Shut Down

I was moved to meditation by this exhibition and essay at the Leopold museum in Vienna.

In a few years many of these structures will have disappeared – torn down, carted away or simply collapsed. What will be left then? A few walls, some rubble and iron skeletons – an elegiac memento mori. They compel us to reflect on the essence of things, on our own mortality. “My occupation: ruins builder. My mission: ruins architect. My sin: ruins voyeur. Don’t ask me about forgotten places”, wrote the Romanian poet Mircea Cărtărescu. “Gather around me, open my skull and look at my brain: before your very eyes it will crumble like plaster. And its dust will be mixed indistinguishably with the dust of the ruins among which I have lived my entire life, as a lover of a harem of ruins.”