RUINS AND REVERIE

Some buildings were placed to be seen from far off: on cliffs, above valleys, on shores that hold their reflection. Whoever built like that wanted to be seen and to see a long way. RUINS AND REVERIE leads to the remains of that old splendour, to castles, fortresses and monuments that have kept their scale even in wide country.

You stand in front of them and wonder how they were ever built, and why here of all places, where no road leads and the wind takes away anything that is not stone. The answer is always the same: because it could be done, and because it was meant to impress. The impression has lasted. The roofs are gone, the walls are crumbling, and still they pull you towards them. You catch sight of one from a distance and walk towards it, as travellers have done for centuries.

History and nature have become one thing in them. Grass grows where floors were, trees stand in courtyards, birds keep house in window recesses. The stone has stopped being a building and turned into part of the landscape, as old and as unremarkable as the rock it stands on. Memory and reverie lie close together here. You think of the people who lived in these walls and at the same time dream yourself into a world that never quite existed.

That is where the particular melancholy of these places lies. They tell of no ending, but of a change that is still going on. Every winter takes a stone, every spring brings a plant, and each year the ruin becomes a little more landscape and a little less house.

RUINS AND REVERIE is a series about the melancholy of decay and the dignity it leaves untouched. About fragments of another age whose beauty shines brighter in their passing than it ever did, and about the dreams they set alight.