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Category=JHMC
Category=NK
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institutional decay
materiality of symbols
museumification
resignification of monuments
Ruins
Product details
- ISBN 9781836245384
- Dimensions: 163 x 239mm
- Publication Date: 05 Sep 2025
- Publisher: Liverpool University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The essays in this book explore the history of ruins in multiple cultures and periods. Authors study ways in which ruins can be appropriated, foregrounded and re-semanticized for political purposes. The links between the materiality of monuments and global processes of ruination are seldom explored, as are the historicity of rubble and its museumification. Ruins are predicated on the interplay between presence and absence; they remind us of caducity while conjuring up the spectrum of the completeness that would negate them. They can awaken the eeriness of the disintegrating modern city and serve as a metaphor for institutional decay. But they can also underpin proposals of restoration through salvage and reuse of the rubble.
Joan Ramon Resina is Professor of Iberian Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford. Laura Menéndez Gorina is Research Manager for Computational Social Sciences and Humanities and Education at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
