Distinct Inside: Ruinology

DISTINCT INSIDE spans two main areas of interest. First, to advance a form of thinking concerned by modern ruination. It points and elaborates its key figures – the half-human, a ruined subject, a crack, or decay. Then, it connects allied disciplines – architecture, archaeology, human geography, psychology, etc. – under the banner of Ruin Studies. The general considerations are designated as Ruinology. Secondly, said rigour is brought to a poetic field, where it becomes a writing proper. The main concept guiding this process is termed “in-distinct” (revealing a difference when inhabited). Thematically, it tends to support emergent values, from often overlooked areas. It is responsive to their surprises; it stands by the dignity of proletarized experience, the appropriate light of dim areas, and the vitality they shelter.

Sara Matrzo, Visions of Memory and Forgetting, Distinct Inside, 2025, © Sara Matrzo

Dear Sara,

I keep to the thread you left me. I progress, and it becomes nagging: possessive takes collapse in here. One doesn’t take a photograph, really. A photograph shows up, suddenly, in front of you. Like a cow in a backcountry road. It is fleshed out from the landscape – before raising the camera, framing, and pulling the trigger. It means that a photograph, first, is a vision. And what apparitions would disallow. For a vision is something that really stands out, being always a bit alien to what surrounds it.

One doesn’t take a photograph, then, but makes oneself ready for it. Memory may be occluding it. “Raise your hand,” someone said, “if you want to abandon the anonymity of suburbs, of pubs, and return to the organic slush – raise your hand who wants to give up the modern promise, ploughing the fields.” But hold on. Not so fast. Now – chewing the postindustrial, voiding the Mediterranean, with homeoffice comers and goers – raise your hand, too, who wants to go back to the factory. Because the only way to return, to return for real, is through a vision. It doesn’t quite coincide with the past. And that’s the whole point. Here is that gap which a photograph fills in, pointing the way to a harvest – a crop of memory and forgetting.

Pawel,

Berlin, Utopie, 24.5.25

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