Spectre 3 - Ruines contemporaines

Spectre is an iconographic magazine, published by Cosa Mentale Editions under the artistic direction of Mathias Gervais de Lafond. About a specific theme, major contemporary artists deliver their subjective interpretation of a reality. This collective work questions our sensitivity and destabilizes our daily relationship with objects and places. It awakens our poetic presence in the world.

After the first two issues Mineral Pornography and Vegetal Trauma, the 3rd issue of Spectre invites contemporary artists to deliver their interpretation of contemporary ruins.

“Ruins represent pure time, undated, absent from our world of images, simulacra and reconstructions, from our violent world whose rubble no longer has time to become ruins. A lost time that happens to the art of finding.” (Marc Augé, Le temps en ruines, 2003)

It is not certain that the history to come will be capable of generating new ruins. If there is any doubt about the contemporary capacity to leave significant ruins, it is obvious that our era will continue to produce abandoned, unfinished, deteriorated and rapidly obsolete spaces.

Ruins are necessary because they question our historical records, “they make us fleetingly aware of a distance between a past meaning, which has been abolished, and a present perception, which is incomplete.” Ruins introduce a temporal doubling, allowing us to no longer consider the present as the ultimate epicentre of our perceptions.