Ruines à rebours

There are still some rugs on the walls, beams, dividing walls and outlines. The line of the house remains stuck to the neighbouring building. With the demolition, the inside becomes outside and the space of before becomes a two-dimensional sign. My interest for the process of demolition and reconstruction of buildings is linked to my research into visible and non-visible spaces, which are linked to the notion of loss, of disappearance and, finally, of memory.

In his book ‘Ruines à rebours’, Emmanuel Hocquard observes changes taking place in his home town of Tangier. Between the Second World War and until the independence of Morocco in 1956, Tangier was a city under international administrations, prosperous economically and culturally, but then it closed in on itself, allowing only the occasional glimpse of the traces of a glorious city.

In 1969, Robert Smithson decided to travel to Mexico to visit the archaeological site of Yucatan. Once there, he realised that the ancient ruins he had come to see were not in the jungle but in town, within a hotel that had been abandoned before construction was finished: the Hotel Palenque. In the typology of Emmanuel Hocquard, this is an example of “ruin in advance”: something destroyed before it has existed.

The places of the processes of urban transformations, the places destroyed and abandoned are our contemporary archaeological sites, our modern fossils to be studied. But they will last only a short time and will be destroyed without being able to resist the passage of time or before leaving a trace. Is it possible for them to become documents for an iconography.

Lola Créïs, Rok Bogataj, Giuliana Carbi