Repurposing the Ruins: The Isle of the Lotus Eaters

In his book “Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality,” Tim Edensor reflects upon modern day Britain’s regulation of urban space, citing trends and realities which pervade urban space globally:

“As the contemporary city becomes increasingly subject to regimes of regulation and demarcation, space tends to be divided up and assigned for specific kinds of activities, whether for shopping, playing, living, or working. Challenges to these boundaries are policed so that, for instance, it is deemed inappropriate to dance in shopping malls or to live or sell goods on the side of the street. Within this authoritative spatialization… certain spaces are deemed suitable for nothing… Industrial ruins belong to this assignation…”¹

In the San Francisco Bay Area, and I mention this specifically because this is a blog focused upon Bay Area writers, this “authoritative spatialization” is pervasive, especially in the more urban areas of San Francisco and the East Bay. Other cities, Detroit being a good example, approach the post-apocalyptic in their presence of ruins. In the Bay Area however, ruins are often demarcated for redevelopment. Places such as Treasure Island and Hunters Point shipyard are to be swept off the map by urban planners and turned into green recreational space and high priced condos.

In essence, society has no patience for the aesthetic of the industrial ruin. Personally, I have made ruins the focus of my filmmaking for the past two and a half years. It is ironic then that, in my pursuit of using these sites photographically, I am often subjected to security guards and no trespassing signs. Society, with its myth of private property, seeks to enforce the disuse of ruins, just as it reinforces appropriate activities within the public sphere.

I am not alone. For hundreds of years people have used and disused ruins. Edensor gives a fascinating example in his book, citing theoretician Christopher Woodward’s reflections upon Rome’s Coliseum, “The Coliseum did not appear as it does today, but was a far more unkempt and unpoliced site. Travelers were drawn to the peculiarities which lay within the undisciplined, overgrown, undetermined space it had become…”¹

With the rise of Italian nationalism from 1870 and on, with its claims to legitimacy borrowing from the tropes of ancient Rome, the Coliseum was repurposed into a monument, “’a bald, dead, and bare circle of stones…no shadows, no sands, no echoes’,” says Woodward. Apparently it is difficult to find any Coliseum inspired painting or poetry within this period, though the one exception was “Hitler, to whom it (the Coliseum) was a symbol and a monument of enduring power….” Woodward then concludes, “’poets and painters like ruins, and dictators like monuments.’”¹

Clearly, in the Bay Area we live in the society of those who have protracted periods of consumer culture exploration. A fabulous example would be Santana Row in San Jose, California. For those unfamiliar with it, Santana Row is an experiment in urban planning designed to bring the feeling of a small city downtown to the suburban sprawl of San Jose. A curious mixture of mid-level and upper class chain retail, mixed with a large novelty chess board situated in a “public park,” and a large ambling downtown street, Santana Row is a curious, yet insidious, dystopian simulation:

Its use is strictly demarcated however:

Reuse, however, goes both ways. Commercial interests can repurpose a place, but ruins are sites of non-specificity, and thus they allow for total reworking of themselves by non-commercial interests: artists, explorers, and the homeless. A fascinating example is the Albany Bulb in Albany, California. Located near a large freeway, a local Albany road dead-ends into a small peninsula once used as a landfill. Now abandoned, the site has been turned into an informal public park, with walking trails, et al. But if one goes off trail, one finds numerous art installations, graphitti covered buildings built out of rubble, ad hoc encampments of homeless people, and even a DIY public library. In my case, I was attracted to the way artists have transformed the Bulb’s landscape, and thus inscribed it with a sort of junk aesthetic. This is nothing new to the reality of ruins, according to Edensor: “…artistic usages of waste matter create ‘an alternative economy’ and encourage observers to question the processes of ‘(de)valuation and exclusion’” Using junk and found art materials has created entire careers in the art world, and can reflect society’s own dystopian realities.

Kurt Schwitters, the creator of this collage, was banned by the Nazis in 1937 as a “degenerate artist.” I suppose, as Christopher Woodward contended, that Fascists prefer symbolic order to conceptual disorder. But isn’t this still the case? Countless times have I been chased off of ruined “private property” by enthusiastic security guards enforcing their lands’ purposelessness. Certainly, someday their land will be worth something, even if it is already a site of exceeding wealth in an alternative economy.

Different interests competing for the use value of land is true in the Albany Bulb’s case. Real estate interests have propositioned the city to redevelop it into a large commercial shopping area, and open space advocates have pushed for its status as a public park. Despite being officially kicked out earlier this decade, the homeless still call it theirs, at least one night at a time. And artists still pillage building materials from it to create new installations and industrial collage. Currently, the fact that the Bulb is made from landfill material has sealed its fate as the odd inter-zone that it now is. Nothing really can ever be built there. Fortunately, it is too much of a ruin.  

The title of the film that I created there this past Christmas is entitled “The Isle of the Lotus” eaters. Of the Lotus Eaters, it says in the Odyssey: 

“I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be… They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-Eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them…” 

I shot this film on a visit to the Bulb with a few friends, and in seeing its many homeless denizens, and its artistic, yet decaying wonders, I couldn’t help but think that my friends and I were greatly awed, yet fortunate enough to leave it behind in its peculiar form of sleep:

¹Edensor, Tim. The Unfinished Nation. New York: Berg, 2005.

Comments

[Massimo Forti]

"Real estate interests have propositioned the city to redevelop it into a large commercial shopping area, and open space advocates have pushed for its status as a public park."

Its interesting to me that these are the two options; corporate development or making it a park, with all the regulation that implies. Seeing that spelled out clearly I think helps me understand, at least in part, why I have always felt a sort of freedom in ruined and abandoned places.

Thought provoking piece.

[Penemue]

I remember as a child in upstate New York, there was, at the top of a mountain not to far from my fathers house, the ruins of an old country club that had shut down during World War Two. Throughout the four decades since its closure, nature had begun to re-appropriate both the land and the buildings and return it to the wilderness and forest that dominate the Hudson Valley. We would go for hikes up to The Ruins as I knew them back then, at some points during my childhood even camping out for a night or two at a time there. It was always amazing to me, even as a child, the ability of nature to reclaim so quickly what man had attempted to conquer, as well as the dichotomy created by vegetation which has grown along the old foundations and crumbling walls retaining some of the sense of order that mankind had presented.
Ten or so years ago it was turned into condominiums. Theres now a Duncan Donuts where I used to roast marshmallows.