André Cepeda

A History of Ruins and Ghosts

In these photographs by André Cepeda, we see ruins, fragments, debris, rubble, remains, material remnants. They are like viscera, skins and torsos of the city, partial details, micrologies of an urban reality in which life has been completely absorbed into the kingdom of things.   And it is justifiable to call this pure immanence a “kingdom of things”, in the same way we talk of the animal kingdom or mineral kingdom, since it is an uninhabited world: abandoned, silent, haunted by its own ghosts. It arouses our desire to embrace a totality, to attain the meaning of an urban landscape (if this oft-used expression does not contain an inherent contradiction). Yet the analytical recording and the micrological and materialist focus remain, removed from any juxtaposition and composition hypothesis that the urban landscape presupposes.  What we have here is not the documentation of a catastrophe, nor archaeological sites with photogenic or picturesque ruins.   These photos could not be further from the romantic aesthetic of the ruin – whose model is the ancient column – and its modern derivations.    Decrepitude and the weathering of time are apparent. But this is a time shorn of all its historic notions, more akin to the weather system.   They are ruins without a history (and therefore without an aura), neither arousing nostalgia nor evoking tragedy.   Their expressive value is obtained entirely from the prose of the world. The contemporary ruin, a motif and an image of our time, is neither a monument nor a landscape; it is the flesh of a devastated, destroyed, or abandoned city.  Huge abandoned and decaying blocks are the most common example of the ruin's modern image.   The destroyed city and the ghost town are images that permeate the spirit of the time, our Zeitgeist.

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The ruin is, by definition, a fragment.  Yet if we take the fragment in its romantic context, as a literary form or an aesthetic category, then it is more accurately in opposition to the ruin.    The fragment is a break from classical wholeness and harmony and yet it is an autonomous unit, turned in on itself.   Schlegel defined the fragment as “[a] small work of art, [which] has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog”. The fragment, in the romantic sense, is linked to the whole, from which it takes its essence.  Thus, contrary to the ruin, which is accidental, inharmonious, and may relate purely and simply to an absurd form, the fragment results from a project and, consequently, has a character.  In an “essay on aesthetics”, from 1907, about ruins (Die Ruine. Ein ästhetischer Versuch), Georg Simmel also established a difference between fragment and ruin, using the examples of a painting from which particles of paint have fallen off, a statue with mutilated limbs, an ancient text of poetry from which words or lines are lost or cannot be entirely reassembled. According to Simmel, these diminished works, the remains of a whole, do not have the aspect of an artistic unit. Yet the ruins of a building are different: In them, the forces and forms of nature acted upon what is missing or has disappeared, thereby creating a new whole.  Simmel is clear on this point: “(...) out of what art still lives in the ruin and what nature already lives in it, there has emerged a new whole, a characteristic unit”. Simmel is referring to natural decay and the action of vegetation on ancient ruins. The urban elements and sites that André Cepeda photographed are not yet the ruins mentioned by Simmel, although the early advance of nature can be glimpsed in some of them, because it is towards nature that all ruins are destined. They are manifestations of an ongoing process of ruin with no historical breadth, unique to the contemporary city and subject to fleeting forces, transformations, movements, and configurations.   This process of ruin is signalled by a variety of signs which point at erosion, decay, deformation, abandonment, and emptiness.   Strictly speaking, these photos only allow us to talk about ruins as a consequence of interpretive creation, as it were, in an almost abstract sense, its concrete manifestations residing in these signs.  Or perhaps the ruins of our time can be nothing more than the decayed city (made wretched by social “warfare” rather than bombs) or the ghost town. It is a ruin with a social context, akin to a document rather than a monument. A close inspection of these photographs reveals the traces of a disappearance, of a remain that can no longer be salvaged, reified.

