Fragmentary structures that remain today as testimonies to the history of landscapes — above all urban ones — in the architectural vestiges that compose the memory of places: evidences referring back to prior temporalities; decayed existences situated in a given territory — be it an earlier urban fabric — present thus, and in contrast to what exists in the present, for instance, a contemporary city. In this sense, they relate directly to the concept of the palimpsest.
Such structures, inscribed in the lived landscape and documented in images, transgress the temporal boundary between present and past. No one remains indifferent before them: ruins provoke being and dwelling in the world; they evoke responses ranging from contemplative sensibilities and aesthetic appreciation to the critical recollection of violent events and reflections upon finitude. We may think of ruins — as a significant presence in the landscape, as a sensory dimension in the recognition of the physical vestiges of former times — as spaces of Time, just as, within them, we rediscover the temporalities of inhabited Space.
Many ruins, valued as historical heritage with an emphasis on cultural and identity-based relations, have served (as they still do) political ends when mobilised within the imaginaries and narratives fashioned by nationalist engagements — national and even transnational monuments, for example — that seek to legitimise the (frequently mythical) origins of modern nations, appropriating those ruins for political purposes in order to disseminate particular ideologies, including philofascist ones. Imposing ruins represent the artistic potential and technical ingenuity of ancient civilisations: they transmit cultural and moral values along with symbols of power.
In the Anthropocene, ruins afford us a certain measure of transformations; they reveal themselves as scenes of the human drama bound up with the temporalities of each location — in the sense given to that concept by Milton Santos in Espaço e Método / Space and Method (2008). When we understand location, in his words, as "a moment of the immense movement of the world, apprehended at a geographical point, a place," and distinguish location from place, we grasp that "each place is always changing its significance, owing to social movement: at every instant the fractions of society that belong to it are not the same." For this reason, still in the geographer's voice, "location is a bundle of social forces exercising themselves in a place".
Silvio Luiz Cordeiro