More fragments of research on social and physical accumulation, decay, ruins and remnants...
Kolmanskop and Elizabeth Bay, German/Afrikaner mining towns near Luderitz on the Namibian Diamond Coast, were abandoned in the 1950s. The wind is sand-blasting these ghost towns down to skeletons and facades, and the dunes have moved in through the doorways. In Elizabeth Bay the bricks are gone but an interstitial grid screen of mortar remains - a visual reminder of Calvino's Armilla, more or less:
... it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seems a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes [Invisible Cities]More Kolmanskop:
- Sean Fitzgerald's beautiful photos of sand dunes inside the buildings, (more here, here and here) ...
- roof as Venetian blind...
- large, 800k view and an aerial photo
- "treading carefully so that we would not fall through holes in the stairs or floors" and more photos
The worlds are dust is Salvator Rosa:
All of our works fall and sicken,
Nothing is eternal:
The Colossei die, the Baths,
The worlds are dust, their pomp a nothing [quoted in Woodward's In Ruins, 91]
Previous remnant: Fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of words.
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