I will be speaking at this event on the 28th November at the Whitworth Art Gallery. The event is free but please book a place if you would like to attend.
A half-day seminar looking at artistic and scientific responses to industrial and other modern ruins, with Jane and Louise Wilson, Paul Dobraszczyk (University of Manchester), Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan University), Bradley Garrett (University of Oxford), Jeff Hughes (University of Manchester), Dylan Trigg (University of Sussex)
Ruins have come to occupy a central place in visual culture: as images of the aftermath of acts of terrorism or the resulting war on terror; the ruin of the housing market after the recent financial crisis; the deserted towns and villages surrounding Chernobyl and Fukishima; or a post-apocalyptic obsession in cinema. This seminar will examine contemporary notions of ruin and ruination, in relation to architecture, the city and history, and calling on a diverse range of ruin obsessives from the fields of philosophy, cultural geography, art and architectural history. Signifiers of both civilisation and barbarism, creativity and destruction, ruins call into question the solid, the enduring and the permanent, representing as they do either the end of the old or the beginning of something new. We seek to learn from this challenge presented by ruins, whether they be created by the constructive but often brutal processes of modernisation, or their opposites – the forces of destruction, both natural and unnatural, real or imagined.
