Seeing The Future In The Present Past

Siobhan Lyons perceives the flow of history in terms of organic growth and decay.

- Siobhan Lyons

Down the end of the street where I used to live in Melbourne there was an old house that became abandoned. For the longest time the house went through varying stages of decay, with boards put up over the windows, graffiti on the walls, and weeds obscuring the litter left behind by the teenagers who would frequently loiter inside the abandoned structure.

Our contemporary obsession with modern ruins, ambiguously dubbed ‘ruin porn’, has a tendency to trivialise the importance of such sites, which appear out of phase with our normal experience of the present. In her book Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), historian Kate Brown talks instead of ‘rustalgia’ (cf nostalgia). For Brown, while some people speak of their ‘lustful’ attraction to such sites, “others will speak in mournful tones of what is lost, what I call rustalgia” (p.149). Rustalgia both transforms and transports us, underpinning the more philosophical elements of these places, while ‘ruin porn’ makes them into nothing more than objects to gape at. She thinks her term and what it draws attention to will help us understand how “sketchy is the longstanding faith in the necessity of perpetual economic growth.”

Focusing On The Future