I am in Rome. After New Orleans, Aceh, New York and Sarajevo, here are the ruins as God intended them – vast, ancient, breathtaking. Colloseum. The Roman Forum. Trajan's Market. I take them in as Alice takes the ‘drink me’ potion from the little bottle on the three-legged table made of glass. One sip and I am the size of a key-hole. Against the world’s most celebrated and spectacular ruins, I watch myself turn into an ant, a black dot, a puff of hot air.
 
You would think that the idea of benign, lavish, titillating ruins would be loosing its ground by now. Not because of any profound shifts in collective consciousness but because ruins no longer belong either to eternity or to the distant, pedagogical past. They belong to this morning when another suicide bomber has called it a day, when another natural calamity has torn apart a sleeping place. So why do I gasp for air in Rome? Why do I sweat with reverence and awe?
 
A Finnish documentary in Melbourne’s international film festival a month earlier: Three Rooms of Melancholia. I really like the name. The film is about the war in Chechnya and what it does to children, not that we don’t know what wars do to children or maybe the point is precisely that we don’t. The three rooms are: in a Russian military academy for boys, in the Chechen capital Grozny and in a makeshift refugee camp in the neighbouring Ingushetia, where surviving children most of them orphans are taken. Not by officials, of course, by private citizens.
 
Look at the shots of Grozny taken from the car. This place, once-upon-a-time a capital city and a nice-looking one at that by all accounts, is finished. Its buildings are ruins at best (at worst, they have disappeared without so much as leaving a brick behind). Its streets are abandoned battlefields. It is impossible to imagine this city peopled again, ordinary, alive.
 
And then you notice in this terrible heap of rubbish, tiny bent backs. The camera moves in and you see that these are the skinny, gray backs of children playing alone, in pairs, in larger groups, mainly boys but there are some girls too. Playing on this miserable, insane, bombed-out street, in these ruins, which your mind instantly wants to forget.
 
No children are playing in the ruins of Rome now. But they are and have been for ages, in the bombed-out and burnt-out cities across the world – in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Lebanon, after earthquakes in Turkey, after the Indian Ocean tsunami in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India…
 
On Christmas Eve of 1974, the Australian city Darwin was devastated by Cyclone Tracy. Of the city’s buildings less than ten per cent were left undamaged, and in a number of the newly built suburbs the destruction rate was one hundred per cent. Gone were water, gas, electricity, birds, leaves on the trees and even insects, with the exception of cockroaches and white ants. The mass evacuation, on a scale previously unseen in Australia in either peace or war, saw the vast majority of the residents leave as well. With the Boxing Day Tsunami and New Orleans, the story of Darwin seems pretty ordinary, kind of ‘low-impact’ as they say. Three decades ago, however, what had happened seemed inconceivable, a thriving city stripped to its bones. Tracy was and still is the worst natural disaster to hit an Australian city.
 
Yet less than a year after the cyclone and ten-year-old Bernard Briec, only recently back in his city, cannot think of a better place to be than the Lee Point Dump, a ‘scavenging spot’ he calls it, overflowing with the relics of destruction. It’s a haven for the brave kids of his devastated city. The city’s ruins, its abandoned and derelict structures shelter and give rise to what anthropologist Laurie Wilkie calls, 'secret landscapes of childhood' (1). The slightly older Matthew Coffey, evacuated in the aftermath of the cyclone like the majority of Darwinians, literally counts the days till his family is able to come back. Out goes the sameness of life away from home, in comes the most spectacular cubby houses on the surface of the earth. In Darwin, bits and pieces of lawnmowers, fridges, corrugated iron ripped from the roofs of the buildings, children’s toys and squashed casseroles bring into existence entire worlds of once-in-a-lifetime vitality and magic.
 
Why does it matter so much, this playing?
 
Maybe it’s because an encounter with the Colloseums and Forums is, for all intents and purposes, an out-of-body experience. As a go-between, the body fails me in Rome. It is too small, too limited and unlike mind it cannot travel in time. In Grozny and other places devastated by war, terrorism or natural disasters the body is central. A place savaged by death evades the eyes, shuts down the imagination and turns the mind into a shapeless cripple. Only the body is left. It – running, hiding, sleeping, bleeding, playing – is precisely how you get to know these ruins.
 
