This Wreckless Landscape

Abstract

on some cheap land leased from a railway company they are stacked up to ten high, headlights plucked out, strands of wiring trailing. Carrion for breakers, brokers, and the drivers of bangers. There might be the odd stolen car hidden after dismantling, its undamaged parts reassembling an insurance write-off for illegal profit, creating a “ringer.” These are the road’s ruins, crumbling faster than buildings; they are the rusting record of metallic modernity, an intimate architecture of vehicle fashions. Some still wearable, others exotic, historic, nostalgic. Modern men’s discarded wardrobe. Mobile machines immobilized. An archaeological record of the just past.

Allegory is in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things

—Walter Benjamin, The Origins of the German of Mourning (1928)¹

Severed—this usually applies to wiring harnesses trapped or cut through by damaged metalwork

—D. Griffiths, Automobile Assessing (1983)²