Utility After Abandonment – details of our 15 paper ruins session at the RGS-IBG Conference, Cardiff August 2018

“…show no pretence of other art, and otherwise… resist all tampering with either the fabric or ornament of the building as it stands; if it has become inconvenient for its present use, … raise another building rather than alter or enlarge the old one; … treat our ancient buildings as monuments of a bygone art, created by bygone manners, that modern art cannot meddle with without destroying.”

Manifesto of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 1877

In his SPAB manifesto William Morris declared that in their original completeness buildings have a fixed identity and authenticity which can be maintained indefinitely via timely and proactive works of protection and maintenance. Thus reactive restoration should never become necessary, if precious buildings are looked after properly. But SPAB’s concerns were for the preservation of a few signature buildings, and their dream of an indefinite remaining-as-is was just that, a dream and whether for the iconic few or the prosaic many. All things fall apart, and protection and maintenance programmes are usually a question of controlling the rate at which ruination occurs, rather than holding it at bay permanently. For most buildings the journey towards ruin is inevitable, unless an evolving, adaptive re-use strategy is enlisted. The choice is a stark one: adapt or die.

But viewing ruination as a process offers the prospect that the chosen re-use point could be set at any of various stages along that journey. The structure that is being re-used could already appear to be markedly dilapidated by the moment of its salvation via an adaptive re-use. And in some quarters it is the very emergence of architectural decay that spurs a revalorisation and the opportunities for re-use that then ensue (and the challenge then becomes one of how to artificially freeze the building in that state – but no worse – and to activate its use in a manner fit for the tastes and needs of now, rather than the moment and purpose of its origination).

I’m delighted to announce that we are going to have a three part session exploring the utility of contemporary ruins at this summer’s Royal Geographical Society annual conference in Cardiff (28-31 August). The exact date of our session will be announced towards the end of May (and details will be posted here). But in the meantime here are details of the 15 papers that we have, showcasing ruin//reuse research from all around the world: Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Arctic.

Session 1 – Curating ruination: care, affect and mattering

Chair: Edward Hollis – University of Edinburgh

The shimmering ruin

Hayden Lorimer – University of Glasgow

This paper will do three things. First, it will introduce the conference session establishing its purpose, parameters and potential. It will consider how, in the current conjuncture, ruins are being reimagined, repurposed and reactivated, where new utility is found after long periods of abandonment and entropic decay. If this signals a reversal in ruinous fortunes – with present-day or near-future ruins repopulated as public spaces and cultural assets – it also presents significant challenges for heritage managers, land owners, arts practitioners and social activists, in legal, social and creative terms. Second, the paper will consider how recent interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of ruin studies and heritage studies can provide the theories necessary for critically understanding projects of re-occupation or (re)-construction. This exercise of taking stock conceptually will be a means to reckon with ruins, culturally and materially, in updated form (Edensor and DeSilvey 2012). Third, the paper will briefly put some of this thinking to work in a single introductory study. Kilmahew-St.Peters (KSP) is a signature site for reimagining the new ruin. Located in the West of Scotland, KSP has been the subject of recent experiment: ground-breaking, arts-led, community-facing and heritage-driven. Outcomes at KSP remain complex and contingent, with a local culture of ruin-care perhaps destined to be perennially transitional. The site’s vexed history will be presented in capsular form, as a sequence of live tweets. This illustrated frieze will serve to preface three later contributions to the session, alighting on specific aspects of KSP’s past, present and future.

What really haunts the modern ruin?

