Ruins

I called this exhibition “Ruins” because at the moment more than ever the word “Ruins” seems to explain just how I feel.
At one time I used to call some of my designs or booklets “Esercizi Formali”, meaning I didn’t feel “committed”, at least not in the way classic intellectuals do. So I did things where any commitment there might be would be remote and indirect.

I never seriously thought that all-embracing projects could exist to save the world and mankind, and still less have I been able to design a personal system of my own. I have never felt like a missionary or ever thought it was my duty to save souls, or nations, or still less the societies on this planet.

Now however I realise missionaries of every kind have done so much with their gorgeous designs that I feel as if I had wandered deeper and deeper into an immense desert of ruins and everything I do, whatever project comes into my mind, seems to turn immediately into a ruin. It seems to become a solitary presence whose reasons I myself understand less and less, whose connections with the rest are more and more of a mystery to me.

Everything I do becomes a steadily more random, mysterious presence, just as ruins in a desert are mysterious – populated by remains of ancient by now incomprehensible geologies by remains of ancient evaporated torrential rains, by remains of unknown, vanished vegetations.

Perhaps there nothing else for me to do but walk among ruins and maybe when I design I have no other destiny but to produce ruins, I mean designs dropped without explanation into the midst of millions of other designs the logic and binders and connections of which will never ever be known to me.

Ettore Sottsass, 1992