Chuchu Qi a.k.a. Chuchu
selected works [landscape]
Ruin, Ruins, Ruined
a manifasto
Critic: Michael Allen
Spring 2022 | Elective
St. Louis, MO
Cahokia Mound, Collinsville, IL
photo took on site, 02/10/2022
Ruin flows.
It is a fluid and unstable existence,
liquid space of shifting forms
and rapid displacements.
To experience the “ruining” of the ruin, you need to get closer to the site, stand on the debris, breathe, look, and feel… Then, you can see the debris is not just physical, but on-go-ing, forming a multifaced process of continuous ruination and weaving a web of space that speaks the material and immaterial aggregations in relation between the forms of the city and the people who inhabit.
If you don’t want you experience the ruining ruin and stand on the site, I am here to convince you with the photograph I took on sites, including both field trips took during class and the trip I took outside with my friends, which I see as a great medium for exploring hidden meanings of the visible world, unveiling the crucial processing aspect of ruinations by the verisimilitude meaning at hidden actuality.
back ground image: printmaking made inspired by the photos of Cementland
1. Ruins, Growing...
Walking along the path at Cahokia, one can imagine the splendid past of the place, the sacrifice ceremonies happened on the currently grass-covered mounds. Cahokia, the once largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, left this huge and complex archaeological site with the artifacts of the past wisdom. It is the nature, which has a subtle but ever-growing power over the land the acts as an author of the site of Cahokia, as well as many other ruinations in St Louis. Cementland, where located at the north intersections of the St.Louis city and county boundary, has provides a more visible image reflecting how a reality of nature has agency of its own.
The path in Cementland has been overgrown with weeds. One needs to pull over the weeds in order to stand on the previously built staircase and climb to the top. The view on the top of the mounded hill shows even more wilderness, covered by the recklessly grown bush which trails all over the space and becomes even taller than the surroundings buildings.
Yet the nature is not the only growing medium that gradually covers the ruination, ruins like Cementland has also become a dumping ground for various materials: couches, sone intact but some displaying springs, dot the main entrance with the unexpected items such as a metal wrecked boat and a toddler tricycle. Even outdated clothing and technologies such as a CD sat in piles alongside piles of the well-sorted construction materials like tires. With the dumps layered on top of each other over the years, and the growing nature along sides of these dumping materials, the ruins, are not still, but a verb that has ever changing appearance..
2. Ruins, Expressing...
for Escaping...
Ruins has changing forms, but also has the changing meaning within. Meanings can be varied by the literal agents like graffities and other forms of arts that reimaged the structures and space. At Cementland, graffiti fills the open space of the walls and floors as well as the structures crevices as one travels through the space, telling the stories of visitors who came because they see the value of the failed dream of the Cementland became a theme park, as well as acting as a way for the visitors to escape from heavily constricted imagination in the form of manicured lawns in suburbia.
Messages are the creations and expressions that claims a space but also a practice of agency, which expresses both extreme cynicism and optimism. The freedom of speech can be expressed through the graffiti and notes on other vacant lots and buildings as well. Even artists, like the one saw on the northern site of northern city garden, is an incredible example showing how interacting with ruins and vacancy enables a conversation and even promotion. “Equal pay day to day” collaged on the background of dollars at the site of 3901 Labadie Avenue displays a typical way of slogan expression but taking an unusual place for speaking off. While some forms of arts at ruins and vacant places spoke to the issues of politics, justice, some also related to personal experience, making the space as a shared authorships between the land and human.
3. Ruins, Transforming...
Ruin is a present progressive tense as a verb. Ruining. You might read it as demolishing, destroying, but it defines as the opposite, or between your definition and the opposite destination. Ruining means transforming, which possessed critically as a response to the city’s needs. The idea of “minor architecture”, which first presents by Stoner at UC Berkley, definite the idea as “making of spaces within the already built”. Ruins, seems an ideal urban landscape in the shape of minor architecture in which has the potential to be transformative into other uses and for people to explore and to invent new ways of inhabiting urban forms. Either covered nature or the layered graffiti is creating a form of transformative process that taking process that taking the ruins to a new form of inhabitation which is revolutionary, and even spatial. You should not stand as an outsider, but join this collective transforming process. Even filling out a questionnaire by the local artist, like Dali Chambers can be crucial to the community project like the “Beautiful healthy resilient”, transforming the vacant lots into the use of urban garden.
4. Ruins, Imaginating...
Ruin also has the tense for the future. Ruin means will, and hope. It was a form an imagination, a dreamworld, but can be processed with re-imagination, creating experimental, temporary and even invisible spaces of invention from the detritus of what is already there on the sites. Like present, ruin is a verb that connects with collective efforts. Ruin will be imagined as urban garden like the one at 3901 Labadie Avenue, promoted by local artists like Dali who not only makes the space with renewed use but making the changed space into the creation of her arts. I see the power of future flowing along the ruins and vacancies like these places, but also invite you, to come together and join, making noun word “ruin”, alive again.
Sources:
Witthaus, Jack, and Christian Gooden. “Cementland’s Future Isn’t Clear after Death of Creator, but Visitors Are Still Drawn to Site.” STLtoday.com, October 12, 2016. https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/cementlands-future-isnt-clear-after-death-of-creator-but-visitors-are-still-drawn-to-site/article_8f131ad6-fe2e-51c4-ad4b-6b3152f2ff5a.html.
Stoner, Jill. “Minor Architecture”. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/toward-minor-architecture