Luke Bennett – Sheffield Hallam University

Tim Edensor (2005, 2011) has celebrated the ruin as a place of open possibilities enabled by the decay of its normativities. Meanwhile, acknowledging the ongoing role of the ruin manager, Caitlin DeSilvey has mapped out “palliative curation” as a light-touch approach to ruin-care in which the productive capacities of dilapidation are enabled. In our current study of the management and repurposing of the Modernist ruins of the St Peter’s Seminary near Glasgow, we have investigated the complex ways in which care and associated normativities are iteratively composed and applied to a ruin. Our study suggests that the pragmatic instantiations of a ruin’s care reflect complex, shifting and negotiable apprehensions by owners, managers and security staff forged in the intersection of a site’s pasts, presents and futures, and of the knowledge, risks and opportunities that this journey through time may bring. Here, the dynamic nature of the circumstances and trajectory of any ruin generate a succession of local and provisional assumptions and resulting temporary interventions, which channel engagements with the ruin and how care (and ordering) of it is materially and symbolically expressed. This presentation will explore this through an interpretation of three instances of such ‘haunting’ at St Peter’s: (1) forecasting danger by reference to elsewhere: in liability and risk assessments for organised encounters with the ruin, (2) listening to the site: reflexively adjusting attitudes towards managing recreational trespass as ruination progresses and (3) making do: the improvisational care applied to the ruin by its lone security guard, drawn from his own Lifeworld.

Wymering Manor: ordinary matters and everyday practices in at risk historic sites

Belinda Mitchell & Karen Fielder – University of Portsmouth

Focussing on historic buildings which are at risk, we are interested in the disciplinary territory that lies in the overlap between interior design and conservation practice by conceptualising historic interiors as unfinished sites of experience loaded with affective capacity. The work aims to examine the representation of such spaces from the inside out through new materialist theories and creative methodologies in order to articulate the sensory in conservation practice and to rethink historic interiors accordingly. An uninhabited 16^th-century timber-framed manor house in Portsmouth provides a case study for this experimentation. We propose that the house is experienced all the more poignantly as it hangs in a transitional state prior to any unified programme of restoration and reuse which would determine a fixed and static end point. The concern in this essay is with the house, its material/immaterial matters and the matter of the local community who are reimagining its futures in their ongoing efforts to save it. We are interested in the everyday community responses to the impulses that derive from the material mattering of vulnerable historic sites and the values and attachments that are formed through these material flows. The commonplace interactions and gestures of the community are discussed through referencing Kathleen Stewart, where “the ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledge, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life”.

Ruins fermentation: practicing different forms of culture

Lilly Cleary – William Angliss Institute, Syndney

The process of fermentation, according to Sandor Katz (2010), describes the creative space between fresh and rotten; fermented products creatively arise within a collaborative web of microbial relationships and “they are embodiments of culture not lightly abandoned” – or left to exploitation by intensive production and its inherent need to value uniformity, consistency and durability in the name of safety.  This paper enrols the practices of fermentation, materially and metaphorically, as a way to bring together the connected questions of how to activate modern ruins creatively and collaboratively, as well as safely, albeit in a less uniform and consistent way. My analysis reports on the repurposed use of a disused abattoir in regional Victoria, Australia – a site saved not because it was valued, but instead has become valued because it has been saved (DeSilvey, 2017).  Usually associated with death and decomposition, a number of craft fermenting businesses have begun to re-configure and re-perform the space. Here, rot as the active agent of ruination (Lorimer and Murray, 2015) has been displaced by rot as an active agent in convivially making welcome the uncertain and often inconsistent agencies of humans with nonhumans. My paper builds on this case study to reimagine the decomposition of ruins as productive public sites for practicing different forms of culture and “wild” culturation – asking, how might the practice of ‘ruins fermentation’ allow us to engage in a very material sense with the abandoned spaces, microbial traces and living communities of ruins.

Actively awaiting ruins in the Netherlands

Renate Pekaar – Cultural Heritage Agency, The Netherlands

Clemens Driessen – Wageningen University, The Netherlands

In the Netherlands, a ruin is hard to come by. Of course, there are occasionally buildings that are no longer in use. But before they get a chance to fall into disrepair and attain a ruinous state, these structures will have been either refurbished, or torn down. By discussing a series of cases of buildings that almost, or only briefly, had become ruins, this paper will explore the motives and speculate on the cultural origins of what arguably is a collective desire to clean up every structure that is no longer used, or to diligently reconstruct historical ruins to their imagined original splendour. The first author of this paper, as a heritage professional working for the Dutch government, has in her work sought to advocate an approach of ‘actively awaiting’ – allowing for time to generate a renewed interest in (listed) buildings that are no longer functional, or perhaps leading to an appreciation of the process of their falling apart.