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Ruins, unless the result of a sudden natural or man-made catastrophe, are the work of time.  As such, they are manifestations or embodiments of history.    Yet as is the case with the manner of experience in the modern city, which has become an experience of shock, of an episode that is not transmissible as a true experience (Walter Benjamin gave us the concept of this new experience marked by poverty), the urban ruin of our times, a product of our civilisation, has nothing to do with prolonged temporality, which originates in the past and slowly progresses through time; nor is it subject to a fixed topography.  The ruins that André Cepeda photographed are vestiges of an urban reality in which the passage of time always translates to decay, time that never becomes history. For this reason, they do not evoke an archaeological photograph but rather an image that drifts along the surface of time.   They are more in the ragman mould than that of the flâneur. Both are detached from the ordinary world and in their wanderings do not see what everyone else sees, the useful and the conventional.  But while the flâneur is a romantic figure, disorderly and impulsive and given to looking upwards, seeking the symbols of desire which fill the city, rather than down at the pavement, the ragman sees in the street nothing but broken dreams, rags that he collects like a Lumpensammler, as Benjamin dubbed him. The ragman photographer is unaware of the happy disposition of urban landscape photographers, who are authorities on the aesthetics of city photography and feel that cities and photography are a match made in heaven.  No, he rejects aesthetic conventions and representation codes and maintains absolute privacy, bordering on the clandestine, over his movements, which often involve places that are so far from the trodden path that they appear internal or completely removed.  He sets off in search of remains and signs, his urban reality having an expressive, almost grotesque, physiognomy. And, as a photographer of signs, he is a delirious semiotic.  The result can be an extreme semiotisation of the ongoing process of ruin and decay within the city.

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The material body of the city is no longer just stone (a mineral body) but cement, glass, plastic, aluminium.  And upon this material body, inseparable from it, a spiritual life is projected.   This spiritual life is, on occasion, daubed on the city walls in the form of inscriptions, murals, graffiti.  This symbolic space of ghostly projection and production is absent from these photographs.  Everything in them appears devoid of memory and spirit.  Material opacity reigns supreme, more akin to detritus and rubble than to ruins.   And if there are hieroglyphics of an urban culture to decipher, they are extremely basic.  Here, it is not just ruin that advances.  The desert also takes root.   

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There is a well-known idea of the city as a palimpsest, formed of several layers of urban text.   This implies that the city is bursting with visual signals and that these signs, as well as being diverse and great in number, produce simultaneous and overlapping effects, like a collage. And we can establish a contrast between what is deemed discourse and what is deposited as an accumulation without rules.  The city as text enters into the realm of legibility, whether this readability applies to the architectural or the social physiognomy.  The plan of a city, with its labyrinth of transport links, its thoroughfares, and its intersections, becomes the image of an awareness equivalent to an “internal city”, as Valéry noted in a text about Paris.   If Valéry discovered that the city has the structure of consciousness, the idea of the legibility of the city became established when the modern metropolis, with its suggestive layout and as a panoply of possible experiences, incorporated codes that are like a language with its own grammar (making a metaphor like “urban phrase” possible).  The big city is a whole world and this world is like a book.   Hence the idea of the legible city, the city as a semiotic space in which nothing, whether material or not, is bereft of meaning.   The city is a forest of signs.  Walter Benjamin raised this issue of legibility when describing his archaeological exploration project in Paris, “capital of the 19th century”, as moving from a “book of nature” to a “book of the city”. Let us read an excerpt from The Arcades Project:  “The expression ‘the book of nature’ indicates that one can read the real like a text. And that is how the reality of the nineteenth century will be treated here”. For Benjamin, reading is a deliberate experience, a quest to construct meaning. For him, Paris was a true place of signs.  Yet reading a city can at times be like deciphering the writings of a lost civilisation, for not everything was written to be bequeathed to future generations, to be handed down to posterity. How can this idea of the city as a legible text serve us when looking at these photographs by André Cepeda ? It should first be noted that they contain almost no urban syntax. If there is ultimately a syntax, it emerges by juxtaposing the series of photographs.    Without such a montage we would almost not have a city.  We would merely have urban fragments – features, remains, details – that do not form part of the syntactic composition of an extensive “urban phrase”. The city appears as absence, only emerging under the guise of details. But one has to imagine that it is there, hidden in the details like God or the Devil, unseen because the photographer has a micrological focus.  The city is anonymous – we do not know which it is nor where it is. Even the social legibility of the signs, which could provide a significant clue, is cloaked in opacity.   There is a strong desire in this photography to fragment and suspend meaning, to reveal signs in such a way that they offer themselves in their materiality, avoiding all symbolism, metaphysics, transcendence, and sometimes even meaning.  Thus, even if we are permitted to speak of ruins, we should avoid evoking a poetics of ruins.  It is neither poetry nor literature; it is a physics of ruin and decay.  

