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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.