AoR
Aesthetics of Ruination
What is at stake in remembering the past? How can our senses, sensations, sensibilities guide us to and through the densities of the past and the archives that try, but perhaps always fail, to contain it? What possibilities emerge if we inhabit these archives of history - the Visual AIDS archive as one example - as an archive of feeling? Can we experiment in wayward collectivity, a being-with that breaks open the aesthetic imaginaries and intimacies of HIV along with its representational boundedness? And in this space of feeling for, with and through, what might the hums and textures of the artworks we encounter highlight about the arts and practices of living marginalisation and otherwise?
Our presentations during the Visual AIDS Annual Symposium will build on a Studio we organized in April 2025 where we ‘listened’ to the art of Ronald Lockett and Robert Farber. In critical conversation with an art historical approach that seeks to represent the artist and their work in the context of culture and time, for us, Farber and Lockett’s work inspire a more sensory methodology. A way of becoming with and through the artworks that is productive of wayward aesthetics that feel their way back to the past while refusing capture and gesturing beyond that which feels unlivable in the present.
In our research our task has been to sift through the imagined traces of what has been lost, discarded, broken or left behind in order to create outputs that speculate, form, perform, and gesture towards more liveable worlds, with and beyond viral pasts and presents, within or away from the worlds Farber and Lockett inhabited. Through our engagements with affective, sensory and haptic registers of feeling backward and wayward, you are invited to resonate with the hapticality of erotic and aesthetic lifeworlds emerging from the ruinations of the past. This site is designed as an entry into an Aesthetics of Ruination, a welcome to our part of the Visual AIDS Annual Symposium and a place to activate our personal thoughts, inspirations and investigations and share these with a ruined, wayward and fugitive community of friends.
Welcome to an 'Aesthetics of Ruination'. Our project starts from a shared need for more liveable lives, an acknowledgement that what makes life unliveable, partially or wholly, carries heavy histories that erupt into our present in different ways, a longing for a future that we believe emerges from what has been ruined. A project oriented to the art of living otherwise, for whoever feels called upon by the ‘we’ invoked.
In the summer of 2023, Aesthetics of Ruination was started by Annette-Carina van der Zaag and Rory Crath in the archives of Visual AIDS, exploring the artworks of Robert Farber and Ronald Lockett. Many of the following questions our project gathers around started then, and have been deepened, elaborated, disrupted and enriched by our collective study with Corentin Leven, Eva Hayward, Marquis Bey, Julie Torentino, Joseph M. Pierce and Constantine Jones.
We are interested in an aesthetics of ruination, as a process, a continuation of collapse, ruin, erasure, violence – none of us sit within these aesthetics comfortably. Yet there is something seductive and unthinkable about rummaging through the rubble in the hope to find forgotten contours of a more liveable future there. Instead of a linear story arc of optimistic progress, we’re looking back and feeling our way out of line, wayward. Situating our hopes and dreams for living otherwise in a deep negativity entrenched in heavy histories that haunt ruination as process, metaphor and methodology.
Annette-Carina van der Zaag
Rupture and the Otherwise, performance lecture, Rietveld Academy Amsterdam, May 2025
Robert
Farber
Ronald
Lockett
Video by Engin Akyurt
A central paradox of any transformative criticism is that its dreams for the future are founded on a history of suffering, stigma and violence. Oppositional criticism opposes not only existing structures of power but also the very history that gives it meaning. Insofar as the losses of the past motivate us and give meaning to our current experience, we are bound to memorialise them (“We will never forget”). But we are equally bound to overcome the past, to escape its legacies (“We will never go back”). For groups constituted by historical injury, the challenge is to engage with the past, without being destroyed by it.
Heather Love
Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
The Erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
Audre Lorde
Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
In the ruin, the relation between past and present becomes difficult to
ascertain…the past persists not only in the material form of the ruin but in the imaginative potential sparked by its fragmentation and the processes of ruination.
Fiona Anderson
Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront
The lower frequencies of these images register as what I describe as “felt sound” – sound that, like a hum, resonates in and as vibration.
Tina Campt
Listening to Images
”Girl, where are you headed?” Each deprivation raises doubts about when freedom is going to come; if the question pounding inside her head – Can I live? – is one to which she could ever give a certain answer, or only repeat in anticipation of something better than this, bear the pain of it and the hope of it, the beauty and the promise.
Saidiya Hartman
Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments