Abstract
Through the methodology of conversation, Lavery and Murray explore approaches to ruin and ruination, asking what job of work the ruin might perform in the twenty-first century. Using the provocation of “thinking like a ruin,” the authors propose different perspectives to help understand the materiality and theoretical context(s) of ruin and ruination. Drawing upon four case studies—Andy Goldsworthy’s Stonehouse Bonnington, St. Peter’s Seminary near Glasgow, Kris Verdonck’s Conversations at the End of the World, and the Sicilian town of (New) Gibellina—Lavery and Murray debate the ethical and political potential ruins have for imagining new forms of resistance, thus reconfiguring or re-purposing how decay and dereliction might provide a different lens for approaching issues of environment and ecology.
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Lavery, C., Murray, S. (2019). Thinking Like a Ruin. In: Mitsi, E., Despotopoulou, A., Dimakopoulou, S., Aretoulakis, E. (eds) Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26905-0_15
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