Introduction
Places of dwelling are abandoned, destroyed, or disappear in time. This process can occur spontaneously, gradually, deliberately, or inadvertently. It can also transmute within the creative sphere of the imagination. There are many ways that the ruins of the built environment, taken as an end, acquire an afterlife and play into the constitution of a place in reverse. Sometimes, they remain, within the absence—the abandonment—of their contemporaneous world. This falling into ruins, or ruination, may remain in the open or it may become covered, rediscovered, maintained, preserved, repaired, recycled, or merely collapse into oblivion. Although ruining and building initially seem antithetical, they have a generative connection in place-making thought that is open to exploration.
Ruins can act as tropes of reflexivity.[1] Various cultures have articulated the ways in which the idea of ruin contributes to the understanding of place and place-making differently, sometimes explicitly and other times implicitly. A broad range of sources shed light on these variations in the unfolding experience and meaning of the ruin in comparison to a more mentally and emotionally distanced, commodified, or homogenized perspective of the ruin in the present. In Ancient Rome, ruins were sites of reflection on the finitude of communities and acted as signs of both warning and consolation.[2] In Medieval Europe, architectural ruins signaled amorality and corruption of societies and states.[3] They were measures of morals. Ruins later became an indication of historical distance and a split from the past in the Renaissance, which developed various views of ruins ranging from anatomic perspective to reveries. For Renaissance thinkers, the architectural ruins of antiquity became sites to study structural, topographical, archeological, and historical precedents and to unlock the laws of weight, architectural principles, secrets of antiquity, and mathematical measurements.[4] During the Baroque period, ruins became sites of transience and the objects of self-contemplation and mourning.[5] They resonated with death as human finitude. In the Enlightenment, ruins became objects without a past.[6] They were also celebrated as the collapse of hegemonic structures, thus giving hope to oppressed societies.[7] Without a past, ruins further became aesthetic and joyful objects in the Romantic era. In this era, Piranesi’s etchings of the ruins of Rome and the paintings of Robert Hubert illuminated “anachronisms and physically impossible arrangements,” which paved the way for the popularization of ruin follies of sham ruins.[8] As Andreas Huyssen states, “artificiality and the fake” as well as “decay, erosion, and a return to nature” form the central topics in 18th-century aesthetics.[9] In the Romantic era, fragment, surface, and natural decay became central to the contemplation of ruin, continuing to influence more contemporary musings and thought. After the dreadful and moral ruin that pervaded postwar German cities,[10] a celebration of ruins has re-emerged. From this rubble and debris emerged a new form of ruin that underpinned many European and Asian cities in the 20th century.[11] Whereas sham ruins served as follies in the eighteenth-century experience of natural landscapes, an inverted relationship between the ruin and its surroundings now marks contemporary landscapes: the ruin is appreciated as a locus for innate connection with nature, and the ruin as a locus of nature has become a celebrated phenomenon in the technological urban landscapes of our era.[12]
On the other hand, while it still guides thinking regarding place and place-making, the concept of ruin has unfolded introspectively in Eastern cultures. The idea of ruin appears in the Chinese poetic genre of huaigu (lamenting of the past).[13] It also appears in the Arabic poetic genre of qasida and nasīb with a motif of al-wuquf 'ala al-atlal (lamenting the loss of forsaken grounds).[14] In both genres, it appears with a sense of sadness and nostalgia and never as a mere visual depiction. Here, ruin-gazing is related to returning to the destroyed home, and ruins are “sites of memory.”[15] This contrasts with the ruin as a ‘site of imagination’ as detached from the past. The latter may further take the form of “ruin-porn” in the devastated landscapes of war or other disasters.[16] These multifarious horizons, lingering in historic records of various places and cultures, are reminders of an original sense of ruin—‘artifacture’—which has predominantly led to an existentially distant experience of ruins through the course of history.
