"Ruins"
In a society driven by efficiency, progress, and functionality, ruins appear as anachronistic remnants—unfinished sentences in a language we have forgotten how to speak. Yet they carry a unique significance: ruins are tangible breaks in the linear flow of progress. They are places where the past flickers through, where memory and loss converge, and where meaning slowly reveals itself. Within our functional society, ruins serve as a silent counterforce—not useful entities, but reflective spaces that compel us to pause.
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Michel Foucault described such “other spaces” in his concept of heterotopia—spaces that escape the usual order of place and time. Ruins are quintessentially heterotopic: they are localized, yet lifted out of their original context. They are both real and symbolic, embodied and imaginary spaces. In Jonas Vansteenkiste’s work, these heterotopias are activated and restructured. He engages ruins not merely as symbols but as mental architectures where experience and emotion can dwell.
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The ceramic wall pieces in his installation Ruins function as fragments of an interior landscape. They resemble remnants of once-existing structures, partially restored, partially disintegrated. The surface of the ceramics is rough, scratched—sometimes glazed, sometimes matte and fragile. They are tangible memories, but also attempts at healing—as if the artist seeks to touch the wounds of time, not to hide them, but to make them visible.
Within these fragments lies an echo of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending with gold, where break lines are not concealed but accentuated. Vansteenkiste, too, reveals the fractures—he makes them bearers of meaning. They stand as a counterpoint in a world that prefers to demolish ruins rather than preserve them, that prefers renewal over remembrance.
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This reflection on brokenness and repair resonates deeply within the broader cultural and philosophical frameworks around restoration. As explored in exhibitions such as Repairing the Present within the European Atria context, the act of repairing has gained new relevance—not just as a practical gesture, but as a cultural and ethical one. In Western society, repair is often viewed as a means to restore function or return to an original state. But Vansteenkiste proposes an alternative: repair as transformation, as a way to highlight trauma and fragility rather than conceal them.
Thus, the ceramic wall pieces become heterotopic spaces in their own right: moments of stillness within haste, of vulnerability within rationality, of poetry within debris. They offer an invitation to reimagine what we usually consider “broken”—not as something to be fixed, but as something to be witnessed and, perhaps, cherished.
