Places of difference that make a difference: On thinking-with-ruins and hauntological encounters with Vyborg

Abstract

After having become a part of the Soviet Union territory as a result of the Second World War, Vyborg turned over time from a prosperous second largest city of Finland into a small provincial border town of Russia. The impact of traumatic history, as well as the influence of different cultures on Vyborg, turned it into a kind of palimpsest. The ruins of buildings destroyed during the war are still present in the town, causing ambiguous feelings among the visitors. This study seeks to understand how the presence of the ruins affects the experience of modern Vyborg and how this experience can be understood and transmitted through the practice of contemporary art.

This study applies the theories of feminist new materialisms, hauntology and ruins. These theories outline the key concepts, problematise questions of space-time-matter relationship and help to understand the experience of Vyborg.

This study approaches the subject with the methodological framework of artistic research. It utilises diffraction as a feminist practice as its main method, focusing on the concept of re-turning as meta-diffraction. As an artistic component, three types of text were produced during the research process: storytelling, photography and video art. Through these texts, Vyborg, as the subject of the study was diffracted and deconstructed using the aforementioned theories.

This artistic research suggests that Vyborg is a place in-between, which is haunted by the ghosts of the past, both through various visual-auditory cultural codes and through the presence of ruins in the urban landscape. Via applying feminist new materialist non-binary understanding of knowing in being and matter as an active agent in this world, the concept of thinking-with-ruins was proposed as a feminist onto-epistemological practice. It showed a transformative potential in approaching the concept of difference or otherness. Thus, seeing ruins through a feminist lens transforms them into naturecultural places of potentiality, places of difference that make a difference, challenging the homogenisation of lived environment.