The ruins of the built environment prevail in contemporary landscapes and their “inarticulacy” play into the everyday life of citizens.[17] Attitudes toward ruins differ between like, dislike, or ignorance—essentially a ‘not seeing’ among the citizens.[18] Undeniably fascinated with ruins, especially in urban contexts, contemporary literary scholars, poets, artists, and ruin-explorers nevertheless frantically pursue the sublime through the imageability of ruins. In non-architectural fields, reflective encounters seek “images of decay” as the thinking on ruins has progressively moved away from the actual site of the ruin in search of decay aesthetics through the weathering of surfaces as a reaction to dense urban conditions.[19] The current “ruinophilia” is temporal.[20] As such, it comes from a longing for witnessing natural processes in our heavily built environments that eliminate weathering from their surfaces.[21] The overwhelming experience of overbuilt urban settings condition a manner of seeing ruins as sites of resistance and relief.
Present literature on decay and the processes found in ruins communicates a perspective of ruin with detached ‘ruin-subjectivities,’ and as such is removed from the worldliness in which ontic categories take their meaning. A subjectivity that determines how ruin is encountered and revealed is ruin-subjectivity. Detached ruin-subjectivity, which contrasts owned ruin-subjectivity, does not encounter the ruins from within the temporality and spatiality of originary ruin, and thus, does not really encounter the ruin as ruin but ruin as an object or artifact. This temporal distance lends itself to a kind of objective knowledge that remains at the surface of the ruin as formed-matter in its disintegration. Consequently, the path of thinking that overlooks the actual ruin as a relation produces knowledge on ‘ruins without bodies’ and ‘ruins without worlds.’ While non-architectural scholarship has discovered values of decay and ambiguity in intact ruins, architectural strategies seek to order, program, and stabilize these “vague” sites.[22] This process of ordering and stabilizing unfolds as restoration when a building with historic significance is returned to its previous—intact—condition to ‘represent’ the past, and as recycling when the components of discardable buildings emerge within environmental discourses.
Existentially distanced modes of knowledge build up like dust upon primordial ruins and as such hinder the truth of origins. This essay argues that ruins can be fully understood in their origin, actuality, and potency from an architecturally-guided perspective, and by situating ruin in its worldliness, provides an alternative view of the immediate and expansive experience of ruins and the structure of ruin as it unfolds between being and becoming and between origin and project. This position frames a care-based theory of ruin.
Artifacture and Ruin-Time
Originally, ruin was a Western concept that had its origins in “the architectural remains of predominantly masonry structures.”[23] As opposed to the migrant and cyclical worldview and eternal return in the Eastern topos that embraces the perishability of building as material, the Western origin of building is charged with the “relative permanence of stereotomic mass.”[24] Thus, a will to endurance is already instilled into the artifacts of the built environment, which establishes the finitude and vulnerability of the built artifacts that may become “artifacture” as “uninhabitable remains.”[25] Collapsing into ruin occurs more readily when the structures have been built with an intention of material endurance as in the Western tradition of architecture. Stereotomic permanence, as in stone buildings, lets artifacture linger in its physical manifestation in a geological temporality. Endurance ruinates, and ruin endures. In that sense, ruins are both objects and processes.[26] Intentionality is embedded in the relationship between materiality and ruin-subject who accesses materiality through embodied vulnerability that always already exists as a pre-condition of being.
Through the course of history, the architectural ruin manifested itself in various ways, as a part of the present or a future project: ruin-as-destructive, ruin-as-dissected, ruin-as-constructed (i.e., sham ruin follies), ruin-as-generative (i.e., Splitting by Gordon Matta-Clark[27]). There is a transhistorical and transgeographical understanding of the ruin: the ruin-as-destructive originates in a threat against the integrity of the human body. This sense of ruin is embodied and originary; it is related to the temporality of collapse and the finitude of the world and the demise of a body. In fact, Old French ruine in the 14th century refers to the “act of giving way and falling down.” And ruine comes from Latin ruina, which suggests “a collapse, a rushing down, a tumbling down,” and is related to ruere “to rush, fall violently, collapse.” In turn, Proto-Indo-European reue refers to “smash, knock down, tear out, dig up.” Owen Barfield further points out the origin of the word ruin in the Latin word ruo, which means to rush and fall with a sense of disaster. Ruina came to mean both falling and a fallen thing.[28] Ruo has a linguistic relation to the Ancient Greek word oroúō (ὀρούω), which also means ‘to hurry.’