Some efforts have recently emerged that seek to actively promote an alternative aesthetic in which decay is accepted and given new meaning. An example is the ‘Ecoruine’ project in Northern Groningen, where historical farm houses are projected, via computer renderings of future ruins, to be the scenic backdrop of a campsite. This paper will seek to answer whether through this type of work the dominant sense of degeneration associated with dilapidated buildings in the Netherlands could -over time- be replaced by the ruin as somehow valuable, embracing its evocative and ecological quality.

Session 2: Reusing the ruin: pressures, opportunities and difficulties

Chair: Hayden Lorimer – University of Glasgow

Castles in the Air, Facts on the Ground. An examination of imaginary proposals for the ruins of St Peter’s Kilmahew

Edward Hollis – Edinburgh University

Written six centuries ago, Alberti’s dictum that ‘Beauty is that thing to which nothing may be added, and from which nothing may be taken away’ haunts our attitudes to heritage today. Conservators, art and architectural historians document and discuss buildings and artworks as singular artefacts, usually authored by single authors, possessing a completeness that time, decay, and atrophy can only spoil. That’s the traditional story, anyway; and it is one within which the ruin takes an uncomfortable place. Following eighteenth century ruin theorists, and anticipating Edensor, the architectural historian John Summerson tried to reconcile the ruin with classical aesthetics by suggesting that the incompleteness of the ruin is suggestive: it invites completion in the minds’ eye. But that state of completion may, as the nineteenth century restorer Viollet le Duc suggested, may never have existed – it is, as Ricoeur suggests of memory, an imaginary all of its own, as well as the recollection of something but lost. In this sense, it may be afforded all sorts of creative latitudes that a strictly archaeological reconstruction of the past may not. This paper will explore these imaginary latitudes by considering a host of castles in the air: unrealised creative proposals generated by one real ruin. Since its abandonment in the late 1980’s St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross has spawned, in projects devised by developers, artists, activists, and students of architecture, landscape, and interior, hundreds of projects for its completion. These projects differ from other creative interventions, from graffiti to events, that have taken place on and in the site: this is a study of works devised in absentia, on paper and in the screen. On the face of it, these proposals are thought experiments. What do these projects, each a snapshot of attitudes to the site at the time it was made – a sort of retelling – tell us about changing attitudes to St Peter’s itself as it undergoes its own processes of ruination? This process of change is, in some sense, a result of the dissemination of these imaginaries in their own right – through exhibitions, online, in reports and so on. How do they speak to one another, through networks of influence and counterreaction? How these imaginaries relate to the site itself? In some, it is used as an object of contemplation; but in others, the causality is reversed, and these remote imaginaries have left traces on the site that then suggest further possibilities of their own. Finally, this enquiry will return to Alberti’s dictum, to ask how such projects, themselves incomplete, transitory, co-dependent with another ‘work’ the ruin itself) may be understood as creative works. If beauty is that to which nothing may be added, and from which nothing may be taken away, then how are these works of subtraction and addition, in themselves, beautiful?

