Susan Stewart on ruins as wounds and promises in 'A World of Ruins'

In an interview with Artribune, American scholar Susan Stewart discusses her book 'A World of Ruins' (Aboca Edizioni, 2025), exploring how ruins function as both wounds and promises, preserving the past while opening possibilities for the future. Stewart examines the paradox of creative destruction in the Anthropocene, arguing that art takes seriously the radical questions of life's purpose and value. She traces Western fascination with ruins from the Maya to the Renaissance, citing Alberti's analogy of buildings as bodies and Riegl's concept of 'age value' in monuments. Stewart distinguishes between mediated ruins in art and literature and the 'pornography of ruins'—voyeuristic consumption of decay that erases human suffering. She references Freud's metaphor of ruins for the psyche, where nothing truly disappears. Figures like Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth each reinvented their art through ruins: Goethe saw decay as poetic inspiration, Piranesi found material evidence of Etruscan roots, Blake transformed ruin representation into utopian possibility, and Wordsworth documented vernacular collapse amid war and industrialization. Stewart concludes that ruins reveal something ephemeral yet vital—like a blade of grass breaking through stone—reminding us of life's continuity and our connection to larger creative processes.