Ruins – elements of the past or the future?
The defining task of archaeologists is to ask themselves questions about the past and to investigate them systematically using all the tools available to us in the discipline. As such, archaeologists protect and study the material remains of the past. Ruins are therefore the main object of their investigation, but their very definition is by no means self-evident. The encounter with ruins is not without risk. Diderot, Goethe, Chateaubriand and Heine were well aware of this. For them, engaging with ruins is a kind of intimate experience - an experience of moral necessity that leads to a dialogue with one's own self and underlines the fragility of one's own existence. Heine expressed this better than anyone else:
"We don't realise the ruins until we are ruins ourselves."
This notion seems to echo Chateaubriand's famous phrase:
"All people have a secret affection for ruins. This feeling is linked to the fragility of our nature, to the hidden correspondence between these ruined monuments and the fragility of our existence."[1]
For the people of the Enlightenment and the Romantics, the ruins are both object and subject, a concrete presence of the past. In order to understand their meaning, one must be able to enter into a dialogue with them. Piranesi was fascinated by the "speaking ruins", even if this idea does not actually belong to the Occident. It is more likely to be found in medieval China with the "moya", those enormous inscriptions that decorate the sacred mountains, or in the Arab poets of the 7th or 8th century who desperately tried to interrogate the humble traces of the camps in the desert, like Abû Nuwâs:
"You who turn to the ruins of the camp,
What secrets do the abandoned ruins hold for you?
You can only find silent stones there
And wretched animals, to whom only the echo gives an answer."[2]
The hallmark of the ruins is therefore the surrounding silence, without the inscriptions being able to explain them to the visitor or, even less, open up the necessary dialogue with them. The encounter with ruins thus seems to be a universal phenomenon. The appearance of ruins varies from one society to another, but the essential existence of ruins is everywhere and always, because they are proof of a balance between oblivion and remembrance. They are a remnant, a relic of the past that shows the traces of man's actions or the passing of time in objects. As Simmel very aptly observed, the ruin is a return of culture to nature. The materials that people have used to create their dwellings, their artworks, their fortresses, bridges and roads gradually or very quickly return to the state of nature as a result of erosion and the transformation of forms. This process is the result of the wear and tear and the passage of time that affect monuments and objects: the material character of the monuments inevitably leads to their future as ruins.
There is therefore a tension between the immaterial nature of memory and the persistence of material traces. For a building to become a ruin, you have to give it a name, assign it to a specific period, in short, turn it into an object of collective memory. This is certainly not always easy: you have to recognise the surviving structures, realise that burial sites and ancient cities have become mounds, and much more.
For this reason, the ruins are an expression of both the future and the past.