What to do with incompletion? Learning from Incompiuto Siciliano

Pablo Arboleda – University of Glasgow

For the past five decades, around 400 unfinished public works have been erected in Italy as the result of deliberate, dysfunctional modernisation – political corruption and mafia networks involved. A third of these constructions are located in Sicily alone and so, in 2007, a group of artists labelled this phenomenon an architectural style: ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’. Through this creative approach, the artists’ objective is to put incompletion back on the agenda by considering it to have heritage value and, in doing so, their aim is to change the buildings’ dark side and turn it into something positive. This presentation reviews the four different approaches that the artists have envisaged in order to deal with unfinished public works: to finish them, to demolish them, to leave them as they are, or to opt for an ‘active’ arrested decay. The cultural implications of these strategies are analysed through the study of different architecture workshops that have been taking place during the last ten years, and this body of knowledge is supplemented by a long semi-structured interview conducted with one of the involved artists. Ultimately, it is concluded that incompletion is such a vast and complex issue that it will surely have more than a single solution; rather a combination of the proposed four. This is important because it opens up a debate on the broad spectrum of possibilities to tackle incompletion – considering this one of the key contemporary urban themes not only in Italy but also in those countries affected by unfinished geographies after the 2008 financial crisis.

A Tale of Two Cities:  An exploration of psychohistorical legacy in shaping attitudes towards modern ruins in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Harriet McKay – London Metropolitan University

Their nicknames say it all.  Cape Town as South Africa’s ‘Mother City’ seems dependable, knowable, safe and somehow western.  Indeed the term Mother City is innately connected with white European assumptions of ownership. But beyond her mountain range lies something quite different; Africa.   That Africa of course, includes the far edgier ‘Jozi’; Johannesburg. This paper will explore the recent utilization of an abandoned early twentieth century Cape Town grain silo and its redevelopment as Zeitz Mocca (Museum of Contemporary African Art).   Widely acknowledged as having been inspired by the Tate Modern/Guggenheim Bilbao models, this new emblem for championing contemporary Africa was designed by British architect Thomas Heatherwick and sponsored by German entrepreneur Jochen Zeitz. Nine hundred miles away the Hillbrow Tower dominates the Johannesburg skyline. Built in 1968 this telecommunications tower represents South Africa’s economic boom under Grand Apartheid.  That it, like many of Johannesburg’s 20^th century ruins, remains an uncared for white elephant is testimony to a fractured, and therefore much more ‘South African’ history than Cape Town’s ‘Europeanness’ will admit. Johannesburg’s abandoned sites however betray the largest metropolis on the continent to be sitting between the rock of its late 20^th century past and the hard place of wanting to be a modern and truly African city. Examining approaches to redevelopment, or its failure, this paper will use Cape Town/Johannesburg examples to explore the barriers to activating ruins safely, creatively and collaboratively or indeed, at all.

Value negotiations at the margins: Bringing a town back from the dead

Samantha Saville – Aberystwyth University

The high arctic settlement of Pyramiden, Svalbard is in many ways an archetypal ruin, increasingly renowned as a ‘ghost town’. Post-industrial, post-Soviet, post-permanent population. Fiendishly enticing, not only to those imbued with even the slightest tinge of ruinen lust, Pyramiden also offers stunning glacial vistas and ample opportunities for wildlife watching in relative peace. Pyramiden is no longer post-profit or post-potential. Over the last 6 years there have been increasing efforts from its Russian owners to capitalise on this cultural attraction and its location. Tourist and scientific activity is growing.  The re-development and re-use of Pyramiden is however fraught with a number of questions as to what should be valued, how and what this means for the town’s ongoing use. What exactly is cultural heritage, and how should it be managed/ protected/ cared for – whose version of value, conservation, safety and heritage counts here? How are the ambiguous configurations of nature/culture, past/present, care/abandonment to be treated as Pyramiden morphs from ruin to something else? Drawing on doctoral research, I discuss how this story of recognition and revitalisation of a cultural, political and economic asset has been unfolding so far. In doing so I blend value enquiry, assemblage thinking and the ethics of care to tell a multitude of small stories that can inform our thinking of how we activate modern ruins.

