A Future Ruin

A Future Ruin​

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A few years ago, in an interview, the Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, when asked what he was looking for when designing a building or a house, replied: "a beautiful future ruin".
This is not a new idea - the ruin or a ruin for the future - but perhaps it can make us reflect on the relationship between images: between the incessant past, the ruin, and an abstract idea of the future, that is, the continuous present, in which the artist must inscribe his work.
In the history of photography, many artists have had a fetishism for the aura of ruins. Whether documentation tout court, personal history or visual research, most of these images seem to "look at the ruins", but without creating a tension with the present. As a creator of images (buildings), the architect understands that what is now a ruin was always created in the present, in the sense that it was both contemporary and in tension with something older.
For ten days, fifteen students of the Master of Photography at the Iuav University of Venice, in residence at the Archaeological Park of Selinunte, had this idea of a future ruin in mind. It was an intense process of adding and removing images, of trial and error, of dialogue and questions. Among others, one question was always present: "How to inscribe our personal time in a landscape full of references to the past? This project tries to answer this question by showing possible interpretations of the environment, a dialogue between the experience of a place and one's own visual memory".
José Pedro Cortés
My interpretation of "The Future Ruin" focused mainly on the aspect of conservation and protection of what often turns out to be fragile and therefore at risk of ruin, even collapse or disappearance.
All the elements of the photographs are interconnected, sometimes covered by transparent sheets as if to protect the presences underneath, sometimes shrouded in darkness as if to disappear into thin air. The folds, wrinkles and marks on the skin speak of ruin, but also of a concrete time, of a present that continues to flow despite everything.