Visual Media Archaeologies: On the Ruins and Remont of Modernity and its Afterlife

Abstract

This dissertation explores how ruins mediate new social, cultural, and ecological relations between people, matter, and the environment. Taking Bulgaria as a case study, the thesis examines how the state of economic and political ruination in the country, throughout modernity and the post-1989 Transition Period from planned to market economy, shaped a cultural condition of everyday life defined by and in the ruin form: one that can be traced from the early modern makings of archaeology into a discipline to contemporary representations of an urban environment in constant need of repair work to the formation of subjecthood in visual culture across time. The thesis further investigates the ways in which ruins animate historical and cultural memory to shape alternative forms of community that challenge existing absences in state archives, teasing out more minor, informal ways towards the production of knowledge otherwise. At its core lies the following question: How does living with and through a state of economic and political ruin inform the ways in which physical ruins mediate new forms of ecological and social life? The dissertation further studies the human and nonhuman afterlife that has emerged from the ruins of socialist modernity and the acts of foraging and repair work that shape a culture of material circulation today: one that not only animates the unruly heritage landscapes of Bulgaria, but also those of the post-socialist space more broadly and other salvage geographies gripped by new modes of capital flow. The thesis thus concerns itself with the ways in which ruin materials move, the people that move them, and the ways in which people are moved by them. Centered between these modes of circulation, affect, and haptics, the thesis traces out a history of ruin formation that gives shape to media culture. Rooted in and of the ground, a third archaeology emerges at the site where media archaeology meets archaeology proper.