Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

The paper examines the agency of deindustrialised ruins and their potential to catalyse community engagement. It focuses on citizens’ initiatives aimed at activating the former meat-processing factory site in Zagreb. The authors explore how postindustrial communities emerge through these processes.

Paper long abstract

How can inclusive place-making occur within a deindustrialised complex marked by decay, neglect, and the accumulation of waste? This paper addresses that question by analysing the current efforts of citizens’ initiatives and civil society organisations to activate the derelict site of the former Sljeme meat-processing factory in Sesvete, on Zagreb’s eastern periphery. Our analysis is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with actors involved in envisioning and activating Sljeme’s futures, and our own engagement in activities aimed at making Sljeme a place for everyone. Theoretically, the paper is informed by research approaches that conceptualise ruination as a process that challenges linear logics of economic functionality (e.g. Mah, 2012) and that foreground future-making in the aftermath of modernist expectations (e.g. Ahmann, 2024). Our focus is on the agency of postindustrial ruins, which we understand as relational, due to their potential to catalyse community engagement. In this case, ruins have stimulated collective integration, neighbourhood care, and solidarity, producing an entanglement in which ruins mobilise people to act, while people, in turn, strive to activate the ruins. We explore which communities emerge through these processes. Our research shows that postindustrial communities do not organically arise from embeddedness in place, but are actively formed through collective engagement with ruinous industrial spaces. Moving beyond an understanding of communities as entities that merely reflect social and economic tensions, we ask in which ways bringing together diverse – and sometimes opposing – agents around shared goals can shape collective futures in a polarised world.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The Skopje City Museum, in the ruined former railway station, preserves traces of the 1963 earthquake. Using ethnography of the institution (archive, interviews, and exhibitions), this paper shows how the building’s ruination shapes memory.

Paper long abstract

The Skopje City Museum, housed in the former Central Railway Station, is the city’s major memory site of the 1963 Skopje earthquake. Deliberately preserved in a partially ruined state, the building bears visible traces of destruction, most notably its clock frozen at 5:17 a.m. - the moment the earthquake struck. The disaster claimed 1,070 lives and destroyed nearly two thirds of the city’s urban fabric. Today, however, the earthquake is remembered primarily through the international relief effort it mobilized at the height of the Cold War, earning Skopje the epithet “the City of Solidarity.” Drawing on ethnography of the institution, that is, research conducted at the museum's archive, interviews with museum affiliates and local residents, and an analysis of the institution’s annual exhibitions dedicated to the earthquake, this paper examines the role of the ruined building in shaping public memory of the disaster. It argues that ruination, both of the museum’s architectural fabric and of its immediate urban surroundings, functions not merely as a backdrop but as an active agent in the production, negotiation, and transformation of earthquake memory.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the ruin of the listed Yugoslav military headquarters generates divergent communities and political imaginaries, focusing on the recent student protest that emerged after the Serbian government leased the site for free to Jared Kushner for redevelopment into a luxury hotel.

Paper long abstract

The destruction of the Yugoslav military-headquarters (Generalštab) during the 1999 NATO bombing left a prominent ruin in the very center of the Serbian capital. For more than two decades, this modernist complex, listed as a cultural heritage site, remained physically unreconstructed, functioning as an unofficial monument to the bombing and a material anchor of unresolved war memory. This paper examines how the ruin generates divergent communities and political imaginaries, focusing on recent student mobilizations that emerged in response to the Serbian government’s decision to lease the site for free to Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, for redevelopment into a luxury hotel with a museum of the NATO bombing on the premises. Shortly after the announcement of the deal and the illegal removal of the building’s cultural heritage status, students protested to preserve the Generalštab as a protected cultural monument of architectural modernism and a site of collective memory, explicitly rejecting its transformation into a privatized space.

In justifying the transfer of the Generalštab to Jared Kushner, Serbian authorities framed it as a barrier to development, transforming it discursively into a resource through tropes of foreign investment. Drawing on participant observation, media analysis, and engagement with protestors, this paper examines how this ruin generates two antagonistic communities: one oriented toward the preservation of public space, cultural heritage, and political accountability, and another aligned with privatization and populist narratives of progress. It shows how a ruin can materialize polarised temporalities - between war memory and promised futures, public heritage and private capital.

Send message to Authors

Paper long abstract

Polonezköy (Adampol), a village on Istanbul's outskirts, was founded in the 19th century as a refuge for Polish émigrés. This research examines how its material remnants—especially the cemetery, memorials, and Polish heritage—serve as markers of decay and renewal in a postimperial context. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, the paper explores how these remnants reflect tensions between memory, identity, and political power shaped by imperial legacies.

The Polonezköy cemetery, with its inscriptions and Polish-Armenian-Turkish intermarriages, serves as a material archive of historical integration and ongoing social transformations. The demographic decline of ethnic Polish residents, alongside internal migration from central and eastern Turkey, has reshaped the village’s social fabric and political power structures. This shift is symbolized by the material decay of heritage sites, which simultaneously act as spaces of resistance, where new solidarities emerge in the face of political and demographic change.

The cemetery and remnants of the village’s Polish past illustrate the tension between memory and erasure—signifying both loss and potential. These ruins, while representing fading relevance for newer generations, also provide spaces for new narratives of belonging and identity to emerge. The paper argues that the ruins of Polonezköy offer a unique lens to reflect on the postimperial afterlife of heritage. By focusing on materiality, temporality, and political transformation, the research emphasizes how ruins act as contested sites of memory, offering insights into erasure, continuity, and the reimagining of heritage in a fragmented world.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

I examine UNESCO-listed Ani Ruins on the closed Turkey–Armenia border, discussing how the continuum of political violence both enables and unsettles universal, secular and national heritage regimes. I argue absences in official heritage discourse find their presence in haunted stories of the ruins.

Paper long abstract

Ani Ruins, located on Turkey’s border with Armenia, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2016 and are recognized for their unique multicultural medieval architecture. However, Turkish state emphasizes the Muslim–Turkish historical continuity of the site, as exemplified by the opening of the Menucihr Mosque for public use in 2022. This approach disregards the site’s connection to Armenian identity in the present, confining it to a frozen relic of the past. Such selective heritage discourse reflects the denialist policies regarding the Armenian Genocide and functions to “scientifically” establish Turkish identity and history on the ground (Al-Haj 2001). As a result, the ruins of Ani expose the problems of Eurocentric and secular understandings of universal heritage, enabling state practices to gloss over continuum political violence.

Against the “authorized heritage discourse” (Smith 2006) of the Turkish state and UNESCO, this research approaches Ani’s heritage through affective stories. Drawing on hauntology studies (Derrida 1995; Gordon 1997), affect studies on violence (Navaro et al. 2021), and actor-network theory (Latour 2006), I argue that the Ani Ruins carry the “remnants” (Navaro 2021) of the past, where collective and personal memory is entangled with spatial and material relationships, producing assemblages of a nonlinear and unsettled past. This theoretical framework is planned to be implemented on-site through decolonial heritage practices (Lazzari, Larsen, and Orlandi 2024), using a qualitative methodology complemented by archive elicitation. I will employ trace ethnography (Napolitano 2015), narrative interviews, guided tours with visitors (Everett and Barrett 2012), and counter-mapping workshops (Schofield 2014).

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Reimagining heritage in deindustrialised contexts embraces change and multivocality. Industrial ruins challenge preservation norms. We see ruination as dynamic, relational and ethical and can foster sustainable, community led, process-oriented heritage where human and the more-than-human interplay.

Paper long abstract

A reimagining of heritage that accommodates loss, change, ruins and multivocality; moving beyond rigid categories of value in deindustrialised contexts, can make a shift that invites to deeper reflection on memory, materiality and the fluid boundaries between past, present and future. We hope to provoke a broader re-thinking of heritage – embracing transformation, inclusivity, acknowledging both human and more-than-human forces in shaping cultural memory.

We examine the complexities of preserving industrial heritage/ruins through a case study – a collection of large-scale industrial objects at the Norwegian Industrial Workers Museum, Norway. Originally functional tools, now challenge traditional museum practices due to scale, materiality and ambiguous cultural/heritage status. The case study reveals how preservation strategies adapt to changing attitudes; from industrial remains to heritage; from potential sculpture park to museum exhibits in flux. These objects, once discarded, occupy a liminal space between scrap and heritage, reflecting shifting societal values.

Industrial objects are not designed for longevity or aesthetic display, making interpretation and preservation difficult. Unlike curated artefacts, they demand frameworks that acknowledge functional origins and material transformation over time. DeSilvey’s concept of curated decay challenge preservation paradigms centred on permanence and authenticity and embraces temporality and material change; legitimising objects natural transformation, giving an ethical form of preservation. Ruination is not loss, rather a dynamic, relational process between human and more-than-human. Anthropological perspectives can give new meanings and pathways for sustainable, community-responsive heritage practices; advocating for experimental, process-oriented methods, recognising heritage as performative processes, as interactions between materials, environments and local community.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores the Wolfsschanze as a site of difficult heritage through the lens of multispecies and surface-oriented ethnography. By following the notion of curated decay, I discuss non-human agencies and non-linear temporalities that shape postwar dynamics of the Nazi military infrastructure.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) as a site of difficult heritage (Macdonald 2008) through the lens of multispecies (Kirksey, Helmreich 2010) and surface-oriented ethnography (Smykowski, Stobiecka 2022). Departing from the environmental history of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the presentation examines how Nazi military infrastructure persists in the landscape not only as historical remnants but as an entanglement of various agencies. The Wolfsschanze, embedded within the forest ecologies, where concrete, steel, vegetation, as well as human visitors co-produce the dynamic meaning of ruins, shows how erosion, moisture, plant, moss, and lichen overgrowth transform wartime heritage that is purposefully maintained by State Forests in the state of curated decay (DeSilvey 2017). By attending to surfaces and following the premises of the arts of attentiveness (Tsing 2015), I look into nooks and crannies – cracked concrete filled with cyanobacteria, moss-covered bunkers, rusted reinforcements, lichen colonies – in search of emergent life, reappearing on the surface of deteriorating structures. The tension between material decomposition, multispecies intra-actions, and vegetative cycles challenges the linear temporality of historical object and the strategy of its preservation characteristic of the Authorized Heritage Discourse. I argue that the instability and ambiguous status of Wolfsschanze, amplified by the notion of curated decay, on the one hand, might be beneficial for the secondary succession, especially in the ecosystem radically disturbed by wartime violence; but on the other hand, it could excessively aestheticize and obscure histories of violence, raising ethical questions concerning visibility, responsibility, and commemoration.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in Manfredonia, this paper frames the former petrochemical plant as a "ruin without ruins," where destruction persists through silence, regulation, contamination. It shows how past, present, and future collide as repair, memory, and forgetting shape a landscape of disappearance.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses the former Enichem petrochemical plant in Manfredonia (Southern Italy) as a case of “ruin without ruins”: a site where industrial destruction survives not through visible remains, but through silence, regulation, and contamination. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper explores how ruination unfolds through polarised and entangled temporalities. Once Italy’s fourth-largest petrochemical hub, Enichem closed in the 1990s after decades of pollution, accidents, and social conflict. Today, almost nothing of the factory remains recognisable on the surface, while contamination persists underground. What inhabitants experience is an anti-ruin: a landscape that does not invite imagination or nostalgia. The specificity of the petrochemical site becomes visible by contrast with the nearby basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. While there, absence is made visible through aesthetic and monumental practices, at the former factory the opposite occurs: it does not become heritage, but a technical problem to be managed. The past is not displayed, but neutralised, turning industrial presence into a silent absence that still weighs on everyday life. I argue that Manfredonia embodies an entangled ruin shaped by competing temporal regimes. Tentative reindustrialisation projects and endless remediation extend a future-oriented temporality of technical repair, while activists, former workers, and residents inhabit fractured pasts marked by selective memory and structural forgetting. In this sense, the Manfredonia case shows how ruination does not necessarily appear as spectacular decay, but can operate through erasure: not as what is seen, but as what continues to shape life precisely through its disappearance.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This work ethnographically explores how extensive quarrying operations in a mountain fissure in post-earthquake İskenderun, intended to supply materials for urban reconstruction but unexpectedly altering the famous local seasonal wind, unsettle residents’ senses of loss, recovery, and the future.