This origin of ruin is hindered in recent scholarship by its focus on the natural agency of deterioration. Contemporary discussions commonly define ruins as entities between two eternities of presence and absence; the process of decay never ends within sight of human temporality. Florence Hetzler’s “ruin time” demonstrates this line of thinking.[29] In reference to an objective externality (geological time), the materiality of ruin is detached from the original subjectivity. Sometimes it is re-attached to a subjectivity as an after-experience of the ruined object, as with urban-explorers and ruin-tourists who remain external to ruin time and experience a ruin as an artifact or ecofact.[30] On the other hand, there is another line of thinking in later thought that prioritizes subjective internality by suggesting, “the ruin is a cultural construct, more than a physical object [and] it is in the eye of the beholder.”[31] Similarly, Robert Harbison suggests that ruin is “a way of seeing or a state of soul.”[32] In this latter system of thought, a shared understanding of ruin is not reached and the determinacy of the material horizon of ruin is also lost. However, the ruin is both an intra-worldly entity with its concrete materiality (as a thing), and the relational context of the world (a horizon), against which the materiality of ruin as a thing comes into its presence, unfolds as experience and finds its meaning as artifacture. ‘Ruin-time’ denotes the time of collapse in which decay is not essential. Among various ruin relations (ruin-as-that-and-that), this primordial and eternal relation with ruin and a shared intuitive understanding of ruin (ruin-as-such) originate in potentially meeting the weight of collapse corporeally and emotionally, connecting with ‘ruin-as-destructive.’ Only when one steps into an originary ruin, rather than a structurally stabilized ruin, can one experience the disintegration of the referents. Ruin ruinates in its embodied worldliness.
The World of Ruin — The World in Ruins
Ruin initially emerges within the horizon of inhabiting the world. The world is a vulnerable referential context, and the concept of ruin appears in the radical decay and collapse of the temporality of the referents of the world. Martin Heidegger introduces the concept of world-decay to refer to the dissolution of world and intra-worldly entities. Building on Heideggerian thinking, Jonathan Lear introduces the concept of world-collapse to define a moment of retrospective recognition of the end of the world. Human beings, in their corporeality, affectivity, spatiality, temporality, and communality are caught up in their life and “care-worlds.”[33] In caring for their way of life and its meaning, they also prepare for its collapse. “Protecting a way of life” is the potential for the termination of such life. Lear calls this situation a “peculiar vulnerability” or a “peculiar possibility” that comes with the care for a distinct way of life.[34] Human beings’ closest and most primary places of making, which in turn allow for a caring, precarious, and ruinous manner of living in and through, are their settlements or dwellings and the things they hold for a way of living. Harbison highlights the inherent force of intentionality in buildings by arguing that they are “more precarious than they ordinarily appear, because [they are] preoccupied with meaning something.”[35] Humanity has been living against ruins, out of ruins, for ruins, in ruins, and altogether, with ruins. Factical life, which is the living present, in its meaningfulness and purposefulness, produces self-collapse in the sense of “abolition of time” in which relations and their directionality and intentionality cease.[36] Contemporary scholars who see a sense of liberation in the ruin celebrate this ontological change in the artifact. Heidegger calls this ruinance: “the destruction of life’s temporality,” or the “concealing of temporality.”[37] Building on the concepts of world-decay and world-collapse, I introduce the phrase topo-tectonic dissolution. This is how I highlight ruin as the radical disintegration of the material joints that tie existential loci of the meaningful and legible context of inhabitation in contrast to the dissolution of form and matter of ruin as a mere object devoid of any prior horizon of being in the world.
It is possible and necessary to gain a genuine understanding and thorough insight into ruin through its worldliness and topo-tectonic constitution. Such understanding consequently frees the contemporary discourse on ruin from a surficial orientation. To gain this vantage point, the research must let the ruin speak through ruin-subjectivities with access to the ruinating temporality and spatiality of ruins. In order to expand the horizon of understanding on the structures and processes of building in ruins—how they are experienced, negotiated and projected from within, I mutually explore the original ruin in its worldliness and the originary ruin-subjectivity of the ruin-dweller through a hermeneutic-phenomenological method.
