Ruin Figments and Reconstructed Memories
single-channel video essay, 14’40’’
2020

In collaboration with Julia Cremers and Daniel Viladrich Herrmannsdoerfer


Ruin Figments and Reconstructed Memories starts off with an artificial ruin staging the city of Carthage after the Roman siege, built in Schönbrunn Palace Park, 1778 Vienna. The backyard ruin is a landscape folly characteristic of English garden design popular at the time, a commissioned trophy to imperial power display in the headquarter's closed access garden, now open to public.

In October 2020 we took about 250 photographs of a section of what is now called the Roman Ruin. The images were imported into the photogrammetry software Reality Capture and patched into a model in digital space.

The work reads the ruin as part of a predatory world building project and further reimagines the folly into the present. Between the original that is a copy and its digital copy, the model of the ruin had been separated into fragments which were modified and animated. Across staged environments, with wind simulation directed at the ruin distorting its mesh, or enforcing compressions downsizing its resolution, the work reflects on the resources needed to make up and sustain worlds and simulations.


© Julia Cremers, Installation view
Learning to dwell otherwise within the ruins
after the butcher, Berlin, DE
2020