Paper long abstract

This work ethnographically explores how residents of İskenderun, a district in southern Turkey which suffered severe damage during the 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquake, relate to the intensifying quarrying operations in the mountains surrounding their environment, aiming at supplying material for post-disaster reconstruction. These extractive operations have not only sparked ecological concern among residents living near the quarry sites, but also created a sense of collective disillusionment with recovery efforts across İskenderun, not through direct displacement or visible pollution, but through shifts in the wind. Known locally as Yarıkkaya (“cleft-rock”), a powerful seasonal wind attributed to a distinct fissure in the surrounding mountains, this atmospheric phenomenon had long been an ecological landmark for the residents of İskenderun. As quarries begin to cut into the very cleft believed to produce the wind, inhabitants interpret subtle changes in its speed, duration, and rhythm as early signs of spatial loss, growing concerned with the future of İskenderun. Rather than framing the resistance to quarrying as environmental activism in the traditional sense, this research traces a more atmospheric form of environmental sensing, one grounded in local cosmologies, seasonal rhythms, and shared visual geographies. By situating these experiences within political–ecological debates on extraction and interdisciplinary theories of atmosphere and affect, the paper argues that residents’ anticipation of Yarıkkaya’s loss constitutes a critique of the developmental teleologies underpinning reconstruction. In foregrounding wind as both meteorological and political actor, the study contributes to emerging conversations on more-than-human politics of extraction and the atmospheric dimensions of environmental justice.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Drawing on literature the anthropology of disaster and the anthropology of ruins and ethnographically engaging with the digital ruins of Hurricane Katrina, I seek to elaborate an expanded concept of ruins which conceive of the ruinous as an active and normatively laden process.

Paper long abstract

How can we trace the ruins of disasters in times of the Anthropocene? According to Disaster Anthropology, loss of infrastructure, destruction of agricultural zones) are inherently social effects. The origin of these effects extends beyond the natural phenomenon and are a result of pre-existing structural inequalities revealed by these natural hazards. Here, then, we may understand disasters, amplified by climate change, as revelatory phenomena, which expose the social vulnerabilities embedded within the affected population. Ruins, then, are no longer static sites of history embodied by materials, but rather politically charged sites. Anthropologists are then tasked with investigating the conditions out of which ruins can emerge, and what it means for ruins to emerge as such.

Drawing on literature on urban infrastructure, the anthropology of disaster, and the anthropology of ruins, I seek to elaborate an expanded concept of ruins which conceive of the ‘ruinous’ as an active and normatively laden process. In doing so, I seek to argue, the ruinous can become an analytical framework through which to understand the ways the effects of disasters, amplified by climate change, have differential effects among society. I consider the case of Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in 2005, and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank which followed thereafter to show the ways ‘ruins’ in my understanding may be mobilized in ethnographic works on disasters. What do digital ruins reveal of what has been lost, and what may then emerge?

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper shows how ruins of colonial copra estates in Fiji continue to shape discussions about economic realities and emerging possibilities of future transformation, as new configurations of economy appear to be on the horizon.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I examine how collective memories and material remnants of the colonial plantation economy shape discussions about economic realities and emerging possibilities in eastern Fiji. First, by exploring the political economy of coconut farming and circumstances of economic stagnation in the archipelago of Lau, I show how remnants of the colonial era continue to inform an ambivalent field of negotiation between past and future transformations of rural villages. Ruins of copra estates and their plantations evoke nostalgic sentiments that are not orienting people towards restoring colonial order, but appeals to recover a formerly proven economic potency when the archipelago was more fully integrated into an expansive world economy. Second, I trace how labor practices of the contemporary coconut economy are viewed and how they influence debates on development and value. Some contend that copra and its ruins belong to the past and that communities should prioritize other ventures, such as virgin coconut oil production, to access global “high-value markets” and potentially catalyze larger industrial transformation. In addition to implying different labor arrangements and gendered divisions of work, these alternative economic modes fragment the coconut’s potency into competing visions of future change. To ethnographically explore these temporal and emergent forms of economic life, I develop the analytical framework “imminent economies” to show how past social arrangements and materialities are folded into transformative imaginaries, and how processes of ruination and restoration are perceived as new configurations of economy appear to be on the horizon.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

My paper utilises Derrida’s hauntology to frame ruins in post-disaster Tohoku, Japan, not just as memorialisation of lost pasts but of lost futures. Temporally, ruins relate to dilapidated, wiped-out pasts as much as they incorporate traces of failed futures that continue to exert force on people.