Repurposing modern ruins through tourism: lost places, heritage and recreation. The case of Beelitz Sanatorium

Aude Le Gallou – University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Over past decades, Berlin’s urban space has undergone deep transformations accounting for the presence of numerous modern ruins in the city and its surroundings. Having become prized spots for alternative practices (Edensor 2005), some of them are now subject to recreational valorisations. This is the case of Beelitz Sanatorium in the periphery of Berlin, which is being gradually rehabilitated after its abandonment in the early nineties. A part of the complex has been transformed into a leisure area which main attraction is a canopy walkway meandering between ruins. Drawing on an urban and cultural geography approach, our presentation aims to analyse its recreational valorisation as a form of cultural repurposing of abandoned places. First, we outline the reappraisal of the cultural value attached to Beelitz’s ruins as rediscovered heritage. Then we discuss spatial issues raised by their development as recreational ruins aiming to meet requirements for use by a broad audience. Finally, we question the temporalities of such a recreational valorisation and ask whether tourism and leisure repurposing must be understood as permanent or as a transitional stage in a broader process of rehabilitation. Our methodological framework is based on a mix of qualitative methods including participant observation, formal and informal interviews with participants, organizers, institutional actors and inhabitants as well as analysis of online material. By providing valuable insights into the ways modern ruins are being re-integrated into the city’s space, the case of Beelitz is exemplary of current changes of perspective on abandoned places and their social value.

Session 3: Remembering and performing in the ruin: heritage, atmospheres and creative reanimation 

Chair: Luke Bennett – Sheffield Hallam University

Stories of light and dark from a modern ruin in transition

Ruth Olden – University of Glasgow

Light has become a significant agent in the drive to transform the modernist ruins of St Peter’s Seminary into a cultural asset and public space.  NVA, the arts organisation responsible for this creative vision, have built an international reputation on their innovative use of light in natural and built landscapes both in the UK and further afield, and St Peter’s is arguably their biggest challenge yet. Recent engagements with the site have seen NVA enrol light in the managed presentation and curation of the site, with all manner of lighting technologies employed to enable access, to facilitate readability of the modern ruin, and to transport audiences into imagined realms. This presentation considers three events that have been staged on St Peter’s between 2016 and 2018 in which light has taken centre stage. In doing so it seeks to examine how NVA have delivered different choreographies of light, what the cultural and creative value of these events has been, and what legacy they have had in the bigger story of ruin transition. Alive to the transient nature of these events however (and arguably of their cultural legacies), this presentation also draws in the lesser known stories of light and dark animating the modern ruins of St Peter’s Seminary. By capturing the ruin in different states of exposure – exposures that are natural and artificial, planned and unplanned – this presentation seeks to explore the opportunities but also the challenges that the drive to ruin post-production and presentation faces.

Committed landscapes: strategies of social and cultural dynamization in non-urban ruins through artistic and creative activities

Rosa Cerarols & Antoni Luna – Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

Geospatial changes in contemporary societies produced a gradual and growing abandonment of large areas of territory. The progressive depopulation of extensive spaces in postindustrial Europe is becoming an enormous challenge for policy makers and territorial activists. In some of these landscapes in crisis, there have been different initiatives over the last few years associated among others to new forms of agriculture or tourist activities that try to modify the abandonment dynamics but maintaining their dependence for urban customers or investors. However, in the last decade there has been a fundamental paradigm shift, facilitated by improved communication networks. New globally hyperconnected spaces of creation and experimentation are appearing even in the most remote areas of the territory. The ability to spread all kinds of new activities in these depressed environments opened new possibilities for social and cultural improvement for local residents. In this project we analyze the impact of art/craft initiatives of KONVENT a cultural association created near the village of Berga, 100Km North of Barcelona. Konvent association settled up in the abandoned spaces and ruins of the old “Cal Rosal” factory. Some members of the association have personal attachments to these spaces since their family and friends used to work and live here and they have worked to preserve the buildings and the old industrial landscape. These emotional attachments and an exceptional atmosphere of creativity creates a very unique setting favoring new local cultural gatherings and certain national and international recognition while maintaining the pulse with local and regional authorities.

The PostDegrado current

Ilaria Delgradi – independent researcher, Milan.