Fieldwork took place in the contemporary rural context of Cyprus where world-decay becomes extreme and allows a rare access to the ruinating temporality of artifacture. The context presents first-person accounts on the expansive decay and the immediate collapse, thereby shedding light on the topo-tectonic constitution of ‘artifacture.’ The ruin-owners, who have been long-term refugees in Northern Cyprus, remain both within and outside the ruin, and imagine place-making amid the impossibility of restoring both the world and the architectural ruin. The ruin-owners look for new temporal possibilities. The new openness to the world is “counter-ruinance,” and Campbell states that “[i]n a moment of insight, a kairos, [the] counter-ruinant structures point life back toward itself, and its original caring movement toward the world.”[38] The ruin, as uninhabitable remains, prepares for a new ethos of living in its ruinous mode—a vision of ethical action rather than of aesthetic pleasure. The ruin-horizon is the two-way relation between what it is and what is to become, i.e., a horizon in which the givenness and future possibilities of the ruin reciprocally inform each other.
While this essay does not celebrate the concept of ruination in any way, it is important to recognize the liberating sense attached to the ruin. Robert Ginsberg suggests that “the matter of the ruin is no longer matter in reference to form” while furthermore “the ruin liberates form from its subservience to function” and “function from its subservience to purpose” by implying a sense of freedom within ruins. [39] While the scholars pose liberating ruination as an extraordinary occurrence, Heidegger takes ruinance to be the “movedness of factical life.”[40] According to Heidegger, ruinance abolishes time; ruin has no time.[41] This temporal nothingness is precisely what allows the “possibility that gives place … for the accommodation and ordering of encounterable … objects,” and thus a development of a new horizon of being.[42] It is possible to understand ruin as an instance of world-disclosure, and in “finding itself at once in and beyond the world, [human being] discovers its projective possibilities and its freedom.”[43] The motivation of projective possibilities peaks in the case of the immediacy as well as the anxiety of the ruin, which has its essence of an embodied collapse that enforces ethical action. The immediacy and the anxiety of collapse is the source of a generative energy that wants to actively engage with ruin-horizon and artifacture, both in being and in becoming. Ruin, as a topo-tectonic idea, makes original action possible.
The following fieldwork sheds light on the connection between the worldliness and intra-worldliness of ruin that unfolds in the rare socio-political context of Cyprus, which makes an originary discourse on ruins possible by engaging owned ruin-subjectivities. The findings of the fieldwork allow describing how the owned ruin-subjectivities encounter the collapse in ruins as topo-tectonic constructs in disintegration. The findings further display how the concepts of the materiality, intentionality, and value of ruins receive a particular inter-relational meaning in a context that, as a whole, further generates a vision of placemaking that entails extracting memento from disintegrating joints and grafting these to the new place of being.
A Case of Artifacture: Deserted Settlements of Turkish-Cypriots
Resonating with Heideggerian world-decay and Lear’s world-collapse, the present context of Cyprus displays a condition of pervasive ruination and ruin-time embodied by owned ruin-subjectivities. The ruins I have studied belong to a politically charged conflict that redefined the ethnic territories preserved by physical borders. The Civil War of Cyprus, which took place between 1963 and 1974, led to the de facto division of the country by the Turkish side in 1974 and 1975. The mass displacement of people enabled the formation of two territories without physical access to each other; the northern territory controlled by the Turkish-Cypriots and the southern territory by the Greek-Cypriots.[44] While the ongoing inter-ethnic dispute between the Greek-Cypriot and the Turkish-Cypriot communities are still present, Cyprus remains physically and ethnically divided across the Green Line. After decades of exile, the first checkpoint between two territories opened in April 2003 and thereby many crossed the border to visit their former homes. Some encountered artifacture, embodied in the abolishment of time as the collapse of the world, and experienced the immediacy of world-decay and its irreversibility.
Currently, the rural landscape of Southern Cyprus has many derelict and ruined settlements that belong to the Turkish-Cypriot communities. These settlements are built of stone or mudbrick materials and built with traditional techniques that are no longer practiced. As such, they are the reminders of older ways of building and living. Despite the attempts to record these dead settlements in cultural heritage books or the travelogues of refugees revisiting their former homeland, this pervasive condition of artifacture has predominantly escaped the architectural discourse. By referring to the ephemeral accounts of the ruin-owners in Cyprus, I will describe how ruination—topo-tectonic dissolution—operates between the abolishment of time and generation of a living present in a context where restoration remains both largely impossible and irrelevant.