Paper long abstract

The Tohoku region, in northeastern Japan, has long been exposed to recurrent natural disasters, most notably the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. As recovery progresses, landmarks and ruins have been memorialised. Such ruins have the potential to evoke the spectres not only of “absent-presences” but of multiple temporalities folding into each other, producing affective-material excesses that conjure sensations and imaginaries. My paper utilises Derrida’s hauntology to frame ruins not just as memorialisation of lost pasts, but of lost futures, “endings that are not over”. Temporally, ruins relate to dilapidated, wiped-out pasts as much as they incorporate traces of failed futures that continue to exert force on people. These severed imaginary constitute momentous watersheds for the life of communities, pressured between a “futureless future” (Koselleck, 2004) and an “empty future” (Adam & Groves, 2007): a commodified future irreducibly tied to its economic use, and that frames ruins as inherently valueless. My paper re-values ruins as analytical lens to investigate the paths severed but still nested in our present and past, which “haunts” ruinous landscape and still shape communities’ experiences of memory, heritage, and identity. The absences evoked by ruins at times remain buried, clandestine, but then reappear as resistances, generative moments, trasnformative experiences which in the right circumstances can be re-appropriated by society. Ruins, indeed, are not just mementoes of the past, but a contested layering of multiple dissonant, haunted genealogies.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

After the end of the slave trade, European slave castles in Ghana became courthouses, prisons, post offices – even a presidential palace. Some are ruins. What do these afterlives reveal? I explore the ongoing material and affective entanglement of colonialism, capitalism, and modern statehood.

Paper long abstract

Along Ghana's Atlantic coast stand dozens of forts and castles built by European trading companies during the transatlantic slave trade. After abolition, many became courthouses, police stations, post offices, prisons – one even served as a presidential palace. Some are now ruins, others are in use as museums. How can we think about what these structures and their afterlives reveal? Drawing on fieldwork at Fort William in Anomabu, I argue that such sites are material crystallization points for the ongoing co-constitution of colonialism, capitalism, and modern statehood. I propose to analyze the relationship between these not in terms of temporal sequence, but in terms of structural entanglement. Structural entanglements are always also affective arrangements that generate atmospheres – atmospheres that not only make colonial violence palpable, but sustain and reproduce it. Understanding these entanglements offers a framework for analyzing how colonial structures persist – not only through institutions and economies, but through the material and affective arrangements that continue to shape what bodies feel in the spaces they inhabit.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the former power plant of Paros, a Greek island, as a modern ruin produced through the uneven temporalities of energy transition. Held in reserve yet already decaying, the site reveals how infrastructures become simultaneously obsolete and indispensable in a polarised world.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the former power plant of Paros, a Greek island, as a site of entangled ruination produced through the uneven temporalities of energy transition. Suspended between functionality and obsolescence, the plant occupies a liminal condition in which past futures of development collide with present narratives of energy transition, tourism, and sustainability. Although formally retained in reserve, it has already entered a state of modern ruin, where obsolescence, decay, and abandonment emerge as accelerated and uneven processes.

Drawing on multimodal ethnographic research, I approach ruination not as a final state of decay but as an ongoing process shaped by competing temporal claims. For some, the station’s reserve status signals a “slow death.” For local imaginaries oriented toward an idealised island landscape, the industrial structure becomes an inconvenient remnant of a past. The paper pays attention to sound and sensory practices as modes through which ruination is made meaningful. The recording of the plant’s final shutdown, the sonic memory of machines, and collaborative artistic engagements with its acoustic environment function as mnemonic technologies that render the transition perceptible and historically significant. Through these practices, the power plant’s afterlife unfolds not only through material decay but through the reactivation of relations between humans, machines, infrastructures, and landscapes.

