For several decades now, ruins have been used ubiquitously as symbols, critical or otherwise, of the current state of our world, as they supposedly offer a suitable metaphorical approach to global problems such as climate catastrophe or the dismantling of democracy. According to the essayist Svetlana Boym, in this respect, “the early 21st century exhibits a strange ruinophilia, a fascination for ruins.” However, very soon, this fascination resulted in inflation. Hence, this talk argues that this inflationary use of the ruin metaphor has become somewhat arbitrary, thus weakening its discretionary power and critical potential. Ruins, in other words, cannot be a symbol for everything that flirts with decadence or destruction. At the same time, the thinking and the “language of the ruins,” understood as metaphors for the world’s current state of affairs, remain European mainly. After all, the process of ruination and its related critical power can be better verified only in a stabilized historical context. To exemplify this dynamic, proceeding comparatively, this article will address a recent phenomenon that occurred in Brazil: the fire that destroyed the Brazilian National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, showing how the subsequent debate about the use of the site points to a different understanding of historicity, memory, and nation budling. While some, such as the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, asked for the destroyed building to be kept as a ruin— in order to remind the Brazilian population of the problems that led to it, such as lack of governmental incentives, societal interest, and the like—this talk argues the opposite. Due to a lack of a culture of remembrance, the ruin in Brazil, envisioned by Viveiros de Castro as a cipher, in the words of Andreas Huyssen, cannot go very far as a critical proposition. To illustrate the point further, a contrast with the case of Berlin will be made, specifically, the case of the Reichstag building, showing how some of the decisions made around the spoils of war, communism, and Nazism rendered perhaps a different way to invasion the role of ruins in contemporary societies. Moreover, I argue that we should discard the dominant form of the “language of the ruins” to learn new accents and dialects, reenergizing the ruin’s critical capabilities.
João Gabriel Rizek is a PhD student at the Freie Universität Berlin in Art History, where he is also a Research Assistant with the Collaborative Research Centre 1512 Intervening Arts. He studied music and film before art history, and his interests revolve around the relationships between art and politics, especially in the Latin American context. In 2021, he presented a talk at the Hamburg University that was part of the lecture series Ruinen aus der Sicht der Kulturwissenschaften: Materialität im Verfall – Nachnutzungen – Umdeutungen, which was later transformed into a book chapter.
For several decades now, ruins have been used ubiquitously as symbols, critical or otherwise, of the current state of our world, as they supposedly offer a suitable metaphorical approach to global problems such as climate catastrophe or the dismantling of democracy. However, very soon, this fascination resulted in inflation. Hence, this talk argues that this inflationary use of the ruin metaphor has become somewhat arbitrary, thus weakening its discretionary power and critical potential. Ruins, in other words, cannot be a symbol for everything that flirts with decadence or destruction. In this paper, we will talk about the fire that destroyed the Brazilian National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, showing how the subsequent debate about the use of the site points to a different understanding of historicity, memory, and nation budling.