Futures From Ruins

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.

(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.

The dynamic echoes social and cultural geographer Tim Edensor’s idea of ruins as fluid spaces, where limits on material curiosity and imagination are let go, and exploration of alternative futures can thrive.

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.

Ruins have inspired similar kinds of objectification for millennia. For many, they’re visual objects, things to romanticize, fetishize and look at from afar. It’s a simplified way of seeing that lends itself to extraction more than engagement, a kind “over-aestheticization of past eras." Henri Lefebvre explored the phenomenon in 1968, writing ... See more

Emphasizing the visuals of ruination offers an emotional buffer from the economic, political, and social issues that lead to ruin’s rise.

When ruins become places for celebration and growth, they challenge the narrative of inevitable decay. They offer us the chance to cultivate Lefebrve’s ideas of “the right to the city” through the experience of everyday inhabitation.