By foregrounding the power plant as an entangled ruin of the energy transition, this paper argues that ruins illuminate the frictions of a polarised world in which infrastructures are simultaneously obsolete and indispensable.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines Gulag ruins in central Kazakhstan to show how ruins of penal infrastructures are lived through pragmatic reuse rather than memorialisation. Ruination emerges as a layered process where past punishment, socialist promise, and post-Soviet precarity coexist in everyday life.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the afterlives of Soviet penal and socialist infrastructures in former Karlag settlements in central Kazakhstan. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with residents of villages built on the territory of the Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp, it explores ruination not as a singular moment of collapse, but as a layered and ongoing process unfolding across socialist development and post-Soviet withdrawal. Structures originally built through forced labor: barracks, isolation cells, administrative buildings, and agricultural infrastructure, were not simply abandoned after the closure of the Gulag. Instead, they were actively reused during the Soviet period, particularly during the Virgin Lands campaign, when these landscapes were reframed as zones of agricultural promise and settlement. In the post-Soviet period, however, the withdrawal of state support, privatization, and out-migration transformed these infrastructures into partially used or abandoned ruins. This paper argues that ruination in former Karlag settlements materializes polarised temporalities: the coexistence of penal pasts, socialist futures that were once promised, and present-day conditions of precarity. Rather than being primarily sites of memory or heritage, ruins here function as everyday resources: homes, barns, storage spaces, embedded in strategies of endurance and survival. By focusing on pragmatic reuse rather than commemoration, the paper shows how residents live with and through decay, transforming spaces of punishment into ordinary environments. In doing so, it contributes to anthropological debates on ruination, memory, and infrastructure, and demonstrates how entangled ruins reveal the social life of decay in post-socialist contexts.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Building on Ann Stoler’s distinction between ruins and ruination, this paper explores conflicting memories of Sardinian mines. Heritage images frame ruins as static pasts, while former miners read them as ongoing decay, revealing crises of presence and traces of cultural apocalypse.

Paper long abstract

Ann Stoler (2008) introduced a pivotal distinction between ‘ruins’–remnants of the past-and ‘ruination’–an ongoing process. In the late industrialist world, this pair of concepts seems to produce a dialectical entanglement of temporalities: the construction of the past as a static trace of a lost world and the production of meaning around the ‘ruination’ that the past continues to produce in the present day.

Post-mining Sardinia, where processes of deindustrialization and the touristification of past mining ruins coexist, appears today suspended between a static vision of the remnants to be ‘sold’ to tourists and a dynamic one, in which they represent a trace of the present crisis.

Drawing from fieldwork on former miners’ memories in Sardinia, this paper examines the entanglement between the heritage makers’ and tour operators’ images of old mines and the ‘nihilist’ attitude in a critical group of former miners’ memories. The former depicts ruins as static traces of the past, while the latter sees them as signs of physical and social decay—something we cannot look at (Bachis 2025).

This dialectic will be analysed using Ernesto De Martino’s (2015, 2023) categories of crisis of presence and cultural apocalypse. I argue that, on the one hand, ruins serve as tangible evidence of the end of ‘a’ world, while simultaneously enabling a new ‘ethos’ through heritagization. On the other hand, the ongoing presence of ruination in miners’ memories illustrates the persistent risk of a crisis of presence, confronting us each day with our sense of being lost in the world.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the "afterlives" of industrial decay in Konin, Poland, where "Turquoise Lakes" – flooded open-pit mines – are rebranded as tourist spectacles. I argue that this narrative of anthropogenic reclamation offers a model of sensory aesthetics for the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates ruins as sites of both polarization and potential, examining how a post-mining region in central Poland – Konin – rebrands its industrial decay into a "post-natural" spectacle. Moving beyond the romanticized "man vs. nature" trope, I analyze the transformation of lignite mining scars into a unique tourism asset. Here, the central narrative is not one of mourning loss, but of deliberate, anthropogenic reclamation.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and promotional analysis, I argue that the region’s "Turquoise Lakes"—flooded pit mines with a startling, chemically-induced hue—function as "entangled ruins" where past extraction and future recreation coexist. These sites are marketed not as pristine wilderness, but as spectacles of recovery. This narrative offers a compelling alternative for tourism in the Anthropocene, replacing the adversarial binary of "untouched nature" with a story of complex, manufactured co-creation.

The paper further explores the sensory aesthetics of this landscape. While the appeal is overwhelmingly visual—rooted in the sublime yet unsettling beauty of the turquoise water—it also encompasses a unique haptic and auditive experience of transition from heavy industry to leisure. By analyzing how this afterlife of decay is framed and commodified, I contribute to the panel’s discussion on how ruination reveals contested values. I suggest that the "Turquoise Gaze" represents a new mode of environmental care, where the material traces of fragmentation are not erased but integrated into a new, marketable aesthetic of endurance and repair.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Ch’iatura, Georgia, this contribution reflects on coexistence with debris in mining-eroded landscapes, where rubble enters domestic spaces, producing material and social ruins, and becomes a set of co-ordinated references within a space–time entanglement.

