Ruins of ruins. Materiality and immateriality of degraded ruins 1/2
In the wake of Alain Schnapp's fundamental work, particularly his Histoire universelle des ruines, we will examine a very specific category of ruins. Those which, while their status of monumental ruin, worthy of being preserved, was established, are the object of destruction. There is first of all the long time that transforms an outstanding monument into a ruin; then comes the time of preservation that tries to stop them in a precise state. Sometimes an act comes afterwards which ruins them even more, until they disappear. There are too many examples of these voluntary destructions of ruins which formed a considerable part of the world's imagination and heritage. The recent news or even the present give many examples, from the Buddhas of Bâmiyân to the temples of Baalshamin or Bêl in Palmyra. The history of this very specific type of discussion, which does not concern the monument, but the vestige, deserves to be studied in depth. The power of these monuments for those who seize them by destroying them, as well as the power of the images of these same destructions, is never more than a new declination of iconoclasm -- or of the iconoclash that was the subject of Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel's programmatic exhibition at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe in 2002.
This question, where the history of heritage and iconoclasm intersect, also involves problems of materiality and immateriality. Epistemological questions first of all. What can be the monumental status of the extreme and terminal ruins that are these new devastated monuments, reduced to dust or derisory rubble? How can we document the history of these monuments and their successive states, at a time when digital tools allow us to make virtual reconstructions of unprecedented precision? What choices of reconstitution or restoration should be adopted, in the face of such destruction, at a time when the virtual and even material reproducibility of monuments can reach unprecedented degrees of precision? Finally, the memory of these extreme ruins must be questioned. That which is aimed at in these destructions, indissociable from the communities which are attached to them in the spirit of those who perpetuate them. That of the very act of destruction, which is necessarily carrying meaning and which will be an integral part of the monument, in its double material status, made of subsisting traces, debris, dust, and of absence, immaterial ruin having existed and remaining only as a memory with some tiny material remains.