Futures From Ruins

Ruins can be potent "containers for emergent forms of inhabitation in a damaged world." Relating to ruins as more than nostalgic, fetishized objects interrupts our memory cycles, reminding us that place can be remade in imaginative ways even when conditions are harsh.

Reshaping ruins activates the future through experimentation with the past, a dynamic that both shifts embedded memories of physical spaces and diversifies what and how we imagine what can be.

People have been inspired to create new spaces, rituals and infrastructure amongst ruins for millennia, artists in particular. From London to Berlin to Rome to Manila, many cities have been continually built anew atop the wreckage of their pasts, with creative groups often leading the way.

(Bombay Beach) is a physical reminder that success and devastation are two sides of the same coin, knowledge that provides incentive to look beyond the nostalgia that ruins so often inspire.

anthropologist Anna Tsing’s ideas about ruins as fertile ground for new life: ruins are places that support the unruly, entwined strains of existence, proving that life can thrive long after apocalypse occurs.

When ruins become ground for creation rather than objects from devastated pasts, they cultivate belief in what’s possible. It’s a shift that people like Tsing insist is essential to moving beyond extractive cycles of “promise and ruin, promise and ruin.”

Understanding that the ground we walk on is in a state of constant transformation is a powerful invitation to remake it, continually, anew.

The creativity people are bringing to their homes is an extension of the care Bombay Beach inspired long before the Biennale began. Many small towns foster solidarity and connection. Harsh landscapes inspire support as well.

Tsing encourages us to look beyond those simplistic narratives, and to ask what else ruins might allow to emerge. As portals to past realities, ruins have the capacity to cultivate connection across history, geography, and culture.