Research Design
Hermeneutic-phenomenology is the research method that guides this study. In this method, the goal of the inquiry is to interpret or retrieve meaning from that which is inquired, or “participation in shared meaning.”[45] The relation between the research and researcher is one of partnership, and “one partner in the hermeneutical conversation, the text, speaks only through the other partner, the interpreter.”[46] In hermeneutic-phenomenology, the search for meaning originates from within the horizon of the researcher.[47] The horizon is the “temporal, cultural context of our lives and meanings” as well as “the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.”[48] The task of the researcher is to “expand in concentric circles the unity of the understood meaning.”[49] The researcher expands the meaning by moving from the whole to the part and from the part back to the whole.[50] In other words, the researcher studies the fragments towards obtaining a meaning of the whole, which further provides a horizon to reinterpret the fragments. A horizon is the whole of one’s prejudices that acts as a limit, but there are meanings beyond that horizon that one has never known until then. Thus, a horizon is a transitional ground that “functions both as a limitation and as an opening to everything that transcends it.”[51] Paul Kidder states, “the nature of this horizon and the possibility of altering it can be fully realized only in the course of engaging with another horizon.”[52]
In this research, my prejudices included the learned appreciation of ruin aesthetics. My horizon was limited by the distance to the worldliness of the ruins. The horizon was expanded through site-visits as well as through listening to what the former inhabitants of the ruined settlements had to say, which allowed a mediated access to ruin-time and a deeper insight into the topo-tectonic dissolution. The expansion of the researcher’s horizon through encountering another horizon is called the fusion of horizons, and the outcome of the fusion of horizons is understanding. While the fusion of horizons is a transformative process that never ends, the fusion is restrained “by the limits on our time and abilities, the finite scope and span of our lifetimes.”[53] In this case, it was also limited by the span of the research and fieldwork.
Locating Ruined Settlements: The initial knowledge on the ruined settlements studied here came from a ruin-tourism website. Consequently, several sources helped to identify the potential sites of the study. PRIO Cyprus Centre’s website contains an interactive map on the routes of displacement in Cyprus due to the Cyprus conflict. A travelogue by Kemal Atay contains Ottoman and Turkish-Cypriot settlements, districts, and architectural artifacts on the Southern side of the divide.[54] Finally, a book compiled by the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus Presidency Office shed light on the potential sites of the study.[55] Consequently, the study identified thirty-nine sites with different degrees of physical ruination.
Site visits: Site visits enabled a direct spatio-temporal experience of ruined settlements. I obtained data in the form of pre-reflective and reflective self-narratives. Pre-reflective self-narratives came through voice recordings that captured spontaneous reactions to the ruins. Reflective narratives came through the field notes written down after the visits. I took many photographs in the site visits, which capture the mediated perspective that moves between an immediate impression and an aesthetically focused framing.
Interviews: Multiple semi-structured, in-depth interviews allowed the former inhabitants of the ruined settlements to articulate the topo-tectonic experience of being in ruin. These informants were enrolled in the study through snowballing and were selected based on an adequate memory and experience of the deserted villages. The reflective interview questions focused on the flight from their settlements, the return to the settlements, and aspirations for artifacture. The interviews took place until the saturation of data. They were recorded with a tape recorder and transcribed afterward.
Interpretation: The analysis of the ruined dwellings started with my self-narratives. Reactive voice-recordings identified what matters in being in ruin. Reflective self-narratives helped me to move between the verbal and visual realms to establish the initially invisible associations and atmosphere of the ruins. Visual interpretation aimed to excavate the likely and unlikely stories of ruination discovered during the voice-recorded and sound-recorded data. The horizon of understanding of ruin was expanded with the integration of reflective narratives of the owned ruin-subjectivities. I indexed all data for their meaning units—the segments of the interviews that are comprehensible on their own. The focus was on the meaning units that “provide insight into the phenomenon being investigated.”[56] I developed thematic units by grouping individual meaning units. The presentation of the findings evoke the interrelationships among the themes that capture an expanded view of artifacture.
