Unsettled Ground

Destruction does not give a place a settled past. Within the same space, lives not yet realised, lives forcibly interrupted, and lives still unfolding overlap. A building may remain standing, yet its appearance cannot tell us what it has endured, or what continues to take place within it.

To call a place a ruin is often to establish a distance from it. For those who continue to inhabit it, destruction may still shape the conditions of dwelling, the routes a body can take, and the limits of each attempt to begin again. The continuation of life does not consign violence to the past.¹

These photographs remain where that distance cannot be secured. Historical remains and present wounds occupy the same surfaces; the order of the image presses against an unresolved reality.² A frame can give destruction a coherence that life within it does not possess. Photography can hold a form in place. It cannot declare that what it records is over.