WD – What dawned?
HL – Confusion! I thought I was looking at post-quake
images from San Francisco 1906 or something. I was struck by the peculiar status of these
structures. They are brand new but come across as ruins. They seem
suspended in a paradoxical temporality where history and future, ruin
and building, collapse into one single expression.
WD – The transport is ruined as well.
HL – The poor state of the plates made the connection to
my own photography. These images made me articulate what I'm doing,
which, up to now, I haven't done.
WD – Robert Polidori have said something like
"The most interesting things are always behind us. I look at
everything as archeology."
HL – Sure, I agree, kind of. I'd swap "archeology" for
"ruins" though, and I believe directions like
"behind" are insufficient for a discussion about the use of the obsolete
and its possible index in the spectator. I mean Golden Age tropes are
traditionally located behind us, Utopian tropes ahead of us, but there
is circularity here, no? Monday's bold utopia becoming bleak reminiscing
come Friday? But the desire desiring to articulate both tropes is one
and the same.
WD - This desire being the place in the spectator where the future of the past strikes a chord.
HL – Yes, and the reverse: The 'pastness' secreted in the
futuristic. I'm not interested in expressing something unequivocally
nostalgic. What I do does not concern "loss" or
"memory", rather the opposite: The reflex, desire if you will, which is triggered here-and-now by obsolete
devices. I'm interested in that suspended mode where nostalgia and
utopia are one and without direction, in an immediacy of vision, where
vision itself is shown to be ruined. It's a paradoxical concept:
Experience as a ruin without history, a repeatedly emerging first ruin,
an immediate ruin.
WD – This sought after immediacy seems to have a
correlate in your choice of tools: You prefer instant media.
HL – O. Haven't thought of it that way. Instant media
- besides its look which I adore - forces me to engage the subject right then and there. Whatever is to be extracted from
a subject must be extracted in situ. It's
simple because once you got it, you got it, no unpleasant
surprises in post-processing, on the other hand it's very difficult to
handle and when you don't succeed you get proof positive right on the
spot that what you're doing is shite! It's very difficult to leave
a subject until you get it right - so I do a lot of cursing while
excursing.
WD – You also gravitate toward modern structures, is it
because what is old is manifestly so and therefore devoid of what you
are looking for?
HL – Not sure, it may be similar to my preference for
color. I love black and white but it so readily starts to mumble nostalgic cues.
And manifestly old structures seem to express nostalgia, don't they? – which, like I said before, does not interest me as much.
Shooting ruins in a ruined way dissolves a tension I'm after: The past secreted in the
futuristic and the future secreted in the obsolete.
Though lately I've been more curious about images in which human
artefacts are not present in the subject matter, and in which the notion of
ruin is expressed only in the registering device, the vision.
WD – A Kantian bent to this: Ruined impressions of a
ruined mind.
HL – And Benjamin – bloody Germans [laughs] – he devised a concept of
some temporal density when writing about "the primal history of
modernity" – not sure about the original term, maybe
"Urgeschichte"? – becoming visible and present. He seems to address a similar
phenomenon: A revelatory immediacy of something distant, a now secreted inside what is
passed, perhaps akin to my ramblings about an immediate ruin.
WD – You've touched upon this before, I believe. In the text Awe
in the Fringe Landscapes, you write: "That-which-is erects an
outpost, which, at the same time, is a set of remains, a ruin, on the farthest cape of experience."
That-which-is being a label for the
world in a metaphysical sense, unknowable except as remains?
HL – Right. Experience, how we comprehend, is always
ruin.
¤
© Washington Desoto and Hansi Linderoth
/ Editora Mercuria 2007
Photographs by Hansi Linderoth
Ruins Main 
