The “pleasure of ruins” is a cumulative setting built from ancient and contemporary views from my relatives’ eyes to mine: beyond good and evil, the aim is “to explore the various kinds of pleasure given to various people at various epochs by the spectacle of ruined buildings“. The places here portrayed, in a very specific area south of Naples, perfectly explain the prismaticity of the term “ruin”: the Rovigliano island (which, according to the myth, owes its origins to Heracles during his return from his tenth labour) was once part of a beachside location and stands now in front of the mouth of one of the most polluted rivers in Europe; the columns of the ancient Pompeii resemble the modern ones from an abandoned bathing resort in Torre Annunziata, a nearby city; a deserted hotel next to the public baths in Castellammare, “the city of waters”, is a symbol of suburban decadence and nonetheless still alive in my family’s archive. The apparently lost beauty is here only transformed: everyone has their own Ninive and, apart from the punishment that men inflict on themselves, all these ruins witness the stratifications of lives and stories re-telling the layers of “a
heartless pastime” in which the bitter pleasure “shows a note of perversity”.
The project is named after both Rose Macaulay and Gregory Whitehead’s works, which themselves are a recollection of spoils from the past.