Bearing Witness to Silence: On the Onto-Poetics of Abandoned Places

Abandoned places have received increasing academic interest during the past decade. While drawing on research that examines the ways in which derelict spaces enable contestation of capitalism and power, this paper seeks to offer a new perspective on the politics of ruins. The paper combines an auto-ethnographic account of visits to several abandoned sites with a theoretical elaboration of art and witnessing. Following Heidegger, ‘art’ is understood as belonging to the site of the ‘event’ which refers to the unfolding of a people’s historical existence, bringing into the open Being as everything that it might yet be. Onto-poetics as a site of transformation connecting poetics, life and the political is intimately related to ‘witnessing,’ which Agamben associates with listening to absence. The paper argues that the interplay between the materiality of the abandoned site and bearing witness to its silence allows for a unique understanding of art as an event.