[ecrea] Transformations CFP: The Ruin, the Future

Transformations CFP: The Ruin, the Future *CFP: Issue 28
*
*The Ruin, the Future
*
Over the past few years a swathe of what has become known as “ruin porn”
has swept the internet. Perhaps in an uncanny updating of Albert Speer’s
dark fantasies of “ruin value”, photographs of Detroit’s abandoned
factories and theatres, Chernobyl’s crumbling tenements and “urbex”
photos of ruined asylums and hotels are gleefully traded on Facebook and
Reddit and have amassed immense cultural currency.

This contemporary interest in ruins scales from numerous blogs and
sub-Reddits to the vaulted heights of major art institutions, with the
Tate gallery’s 2013 “Ruin Lust” exhibition. But of course – as the
Tate’s exhibition charted – this fascination has its roots in much older
traditions. The ruin was employed for theological purposes in the
paintings of the Renaissance, and for didactic and allegorical purposes
in the Romantic paintings of the 18th century. For hundreds of years
ruins havebeen both quotidian elements of the daily lives of many,
especially in Europe, while they have also operated as rich sources of
historical meaning within various modes of artistic expression.

What can be done with the ruin today? Can we put the observations of key
theorists of the ruin, such as Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel, to new
purposes? And from our ancient, colonial and industrial ruins can we
pull some hope, some imagination or possibility for the future that sees
the ruin differently than as an emblem of a glorious or inglorious past?

This issue of /Transformations/ calls for reflections on the ruin and
ruination, its past and its future. Possible topics may include (but
need not be limited to):

Ruins of the ancient world and archaeological practice
The ruin and Romanticism
Walter Benjamin’s allegory and the ruin
The city in ruins
The aesthetics of the ruin
Colonial ruins and ruination
Film emulsion and the media, the ruin of the image
The ruin and the archive, memory and forgetting
The ruin as poetics
Hermeneutics of the ruin
Contemporary ruins: “ruin porn” memes and the internet
Urban exploration and the industrial ruin
The ruin and pollution, bloodstreams and the environment
The ruin as messianic event
The ruin and the future, the ruin as possibility
Abstracts (200-400 words) are due 1st September 2015, with a view to
submit articles by 15th January 2016.

Abstracts shouldbe forwarded to: (editor /at/ transformationsjournal.org)

View /Transformations/ online: http://www.transformationsjournal.org





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