Field Note: On the Nature of Ruins?

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“As a Chol-speaking Zapatista remarked to a friend of mine recently, pointing to the ruins of Palenque, “we managed to get rid of those guys. I don’t suppose the Mexican Government could be all that much of a challenge in comparison.”"
(Quote from: Graeber, D. 2007. There Never Was a West : Or, Democracy Emerges from the spaces in between. In: Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. p.362).

“We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth, there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts.”
(Buenventura Durruti in an Interview with Pierre van Passen of the Toronto ‘Star’ After the liberation of Aragon, Spain, 1936).

These two quotes got me thinking about ruins. Ruins must be one of the most immediate places of public interaction with their archaeological past, without entering into a museum. How are they presented and what does this represent?

Often ruins are presented as remnants of “once great civilisations”. However, I wonder to what extent ruins in their nature represent examples of what was once a “great” civilisation, or alternatively, the great force that ruined them? Or perhaps something else entirely?

When we think of ruins, do we think of those who built them, those who commanded them to be built, or those who destroyed them and birthed the ruins, or those who value them today as ruins, or places of significance?

I wonder whether telling the stories of those who brought ruination, a story that is clearly hidden behind the story of the ‘once great civilisations’ could in fact bring a whole new light to the ruins that scatter the landscape, and the his-stories the built heritage has to offer us?

I thought of the ruins of monasteries, from the dissolution period. These ruins usually, but not always, tell the story of the dissolution – in this way they do tell the causal story, but, this story is not a collapse story, or a movement from below story, it is a change of power… in fact it is change enforced from above, in this way they tell the story of the founding of the monarchs newest role in the civilisation of today (head of both state and church). Could these then be considered to be less ruins, and more the building blocks of the current civilisation?

I further wonder what the meaning of modern ruins are, those created by terrorism, war, and such like… whose story do they tell?

When considering that even ruins, so much a part of our everyday cultural and physical landscape, have multiple stories that are subjective, and that in many places their multiple histories have been homogenised into one official story, I am left to contemplate what this means for conservators, how does one approach an object that has such conflicting possibilities of interpretation, how does one ensure that neither story is diminished through the process of preserving the tangible remains of a past that is increasingly becoming recognised as intangible, and once again who should decide?

It seems to me the issue of intangible/tangible is also one of control… and in this way it is obvious that therefore wherever there is heritage, there will be a dispute over the intangible nature of that heritage.

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* A field note in this Blog is an idea, concept, issue, that I think worthy of mention, but, that I have not yet expanded upon in any essay length form. But, I include here as a prelude to such a discussion.