The Ruin as Memorial – The Memorial as Ruin

Abstract

The link between ruins and the monumental, the sublime and overwhelming can be traced back to the eighteenth century and the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. This contribution is less interested in the monumental ruin and instead looks at the ruin as memorial and at the function ruins perform in commemorative cultures. This encompasses memorials in which poignant remains have been preserved and turned into reminders of violent acts as well as memorials in which the iconographic traditions of the ruin are consciously reproduced for remembrance purposes. While there are numerous examples of the former, from Berlin's ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche’ to the French village Oradour-sur-Glane, there are far fewer cases in which the language of the ruin is deployed to reconfigure our relationship with the past to allow not only for melancholic reflection but for actual mourning to take place. They range from eccentric projects such as the Neptune Memorial Reef off the coast of Key Biscayne, Florida – an alternative cemetery in which people can have their ashes combined with forms for a reef that is growing over the faux ruins of what looks like a lost city – to Argentinian clandestine detention camps which are left to go to ruin because any kind of intervention is seen to interfere with the forensic and traumatic real.

The ruin allows for a visualization of different forms of mourning: we mourn loss, death, decay and destruction; man-made and natural catastrophes; humanity's futile and successful attempts to master nature; and nature's indifference to humans and their cruelty against one another. But do we need to conceive memorial ruins differently, depending on whether they commemorate gradual decay and mortality, a natural catastrophe, or various types of governmental, military or economic violence? Could the aesthetic of the ruin dangerously confuse very different forms of terror, violence and violation, directed against other nations, political opponents or ethnic minorities, perhaps even rendering invisible human agency and erasing the specificities of the historical context? Or may the ruin help us to discern where these structures and practices of violence converge? These and related questions will be explored in this contribution.

Notes

1 William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.

2 I am particularly grateful to Dr Cecilia Sosa and Dr Valentina Salvi for inviting me to be part of their British Academy International Partnership and Mobility Scheme, entitled ‘Commemoration, New Audiences and Spaces of Memory in Latin America's Southern Cone: Trans-cultural Dialogues in the Wake of Loss’, which provided me with invaluable insights into the complex memorial processes at work in today's Argentina.