Paper long abstract

Shukruti village is located on top of an extractive manganese mine, within Ch’iatura Municipality, a former Soviet mining centre in the western Georgian region of Imereti. The deregulated extraction of manganese causes severe structural damage to the village, encompassing destroyed households and buildings, unproductive fields, emptied water wells, and collapsed cemeteries.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2021 in Ch’iatura, this paper aims to analyse the materiality, temporality, and spatiality of debris and the ongoing process of rubble domestication performed by the local population.

Material remains emerge in response to destruction; in Shukruti, partially collapsed houses continue to be inhabited even after their material integrity has been compromised. As a result, debris cannot be understood as inert residues of the past. Building on Gordillo’s notion of “rubble” (2014), I conceptualise material debris and ruined landscapes as evidence of the structural violence produced by the extractive system.

The ongoing process of ruination (Stoler, 2008) produces social relations characterised by abandonment and reveals new forms of experiencing the area’s geography, such as choosing the only functioning water well, monitoring a split tree to trace landslide movements, and locating relatives’ graves in different areas of the cemetery.

People dwell in partially destroyed houses, engaging with rubble as part of their domestic space. Simultaneously, the gradual deterioration of walls, roofs, and rooms, along with the continuous transformation of the familiar landscape, marks the passage of time. Rubble thus becomes a tool through which the community interprets and experiences changing temporalities and spatialities.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Building on my 2019 work, this paper reads Alberta’s orphaned wells as “active ruins.” I trace how new liability reforms and mandated closure spending reshape responsibility, intensify polarisation, and open new imaginaries for petro-futures through managed ruination.

Paper long abstract

Building from my 2019 ethnographic analysis of orphaned wells as oil assets “gone bad”—where insolvency, debt, and competing ethics of value creation and care collide—this paper asks what new polarisations and possibilities are being produced through Alberta’s current provincial and regulatory responses to the orphan well problem. Rather than treating orphan wells as inert leftovers of a past boom, I approach them as active ruins: material, legal, and affective infrastructures that intensify conflicts over responsibility for extraction’s afterlives, while also opening imaginative horizons for energy futures.

I examine how ruination is being administratively re-scripted through the Alberta Energy Regulator’s liability management reforms, including the Licensee Capability Assessment, inventory-reduction targets, and mandatory “closure” spending requirements that translate uncertain futures into measurable obligations. These instruments also enable new forms of anticipatory accounting—such as crediting or “banking” over-compliance—where remediation becomes not only an environmental practice but a portable proof of responsibility. In parallel, adjustments to the Orphan Fund levy rework how collective accountability is priced, distributed, and politically defended.

Tracing these policy devices alongside landowner anxieties, service-sector “closure economies,” and state narratives of responsible energy development, I argue that Alberta’s orphan-well solutions are producing a distinctive form of managed ruination. This management can harden polarisation (polluter-pays vs public backstops; rural burdens vs provincial imaginaries of prosperity), yet it can also generate unexpected openings for re-use, repair, and alternative relations to the remains of extraction—where endings and beginnings coexist in the same contaminated ground.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Exploring ruination through the ethnographic case of an alpine mining town where extraction endures alongside urban decay, this paper examines ruins as material remnants and immaterial legacies entangled in post-mining transition and future-making.

Paper long abstract

This paper focuses on ruins in the context of resource extraction and post-mining transition in the Alpine region. Since the 1980s, de-industrialisation has led to a significant decline of mining in many Alpine valleys. In Eisenerz, a mining town in the Austrian Alps, iron ore extraction has remained operative with a drastically reduced workforce, resulting in sustained outmigration, an ageing population, and vacant buildings. More than thirty years of development projects have sought to reinvent the town. While the mine has been reframed as industrial heritage and secured as a long-term landmark, Eisenerz itself continues to face uncertain post-extractive futures.

Drawing from ongoing ethnographic research, this paper analyses ruins as material remnants and immaterial legacies of a changing mining industry in relation to industrial endurance, urban decay, and future-making. Although mining remains economically viable, it is no longer aligned with the town’s demographic and urban realities, even as it continues to shape local and regional identities and urban and alpine landscapes. Mining remnants and legacies range from decaying infrastructures and empty houses re-used for cultural events, to mining festivities structuring the annual calendar, re-purposed industrial sites such as the underground mine turned museum, and the open-pit mine preserved as a landmark of an anticipated post-mining future. Rather than marking closure, ruination materialises polarised temporalities in which secured extractive futures coexist with prolonged urban uncertainty, revealing ruins as sites through which post-mining transitions are negotiated.