From the Romantic period to the present day, ruins have played an essential role in both aesthetics and the social imagination. By their very nature, ruins are imperfect objects, marked by absence and disintegration; yet they exert a profound fascination over us. The stone remnants of antiquity continue to attract visitors from around the world, while abandoned architectural complexes, hidden within the interstices of urban spaces, have become gathering places for contemporary explorers. Why are we so drawn to ruins? What are we truly looking at when we stand before them?

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We tend to regard ruins as the remnants of a bygone past. Yet, in reality, we are living through a process of ruination. Ruins do not belong exclusively to history; they continually emerge in the present and participate, in distinctive and ever-changing ways, in shaping the world we inhabit. I therefore approach ruins as a dynamic process, situated within a zone of transition that is constantly taking shape. I use the term critical state to describe this condition: an intermediate position between two modes of existence, which can be understood on multiple levels—between construction and collapse, civilisation and wasteland, reality and fiction.

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This perspective raises a series of questions. What relationships do ruins maintain with humanity and civilisation? What underlying forces account for their emergence? How has their status evolved throughout history? As both spectators of and agents in the production of ruins, how can we understand them from the standpoint of the present and redefine our own position within these continuously forming ruins? And when the future itself is anticipated in the form of ruins—imagined, consumed, and generated as such—what kind of world are we looking at?

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This research takes these questions as its starting point and seeks to understand why ruins have become one of the most revealing landscapes of our time. Beginning with the traditional conception of ruins, it traces the historical ruptures of modernity, examines several emblematic sites of contemporary ruination, and ultimately turns towards the future. Through different paradigms of ruins and the artistic works associated with them, this study seeks to develop a perspective that traverses temporal structures and illuminates the relationships between them. Its aim is to analyse, across multiple levels, how ruins are shaped into a new kind of landscape: a visual framework that reveals, bears witness to, and anticipates the structural transformations of our time.