Retrieval of Topo-Tectonic Dissolution in Artifacture
The reactive recordings of the site visits indicated the embodiment of artifacture. As such, the anthropocentric convenience is increasingly fractured until the ruin pervades the whole landscape. The meaning categories lent into ruin-images, ruin-processes, and ruin-events, which reveal the world-decay and embodied-collapse of artifacture as opposed to a romanticized perspective of rural ruin adorned by nature—as sought by the ruin-tourists. The categories shed light on the topo-tectonic constitution of artifacture: the dissolution of material and atmospheric joints and existential loci that were once held together in a living present. The findings present a range of experiential categories, and the totality of these categories guide thinking on placemaking amid the ruin with a sense of homecoming that diverges from the ideals of restoration. Presented below, the themes of ‘Fig Tree,’ ‘Desiccation,’ ‘Nothingness,’ ‘Heirloom,’ and ‘Inheritance Worth’ illustrate the interrelationships among memory, landscape, ground, value, and spatio-temporality that orient an original vision of placemaking out of the abolishment of time within the ruins. The findings point toward a vision of artifactural grafting which emerges as a stance against world-decay and an irreversible refuge away from homeland.
Thematic Unit: Fig Tree
Fig tree grows wildly in the semi-arid climate of Cyprus with the aid of wind and birds. This tree runs in the lived memory of Turkish-Cypriots as an image of the forthcoming collapse. An old saying on fig trees implies the collapse of dwelling: to plant a fig tree at one’s hearth. In Cyprus, the houses have outdoor ovens in addition to indoor fireplaces. Hearth is the place of fire and the place of gathering inside and outside the house, and it has come to mean the whole house itself. According to an old belief, when the hearth of a dwelling decays and collapses due to the lack of care, it signals death approaching the household. The saying, ‘to plant a fig tree at one’s hearth,’ holds the knowledge of the strong roots of the fig tree that spread horizontally to find more nutrition. When a fig tree grows near a dwelling, the roots threaten the stability of foundations and may eventually lead to a collapse of a home. Thus, the fig tree is already an image of ruin, and subsequently, one is not supposed to let a fig tree grow very close to one’s house. Fig trees emerge where no guards of a world pluck out the potential collapse.
Fig tree as a ruin-image forms the first ring of the expansion of my horizon from the celebration of nature in ruin aesthetics. In my site visits, the image of ruins juxtaposed or filled with large and lavish fig trees recurred as an indicator of lack of care of the former world of the settlements. The fig trees operate as recorders of the concealment of human temporality in artifacture. As a symbolic image of the expansive temporal decay, the fig tree reveals the potential future of artifacture as ground and figure. It paralyzes the temporal imagination of the ruin-owners who afterwards would reflect on possible actions through artifacture.
Thematic Unit: Desiccation
While the Romantic view imagines ruins covered in vegetation and animals, narratives of various interviewees reveal desiccation as a central process of ruin. Altay Burağan, a poet from one of the ruined settlements of this study, recited the following poem on PIK News after revisiting his home in ruins: “And trees are losing blossoms; they are without leaves from now on / … / Water is flowing neither from the fountains nor from the runnels / … / The chimneys are quiet; the image is tarnishing.” As also recorded in my fieldwork, the most apparent image of desiccation are water fountains or animals’ water basins. In the image of a working fountain, one encounters several events: that which is built on a site at a specific time in history and connected to the water reserves in the mountain; that which gathers the villagers near it, where they greet each other as they fill up their jugs with water to take home; and that which the animals drink water after a long day of grazing in the fields. The essence of the fountain is to let the water stream and rest, but in the case of the ruined villages, there is an essential loss to the manifestation of the fountain; it is where life dries up. While touring the ruined villages, I have come across many broken and fallen fountains and many historic ones without water running in them.
Many former inhabitants of the current ruins encountered the threshold between a living ruin and a dead ruin in the images of desiccated fountains, and in more extreme cases, the desiccated rivers due to radical changes in waterways. The missing water contributes to an inability of action within ruin since a minimum engagement with former home, say through washing hands after a long drive was not even possible. An interviewee from Agios Sozomenos was very disturbed with the removed fountain that could allow minimum orientation amid the ruins. Artifacture denotes this lack of the most basic relation. As several interviewees shared, the loss of water triggers the loss of trees, and the loss of trees causes the loss of shadows, which—along with the gentle breeze—eliminates an ideal hapticity. The loss of trees also causes the disappearance of birds. This topo-tectonic dissolution removes body and worldliness from artifacture leading to a sense of radical alienation. In contrast to ruins adorned by nature, desiccation sets up the horizon through which artifacture is encountered by the owned ruin-subjectivity in the semi-arid context of Cyprus. Artifacture has no inside and no possibility of life or domesticized nature.
