Description
In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in ruins and ruination by artists and theorists. But where does our contemporary fascination with ruins come from? What are its causes and contradictions, along with its politics, economics, ecologics? Why now? How does it relate to other historical epoques, no less beset with what Rose Macaulay termed ruinenlust? And, perhaps most urgently, what are we meant do with this decay? How to live in a world of ruins? While many of these questions have been approached by different disciplines and subject fields, this edition of Performance Research sets out to explore the specific contribution that Theatre and Performance Studies, with its unique methodologies and practices, might make to our current obsession with ruins and ruination. Contributions include essays on photography, writing, theatre-making, ecology, aesthetics, autobiography, dark tourism, heritage sites and cities.
Introduction
Carl Lavery, Richard Gough
The Lesson of Anatomy 1974/2014
Mike Pearson
The Regenerative Ruination of Romeo Castellucci
Timmy De Laet, Edith Cassiers
Ruin Lust and the Council Estate : Nostalgia and ruin in Arinze Kene’s God’s Property
Katie Beswick
‘Terremoto: Utopia, memory, and the unfinished in Sicily’
David Williams
Watermarked : ‘Venice really lives up to its postcard beauty’
Nicolas Whybrow
The Ruin in Question
Hayden Lorimer, Simon Murray
Sites of Dereliction : Beginnings and allies of performance
Phil Smith
Trümmer Geographies : Teufelsberg as a site of forgetting
Benedict Anderson
Ruined Landscapes and Residual Architecture : Affect and palimpsest in trauma tourism
Laurie Beth Clark
The Ruin as Memorial – The Memorial as Ruin
Silke Arnold-de Simine
St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross : The ruin of modernism
David Archibald, Johnny Rodger
A Future for Hashima : Pornography, representation and time
Carl Lavery, Lee Hassall
Photography, Performance, Ruin : Performing photography in site of architecture
Ian Wiblin
Cruising the Queer Ruins of New York’s Abandoned Waterfront
Fiona Anderson
Ruins Recast : Appropriated and fabricated ruins in the work of Scott Myles
Dominic Paterson
Artist’s pages
Eleanor Bowen
Genet’s Cycle of Ruins
Esther Belvis Pons
Quake City
Sharon Mazer
Ruin Hermeneutic
Sophie Sleigh-Johnson
Excavating Performance Contexts : Performative Monuments: The rematerialisation of public art by Mechtild Widrich (review)
Jessica Santone