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In his essay on aesthetics within the context of ruins, Georg Simmel highlighted an antagonism between two poles: on the one hand, the “striving of the spirit”; on the other, the “necessities of nature”.  That which falls within the order of the spirit moves upward, in a movement that is also that of sublimation; that which is of the order of nature is subject to gravity and, as such, tends towards the ground, in a falling motion.  The arts such as poetry, painting, and music are made of matter that becomes invisible to a certain extent.   Then, what emerges is the “spiritual” dimension (it should not be forgotten that in Simmel's era and milieu, the word “spirit” was used frequently). On the other hand, architecture cannot escape from its material force, meaning it inevitably falls into ruin: “What has led the building upward is human will; what gives it its present appearance is the brute, downward-dragging, corroding, crumbling power of nature”.  In ruins, Simmel sees a confluence of natural forces and spiritual aspirations, and from there the “sense of peacefulness” that they convey. Clearly, Simmel is thinking of ruins in accordance with the romantic model. The contemporary ruin is something else, far-removed from this outlook. It is the mirror of a present that contemplates its deserted space, reduced to its pure material condition, given over to the life of things.   However, Simmel's ruin aesthetics, based on the opposition between spiritual elevation and the fall brought about by the forces of nature, aids a reflection on the condition of ruins, of decayed reality, and the remains that André Cepeda's photographs represent.  For they also signify, to a large extent, that which they reject and from which they distance themselves. They affirm and deny, display and conceal.

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Simmel demonstrated that the ruin is a place where history and nature meet, where history is transformed into nature. These photographs fly in the face of symbolic meaning.  They contain no trace of symbolism, which is why they appear so opaque and encased in immanence.  In the final instance, they allow us to see a history turned into stone – its unavoidable becoming-ruin – a still-life.  The depiction of a history-nature hybrid - history transformed into nature – that Simmel analysed in his essay on ruins, is also at the root of a theory on allegory that Walter Benjamin developed in his book on Baroque drama. This theory on allegory has a particular resonance in the photography of André Cepeda and takes it in unexpected directions. Firstly, towards Baroque ways of depicting the world and exhibiting history.  The direct links between allegory and ruins was formulated by Walter Benjamin in a famous phrase: “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things”. In this sense, allegory is an apt way of representing temporal expiration, demonstrating the facies hippocratica, the cadaver's physiognomy, of history. As we know, allegory and symbols are old adversaries, with the latter being lauded to the detriment of the former (romanticism expounds the idea of the symbol being superior to the vacuous allegory). Walter Benjamin sought to return the allegory to the fore, attributing it with great dignity. Above all, he demonstrated its importance in certain moments in literary history: in the Baroque period and in Baudelaire, who in the view of Benjamin was an allegorical poet – one of the factors in his modernity. The symbol is determined by an absolute unit of the “sensible object” and the “metaphysical object”, it assumes a direct, internal, and non-contradictory relationship with the essence or idea.  In its classical grandeur, it is an expression of totality.  The allegory is a form of expression that is entirely distinct from the idea that it describes  and can be characterised by arbitrariness and non-immediateness.  In this way, the symbol is to being what the allegory is to meaning (and this allows us to see why Benjamin relates it to a form of modern writing). It is in this sense that we are able to see processes of allegorical meaning within these photographs, which reveal the sense of history as a field of ruins, a succession of signs that depict decline and present the unavoidable advance of ruin.  The allegorical physiognomy of the city transformed into ruins, of history transmuted into nature: this is what these photographs show us. They offer the eye of the beholder a petrified “landscape” that has a grim and painful quality.    

António Guerreiro