That’s why, amongst thousands other reasons, the tiny backs bent over the wreckage and mud matter so much. A child at play is involved in what cultural historian Bill Brown calls, ‘a highly charged reproduction of the material world' (2). In Darwin, Grozny, Sarajevo, Berlin, Beirut children building cubby-houses out of debris, playing to their heart's content with the remnants of devastation are engaged in the task of reconstituting their destroyed cities. As children remake the material world around them what Brown calls, the 'unforeseeable potential' of objects is released (3). In the hands of playing children, destroyed and damaged objects are re-energised, and ruins become sites of life and engagement not simply of destruction and death.
 
For the past eight years, I have studied the fate of places marked by violence and loss, and I have come to see that cycles of destruction are layered in most of our lived spaces. Places are transformed and thickened not unmade by destruction. Cities, in particular, absorb and re-work their ruins. In the post-WWII Berlin for example, the whole 75 million cubic meters of rubble short of swallowing the city up became integrated in its ecology, topography and daily life. The highest elevation point within Berlin boundaries, Teufelsburg (the Devils Mountain) was, in fact, formed out of the rubble from eighty thousand buildings painstakingly piled together shortly after the war. In Sarajevo during the longest siege in modern-day history, all kinds of artistic projects were compelled into existence by the omnipresence of ruins and debris: sculptures, stylish furniture, life-size models of a pre-war Bosnian house. The ruins were not the dead weight of the surrounding city, not the apocalyptic dust covering its savaged streets, they were used practically and creatively to make things. New things, previously unthought of things, things you can only make from, with, because of the remnants of devastation.
 
Why is it then that it is hard to see anything but the end of the world in modern ruins? Is it because so often we approach ruins with our bodies out of the picture? Ruins as images of devastation hovering over our newspapers, web portals, television screens disembodied and unreachable, just like the ruins of Rome.
 
In his book on sites of memory and trauma in Los Angeles, cultural historian Norman Klein writes that in our eyes all ruins, no matter how real, recent or raw, turn fake. 'No matter how authentic the ruin’, he writes, ‘it is received, or read, as simulated memory: phantasmagoria, dioramas, arcades. Every building is faintly warped to the eye, as if by glaucoma' (4). For Klein, ruins most closely resemble the welts of old scars. The hand touches the welt on the side of the face, yet the ‘mass feels unnatural. It bears the memory of surgical violence – a physical piece of evidence, but evacuated of meaning (5).’ Klein’s wonderfully articulate vision of ruins makes clear why having been to Rome before, if over a decade ago, I was startled anew both by what I saw in the city and by my mind’s remarkable inability to preserve the past memory of magnificence and history unlived by my body. Yet what Klein sees cannot tell us about how modern-day ruins created in an instant by evil or great misfortune become animated and brought to life by destruction and trauma. It cannot make us see ruins as much more than old scars or even as new brutally unhealed wounds, as sites that are vitally important and unmistakably, irreducibly alive.
 
In my writing about trauma and lived experiences of place, I have chosen the word ‘traumascape’ to speak about places marked and transformed by violence, suffering and death. Maybe the word itself is tacky, but it is useful too simply because it tells us that ruins and sites of destruction give rise to the new and distinctive order of experiential reality, that they are tangible, enduring and demand to be reckoned with. Everything fake and phantom about traumascapes, just like the glaucoma, is in the eye of the beholder.
 
As to the images of children playing with ruins, so present in this essay, it is neither sugary nor quietly evocative (aka ‘people are basically good’, poor Anne Frank...). No it is not like that because on the ground unexploded mines are waiting for these children, because on the hill nearby snipers clean their Kalashnikovs, because anything, literally anything can come down on them from the sky. The image of children and ruins does not remind us of the survival of human spirit against all odds, far from it. But it does tell us one critical thing. It tells us that we can do things with ruins. We can live with, not despite them. Besides, most of the world already does.
 
(1) Laurie Wilkie, 'Not merely child's play. Creating a historical archaeology of children and childhood' in Joanna Sofaer Derevenski (ed.), Children and Material Culture, Routledge, London & New York, 2000
(2) Bill Brown, 'How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story)' in Critical Inquiry, Summer 1998
(3) Bill Brown, 'How to Do Things with Things’
(4) Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting. Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, Verso, London and New York, 1997
(5) Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting
 
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