AoR
Aesthetics of Ruination
Welcome to an 'Aesthetics of Ruination'. Our collective studio begins with the art of Ronald Lockett and Robert Farber. We ask, what can be discovered in and through their different practices that recall the shapes of an aesthetic and erotics emerging from the past but which also orient contemporary arts of living otherwise?
We hope Farber and Lockett’s work inspire a more sensory methodology, productive of wayward aesthetics that feel their way back to the past while refusing capture and gesturing beyond that which feels unlivable in the present. Through our engagements with affective, sensory and haptic registers of feeling backward and wayward, you are invited to resonate with the hapticality of erotic lifeworlds emerging from the ruinations of the past. Our task is to sift through the imagined traces of what has been lost, discarded, broken or left behind in order to create outputs that speculate, form, perform, and gesture towards more liveable worlds, with and beyond viral pasts and presents, within or away from the worlds Farber and Lockett inhabited.
This site is designed as a place where we can share our personal thoughts, inspirations and investigations with a ruined, wayward and fugitive community of friends.
Ronald
Lockett
Robert
Farber
A central paradox of any transformative criticism is that its dreams for the future are founded on a history of suffering, stigma and violence. Oppositional criticism opposes not only existing structures of power but also the very history that gives it meaning. Insofar as the losses of the past motivate us and give meaning to our current experience, we are bound to memorialise them (“We will never forget”). But we are equally bound to overcome the past, to escape its legacies (“We will never go back”). For groups constituted by historical injury, the challenge is to engage with the past, without being destroyed by it.
Heather Love
Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
The Erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
Audre Lorde
Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
In the ruin, the relation between past and present becomes difficult to
ascertain…the past persists not only in the material form of the ruin but in the imaginative potential sparked by its fragmentation and the processes of ruination.
Fiona Anderson
Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront
The lower frequencies of these images register as what I describe as “felt sound” – sound that, like a hum, resonates in and as vibration.
Tina Campt
Listening to Images
”Girl, where are you headed?” Each deprivation raises doubts about when freedom is going to come; if the question pounding inside her head – Can I live? – is one to which she could ever give a certain answer, or only repeat in anticipation of something better than this, bear the pain of it and the hope of it, the beauty and the promise.
Saidiya Hartman
Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments