Ruins are suspended in the middle. They stand poised between the forms they were and the formlessness to which they are destined. They lose their original purpose (even if they have the singuarity of artworks) and they are severed irremediably from their contexts of production.
In the present they are fused, almost always destructively, with their inmediate natural environments. They call for an active, moving viewer who can investigate on their identity. Piranesi talked about them as “queste parlanti ruine“: “these speaking riuns“. Decayed buildings speak, make noises, change their lights and move (fast and slow). In their “dying” process, they acquire new life and new living forces.
As explorers, we respond to ruins in very specific ways. For me, the most interesting one is that we transform materiality into ideas, learning something about the value of human making and the place of our made world within the natural world.