Thematic Unit: Nothingness
Ruin-owners encounter images of the desiccated fountains, blind wells, or missing building parts, and perhaps their imagination reverberates in these images of ruins. Places of childhood that are now missing or in ruins move the ruin-owners in various ways, but there is always an element in ruins that pushes them closer to and further away from the sight of the ruin-owners. The web of significant loci of memories, which could allow imaging and seeing, are no longer there. The expanse of the missing loci and referents reach a moment that the missing becomes nothing. The memories run deep into the ground of the ruins, and the underground world, where history and memory accumulate, is significant for ruin-owners. Interviewees who had a deep connection to the land as a place of burial and eternal rest of the ancestors expressed profound sorrow at the sight of lost cemeteries and any references to their location. Some even stated that they became ill after their first visit to the ruins. The hope of intercommunal reconciliation vanishes in the missing and broken graveyards as well as the lost places of childhood dreams. Association with the former site of dwelling has become impossible for many interviewees.
Sorrow and anxiety remain in tension as nothing is revealed to ruin-owners. Nothingness brings a strong sense of disorientation in time and space as well as hopelessness for the future. Sorrowful subject clings to things and does not let go, whereas, in anxiety, things push themselves onto the anxious subject who turns away from them. Anxiety presses nothing onto the subject who wants to cling onto the past. In a discussion on Agios Sozomenos, the interviewee described the nothingness as having “no branch to hold on,” which led her to a profound existential crisis. Another interviewee from Alevga referred to a blank moment in her sight as a physical experience of not seeing after revisiting homeland for the first time after the opening of the checkpoints: “something happened to our sight, and we could not see.” The interviews altogether shed light on the phenomenon of nothing as a ‘non-image,’ which made sight and action impossible: “From now on, I do not want to see them; I do not want to go there… What shall I see?”
Nothingness is incomprehensible and unimaginable. There is nothing in artifacture. By recalling the experience of “nothingness in nothingness,” an interviewee from Agios Sozomenos described the ruins as a site of radical meaninglessness. Joint sites of material-memory-imagination are disassembled in the topo-tectonic disjoining in artifacture. Removed from their referential web, these fragments become replaceable: movable or transportable to new landscapes where they may be comprehensible again.
Thematic Unit: Heirloom
In the sites of this study, people used to tend the same land as farmers and builders for centuries, and their bygone world was a product of agriculture and handcraft. A long accumulation of care is now embedded in ruins, and commemorative loci are now missing. For ruin-owners, the radical topo-tectonic dissolution in artifacture unfolds in sorrow and anxiety. The loss of centuries-long care and labor invested in building as well as maintaining the sites of dwelling also mark the loss of these sites that once held people’s memories. This is a further sign to the ruin-owners that it is impossible to restore or revive a world that has both collapsed and decayed. The world-decay becomes a barrier to the restorative imagination of ruin, and these failed sites further pose an issue: the preservation of the heirloom.
Along these lines, the interviewees referred to yadigâr (heirloom), an expression that puts much emphasis on the ancestors who have long deceased, and to the responsibility to safeguard the care and labor of the ancestors whose memories now may live in heirloom objects. The ruined sites are where the heirloom goes missing. An interviewee from Faleia referred to the heirloom from her grandmother. She found herself at the end of history and living memory as nothing had remained in artifacture. Another interviewee from Agios Sozomenos referred to the missing olive trees and their significance for the intergenerational memory and responsibility: “I wish they … did not uproot [them] because they were heirlooms of my grandfather. 500-year-old olive trees, they were memorials.”
The cul-de-sac political conflict does not allow restoring the status of care in artifacture. In failing to safekeep an intergenerational world, the ruin-owners suffer under the weight of the ruined heirloom with a sense of guilt and anger. Due to the impossibility of restoring an old sense of care in the site of artifacture, some interviewees are searching for ways to safekeep sites of memory. An interviewee from Petrofani, who referred to the ruins of his grandfather’s historic house, feels the obligation to preserve the heirloom despite the current circumstances and thus plans to have the house reconstructed in the northern state—like the owner of the Melandra Culture House, who had this simulacrum house built in the North.[57] He is aware that a replica is ‘not real’ but he has nevertheless collected some historic building elements and components from antique shops towards a new project that attempts to imitate the original house. He further referred to his desire of using the architectural components and elements from the original house if it were possible. The displaced reconstruction project illuminates a strategy of overcoming artifacture through a design thinking based on displacement which resonates with the original rise of the ruins.
