Ruination #2

Tim Edensor is Reader in the Department of Geography, Manchester Metropolitan University, author of Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Berg, 2005), and editor of the website British Industrial Ruins.

Shona Illingworth is an artist and film-maker, who creates video and sound installations that explore the experience of memory and the formation of identity in situations of social tension and trauma.

Scholarly, artistic and public interest in ruins and derelict spaces has intensified over the last decade. In speculating about the motivations for this surge of interest, Tim Edensor will focus on how ruins may be used critically to examine capitalist and state manifestations of power. He will expand on his suggestion that industrial ruins have become interesting as sites of “involuntary memory” in a world where the presentation of history is often tightly curated and managed. He will also consider how ruins may complicate the practices of those involved in the pragmatic and ontological ordering of space.

Shona Illingworth will screen and introduce a discussion of her “Balkaniel”, a 31-minute work set on the Cape Wrath Bombing Range in the North West tip of the Scottish highlands, where NATO warplanes drop 1,000 bombs on remote offshore islets, and share a wilderness with local villagers and members of a craft community formed by incomers in the 1960s.

Part of the Department of English Research Seminar series

To register interest please contact english@kcl.ac.uk by 7th December. For further information on the series contact Patrick Wright or click here.