Nuno Perestrelo

Ancient ruins were long considered aesthetic objects, vehicles for meditating on the human condition and the meaning of history, on the fall of empires, on the greatness of times past and present misery. Vanities, memento mori, reminders of our ephemeral passage on earth.

But today, contemporary ruins are considered economic and political symbols, the result of military, nuclear or climatic catastrophes. And the crumbling factories are the vestiges of systematic obsolescence, the remnants of the annihilation of an economy based on Fordism and Marxism, and the idolatry of the machine, an emblematic object of modernity.

In Nuno Perestrelo's photographs, the spaces merge; we look through a passage, a door, a window, the next room is simultaneously close yet unattainable: just as these ruins are at the same time contemporary and distant.