Thematic Unit: Inheritance Worth
Inheritance worth is another thematic unit with an intergenerational focus; it entails the relationship between the ruins and descendants of ruin-owners. The ruin-visits had functions of reminiscence as the ruin-owners returned and kept returning to the ruins with family members. Ruin-owners took their children, and in some cases, their grandchildren to their former settlements. The ceremonial act of visiting the villages unfolds with a desire to transfer the knowledge of the former dwelling place to the next generation of relatives, even if this knowledge is objective. In these visits, the children and grandchildren in some cases were empathetic to the grievance after the ruins. In some other cases, the descendants had apathy. The interviewees tried to justify this apathy as ‘there was nothing to see or do in the ruins’ of the ancestral land. An interviewee from Prastio referred to her child’s reaction to her weeping by the ruins: “when we took the new kids there, they said, ‘why have you come and cry amid these piles of stone?’” Some respondents further stated that their children mocked the ruins during the visits.
The inheritance of the place with its visible, invisible, tangible, and intangible qualities requires the enthusiastic reception of the place by the younger generations who may sustain the world. The prolonged rupture in time and history has led to an inaccessibility to a historic world with its physical artifacts and the dissolution of communal ties among the younger generations. Along these lines, another interviewee focused on the unbridgeable historical distance between two generations. This distance renders the transmission of the settlement to the next generation as impossible even in the case of a physical restoration and a return to the ancestral land.
Inheritance worth is an intergenerational and intercommunal category that defines whether the potential actions of restoration, renovation, or restitution are meaningful enough. The worth of the ruins is limited by the ruin-owners’ lifetime. In the decay of a collapsed world, an irreversible loss of inheritance worth makes restoration inadequately meaningful. Artifacture is a non-site where devaluation extends beyond use and commodity value, but artifacture still urges for alternative actions to inherit mementos in a more meaningful way.
Conclusion: Toward an Artifactural Grafting
On the one hand, there is no hope for a community and inter-generational sustenance, no material references to memories, no sheltering of nature, nor is there any hope for the restoration of artifacture. On the other hand, ruin-owners feel the necessity to act and imagine alternative projects to move out of present artifacture, which exists between what it is and what it is to become. The topo-tectonic narratives reveal a ruin-horizon with a vision of ethical action that emerges from actual encounters with artifacture.
Many ruin-owners probably walked among the ruins in their former homeland and lifted away, in imagination and practice, the excesses of rubble and of void. They searched for the past loci underneath this cover-up to extract and save the relics of the previous dwelling as souvenirs. The most frequently reclaimed souvenirs from the ruins of the dwelling place are the fruits, crops, seedlings and tree branches to be grafted to trees in the northern state. There is a relief in keeping the memory-loci in the form of rusted keys, building blocks, or broken tools. The persistent attitude of extracting loci from the historic rubble and their preservation display an ethical responsibility. This sensibility takes a more deliberate and architectural form for one interviewee who sees the potential of a profound architectural project to save the ancestral heirloom from disappearing. These temporal re-orderings, which take place in the imagination and actions of the ruin-owners, aim to bring artifacture to a living present in a new place.
The individually guided actions are small tactics that reveal the potential of grafting in place-making strategies after ruination. The accounts of ruin-owners reveal a possible direction in architectural thought in which the works of architectural craft are semantically translated to retain the invisible narratives of both exile and homecoming. The reclamation of memory fragments from artifacture as re-inhabitable memory-loci in a new place highlights a potential for ‘artifactural grafting:’ the insertion of material-memory joints to a new site with a new form and function so that the sentimental remnants of a bygone world are sustained with a use value. If the barriers against the moving of these joints could be overcome, a new place-making practice based on exile could emerge in Cyprus. This vision, of course, is limited by the lifetime of those who care about the world in ruins.