A Future for Hashima

Abstract

This article sets out to investigate the relationship between ruins, futurity, and ‘ruin porn’ - a visual mode of representation that all too often seeks to fix post-industrial ruins as mere aesthetic objects, devoid of history and/or temporality. It does so by focusing on performance, which, in this context, is understood as a processual mode of art-making that provides spectators with an experience of time. In this expanded definition of performance, as one may perhaps expect, the performativity of the object is not limited to the theatrical event alone; rather, it now inheres in sometimes uncanny durational aspects of both still and moving images. The essay proceeds in three stages. Part one provides a historical and theoretical overview of the type of performance inherent in ‘ruin porn’; part two critiques two images from Yves Marchand's and Romain Meffre's Gunkanjima (2013), a photo album that attempted to document the ruins of Hashima, an island situated 15 kilometres from Nagasaki City in the East China Sea; and part three investigates the very different aesthetic at work in Lee Hassall's film Return to Battleship Island (2013) which was made in response to AHRC- funded project, ‘The Future of Ruins: Reclaiming Abandonment and Toxicity on Hashima Island’ (2013). In this reading of Return to Battleship Island , the onus is on showing how Hassall's film, in its representation of Hashima's crumbling apartment blocks and industrial buildings, intentionally sought to contest the atemporal logic of ‘ruin porn’ by attempting to endow the viewing experience with a sense of futurity. Crucially, this does not mean that film represented the future as an object, but, on the contrary, tried to make it palpable, as something one undergoes physically in the very act of reception.

Notes

1 Although not the focus of this essay, there is much debate as to what actually constitutes a ruin and whether or not the ruin has been created through natural forces or by human-made factors, such as warfare, forced evacuation and myths of economic progress. See Hell and Schönle (2010: 1–14) and Trigg (2006).

2 These two modalities of the future are not, of course, mutually exclusive. It is simply that ‘past futures’ have traditionally been the preferred subject matter for scholars, rather than the more speculative ‘futures present’.

3 Enlarged images from the book were also part of an exhibition entitled Gunkanjima at the Polka Gallery in Paris in 2013.

4 There has been a long-standing campaign to see Hashima designated as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) world heritage site on account of its world historical interest. The bid was successful, and, on 4 May 2015, as I was editing this essay, the island, along with other industrial ruins of the Meiji-era in Kyushu and Yamaguchi, was granted UNESCO status.

5 Given the obsession that ruin photography has with abandoned factories and machinery, it is telling that Brecht's critique of photography was directed at images of the Krupp Work Factory. See Anderson (2014) for a more detailed discussion of this point.

6 These are Michael Shanks and Angela Piccini.

7 At times in Camera Lucida Barthes appears to suggest that photography works magically to reproduce a past reality in the here and now. In a discussion of Richard Avedon's portrait of the former slave William Casby, Barthes says, ‘[T]here was a certainty that such a thing had existed: not a question of exactitude, but of reality … slavery was given without mediation, the fact was established without method’ (1993: 80, emphasis in original). But then, almost immediately, Barthes counters this claim by reminding us that photography does not capture real things as such, but rather their ‘emanation’ as light particles that ‘touch me like the delayed rays of a star’ (80–1). In our dealings with photography, then, we are always in the domain of the dead: relic hunters in a landscape of fossils. The performance of the photograph is not so much about immediacy, as Pétursdóttir and Olsen (2014) maintain; rather, it is grounded in mediation and delay, a negotiation with the presence of an absence.

8 According to Piccini's insightful critique, what Pétursdóttir and Olsen neglect to say is that ruin porn tends to produce distanced looking. As such, their argument for a more affective visual practice based on the appreciation of beauty is contradictory. Their concern with aesthetic beauty overlooks what is really at stake in the pornographic image: namely, its capacity to trouble the boundaries between looking and touching, which, as Piccini argues, is the very thing that the erotically charged male gaze seeks to disavow. This leads her to conclude that ‘the problem with ruin photography is perhaps not that is pornographic, but that is not [pornographic enough]’ (2014: 32).

9 See, for instance, Leap into the Void (1960), the celebrated photograph of Yves Klein suspended in mid-air; or Josef Koudelka's extraordinary image Czechoslovakia, August 1968 (1968).

10 Some of Marchand and Meffre's images of Hashima, including Jikogudan, ‘Stairway to Hell’, can be found at http://www.marchandmeffre.com/gunkanjima

11 For more on the project, see www.futureofruins.org.uk

12 The image is contradictory because it projects the present into the future, and, as such, is always already an image of the past.