BETWEEN RUINS: THINKING IN TRANSITIONS

TEXT BY JULIA GWENDOLYN SCHNEIDER

Dorothee Albrecht’s House of Ruins. Dwelling on the Contemporary Globe follows an essayistic method of allowing multi-perspective lines of thought to unfold as an installation in the exhibition space. The basic idea of the ruin as a fractional sign of totality ¹ serves as a point of departure for an experimental arrangement about contemporary ruins, which develops its narration from the fragment. The artist approaches a “thinking of the trace” which, speaking with Édouard Glissant, is “neither pervasive, nor systematic, nor defeating, but rather a non-systematic, intuitive, fragmented, ambivalent thinking, which best corresponds to the complexity and extraordinary diversity of the world we live in.”²

Albrecht works with documentary photographs derived from publicly accessible sources combined with her own pictures and presents these on free-standing, raw or white press boards. Comparable with time layers of archaeological excavations, the artist presents large-format single images or small series arranged as a complex course in the exhibition space, thus establishing interrelations. The selected photographs convey a notion of “stored time without chronological order” ³, categorized by aesthetical analogies and geographical origins. 

The first layer focuses on the massive devastation of the city of Düsseldorf during the Second World War. In the municipal archive Albrecht came across thousands of black-and-white photos by an unknown photographer: pictures of destruction taken after the bombings. Sorted typologically, the macro and micro perspectives are set in dialogue: fields of rubble of destroyed streets, skeleton-like remains of individual homes and former housing filled with debris and ashes. Contrasted with the current flood of images, a single photograph of a destroyed street taken in 2012 represents the horrendous ravages of war in the Syrian city of Homs. Visually, it bears a striking resemblance to the ruin landscape in Düsseldorf. 

Albrechts’s global reference system is always also about subtle differentiation. Analogous to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the public space, the artist perceives the House of Ruins as developing from “the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised.” ⁴ This quote belongs to selected references the artist displays in the installation as supplemental text material together with detailed image information, thus facilitating a hybrid production of knowledge. 

House of Ruins exploits almost the entire repertoire of contemporary ruins. Besides featuring ruins of war, it deals with the catastrophic devastations resulting from earthquakes in Haiti and the Chinese province of Sichuan and includes the nuclear catastrophes in Chernobyl and Fukushima. Panoramic sequences from the area around Garzweiler illustrate the ruinous impact on the landscape caused by the mining industry. Next to this, one’s view is directed to the ghostly remains of quasi-dismantled villages. House of Ruins will not, however, allow the Syrian ruined city of Palmyra to perish, as it is synonymous with structures that incorporate different cultural influences and provide an ancient testimony of tolerance. Albrecht’s installation features the ancient oasis city before its destruction through the so-called Islamic State. 

This visualisation practice not only creates a system of references to the real world, but also picks up on peripheral elements of ruins, allowing us to expand our thoughts and reflect what is there on the fictional level. Albrecht’s photographs of the Acropolis neglect the main spectacle of the ancient ruins to focus instead on stone slabs “which have lost their original place in the ancient ensemble.” ⁵  Albrecht shifts the perspective to what Brian Dillon describes as the perhaps most enigmatic aspect of the period of destruction: “the manner in which it points towards the future rather than the past, or rather uses the ruined resources to imagine, or reimagine, the future.” ⁶  In Albrecht’s imagination the seemingly negligible ancient rubble symbolises potential building material. She even goes one step further. Along the exhibition course, between the movable walls, simple tarpaulins, mats, blankets and palettes evoke a poetic vision of temporarily settling in the provisional. The plain materials create a reference to the Japanese aesthetics of the Wabi-Sabi ⁷, which, contrary to the monumental and permanent, indicates an openness toward the transience of life.

[1] Cf. Norbert Bolz, “Die Moderne als Ruine,” in: Ruinen des Denkens. Denken in Ruinen, (trans. here as: Modernity as a Ruin in Ruins of Thinking. Thinking in Ruins) eds. Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996: p. 9.

[2] Édouard Glissant, Kultur und Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielheit. (trans. here as: Culture and Identity. Introduction to a Poetics of Plurality) Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2013: p. 21.

[3] Babatte Mangolte, “Eine Frage der Zeit: Analog versus Digital,” in: Frauen und Film: Das Alte und das Neue, magazine no. 64 (September 2004), pp. 11–26, quoted after: Juli Carson, „Florian Pumhösls Kritische Ästhetik,“ in: Modernism as Ruin, ed. Sabine Folie. Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst: p. 125.

[4] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of Chicago press, Chicago, London, 1998, p. 57.

[5] Dorothee Albrecht in the introductory text on House of Ruins. Dwelling on the Contemporary Globe, June 2017.

[6] Brian Dillion, “A Short History of Decay,” in: Ruins. Documents of Contemporary Art. ed. Brian Dillon, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011: p. 18.

[7] See Leonard Koren, Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, Point Reyes, CA: Imperfect Publishing, 2008.