From the industrial revolution toward the cultural revolution. Based on this concept I’ve started to analyze this process in my own town, Milan, shaping a new current, named PostDegrado. The technological development, the globalization and the production translation to the East, deprived many places of machineries, professions, workers and families. During the last few years, the enormous industrial and rural abandoned heritage has been and is being renovated with socio-cultural contents. The PostDegrado current concerns the actual tendency to transform an abandoned and forgotten place in a long lasting good. A cultural, artistic, social and interdisciplinary movement that grows up from basic and common needs: creativity needs space; citizens demand meeting spots; the environment requires attention and the land is exhausted from massive edification. PostDegrado is a platform created to promote the enjoyment of reactivated places characterized by architectural fascination and surrounded by historical memories. Inedited locations where people can enjoy the new designated uses. The platform objective is to create a network among projects’ creators, location managers and spaces owners, to facilitate the exchange of information, materials and contacts and to spread the importance and beauty of the new tendency of creative reuse. PostDegrado aims to give practical examples and tools to those who want to replicate one of the several and different format to reactivate unused and forgotten places. There are many existing maps that indicate the geographic coordinates of abandoned spaces. Here’s the first map about regenerated places: a collection of good practices starting from Milan and growing internationally.

Slave fortes and baracoons: re-considering the ruins and loss of historical values in trans-Atlantic slave trade relics

Alaba Simpson – Crawford University, Nigeria & Kwaku Senah – independent researcher, Ghana

Slave fortes and baracoons played significant roles in keeping and transporting slaves to the ships that eventually carried them across the Atlantic Ocean during the slave trade era in West Africa. These relics are increasingly being neglected and used for other purposes which have come to be a source of concern to historians and ethnographers, particularly where earlier works may have been carried out on these relics by these scholars. The paper intends to discuss the absolute destruction of baracoons in the Badagry community of Lagos state in Nigeria and of Forte Good Hope in the Aplaku area of Ghana where the forte has been converted in its dilapidated stage to a Beer Palour. Other examples abound in the two countries and the two scholars hope to approach the discussion from the point of view of insider researchers in order to align the topic with the conference theme. The paper hopes to cause the audience to better know the changes that have taken place in the custodian attributes of the keepers of the relics of slave trade in their various dimensions, thus bringing in the issue of disintegration and perhaps the cause for activation of these relics.

Fieldwork and creative practice: reimagining abandoned defensive architectures and rock cut burial sites 

Rupert Griffiths – Goldsmiths, University of London

Site/Seal/Gesture is a collaboration between cultural geographer Rupert Griffiths and archaeologist Lia Wei. This collaboration develops a shared language of fieldwork, process and making. Working together as artists and from our disciplinary perspectives, we deal with two distinct types of site—one in the UK, the other in China. In the UK, we look at the ruins of defensive architectures such as sound mirrors, forts and bunkers on the Thames estuary and the southeast coast. In Southwest China we look at rock cut tombs set in cliff faces, sometimes at the edge of expanding urbanisation. We correlate these sites by considering them as both monuments and dwellings in urban and rural margins. We see the bunkers and the rock cut burial sites as drawing a line between life and death—bunkers protecting the living from death and rock cut tombs separating the living and the dead. Both use the material monumentality of rock or concrete to do so, whilst set precariously at the physical and psychological margins of the host culture. As geographers and archaeologists our aim is to investigate correspondences between materiality, landscape and the human subject, and to develop and extend approaches to ethnographic fieldwork. As artists our aim is explore the process by which landscape imaginaries emerge through an assemblage of bodies, materials, tools, and technologies, bringing notions of longue durée into direct contact with informal use, lived experience and creative encounter.

Image Credit: restoration of Matrera castle near Cádiz by Carquero Arquitectura, https://www.dezeen.com/2016/10/03/carquero-arquitectura-matrera-castle-contemporary-restoration-cadiz-spain-architizer-awards/