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Reconsidering the Imaginary of the Ruin: Emancipation, Subversion, and Resistance from the Nineteenth Century to Today


When Notre Dame went up in flames, news and social media erupted with tributes, photographs, and memories of the famous monument. Perhaps more captivating than the event itself were the images that followed: a pile of smoldering wreckage lying before the ornamental altar or the cathedral’s burning spire tumbling amidst plumes of smoke. Suddenly, a bastion of artistic accomplishment was transformed into a jarring reminder of impermanence. The imagery of ruins exists as a particular kind of memento mori; an imprint of the passage of time, it functions as a point of contact with the past, while also referring to an elusive future where our monuments collapse, transform, are reimagined, or rebuilt.

This session considers the discourse of ruin as a subject, metaphor, and process. Past scholarship has examined the relationship of the ruin to modernity, industry, and the environment. Expanding the conversation, we invite papers that consider how ruin can be understood as a site of obsession, production, or emancipation. We welcome projects that look at the construction, reproduction, and dissemination of ruin imagery as a dialogic and social endeavor. Papers may ask how the ruin functions as political subversion or a modality for protest or resistance, and conversely how it is also used to shore up dominant ideologies. This session also intends to examine the ruin outside of so-called “western” narratives and consider why ruination outside of the global north has largely been ignored. This panel reconsiders the pivotal role of the ruin in art and architecture history.


Field of Study:
Africa
Asia
Canada
Caribbean
Central Africa

Chairs:
Ewa Matyczyk,Boston University - ewa.matyczyk@gmail.com and Caitlin Lathrop Dalton,Boston University - cdalton@bu.edu

Views of Chicago: Picturing the Ruins of the Great Fire
Christina Michelon, American Antiquarian Society
Re-Imagining The Ruin, Fortifying Religion: Architecture, Internationalism, and the American Campaign For “Protestant Modernism" (1919-1939)
Azra Dawood, University of Houston
The Ruins that Talk: Bahman Jalāli’s Iran-Iraq War Photobooks in the 1980s
Hoda Nedaeifar, Indiana University Bloomington
Revisiting Ruin: The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and an Emergent Aesthetics of Recuperative Recontextualization
Hannah Ryan, St. Olaf College
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