenment, postfeminism, postmarxism, or visual representation. He is the author of Fines Infrapolíticos: de la razón, la representación y la narrativa española moderna (Tirant lo Blanch, 2024).

Antonio Córdoba

Antonio Córdoba is currently an Associate Professor of Spanish at Manhattan College. His research focuses on Spanish-language speculative fiction and the relationship between modernity and the concept of the sacred. He is the co-editor of The Sacred and Modernity in Urban Spain: Beyond the Secular City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Rite, Flesh, and Stone: The Matter of Death in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021), and a special journal issue titled Heads and Tails of the Monarch: Representations of Kings and Queens in Post-Francoist Spain (Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2024). He is also the coeditor of Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), and the author of Extranjero en tierra extraña: El género de la ciencia ficción en América Latina (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla, 2011) and more than a dozen of essays on Spanish and Latin American literature, film, and music.

Jacqueline Sheean

Jacqueline Sheean is an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on the intersection of media theory and Spanish cultural studies and engages issues of memory, authoritarianism, exile, and national identity in 20th and 21st century Spain. Her essays on Iberian cinema and media have appeared in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and Hispania, among other venues.

Notes

1 In this particular sense, and regarding an existential reflection in Zambrano that does not posit the subject of modernity as a narrative towards sacrifice and progress nor anymore towards emancipation, the Andalusian thinker paves the way for the- more-than-urgent, now- abyssal impending threat of the Anthropocene. See Aguilera-Mellado (2018) and also the special issue on the Anthropocene and Infrapolitics co-edited by Aguilera-Mellado, Méndez Cota y Baker in December, 2023. For an infrapolitical reflection on the Anthropocene in the field of Iberian Studies, see the contribution by Aguilera-Mellado on that aforementioned special issue apropos the Basque contemporary author Aixa de la Cruz. For the limits of decoloniality see Williams (2016).