Abstract

This article as an essay elaborates some theoretical advances of a research project on urban ruins in three cities in Latin America and analyzes the notion of ruins as articulation spaces for diverse materialities , temporalities and agencies. The hypothesis points out that as a cultural artifact the ruin upsets and disturbs as it disrupts and destabilizes the precepts of urban progress, a manifestation of creative human activity confronting and stressing the city in its pretensions for the future. In the analysis the text is organized into three dimensions: a) forces of nature and culture; b) latencies of the past and configurations of the present; c) and the differentiated agencies that relieve the historical and political nature of the ruin. It is argued that in the never-ending process of transformation from rubble to ruin and ruin to rubble processes of modernization, progress and urbanization are resisted and subverted. Finally, some reflections are presented that help to imagine an "anthropology of ruins", enabling to approach its complexity from a relativistic, critical and comprehensive perspective.