The presentation explores the interrelationship between ruins and narratives, suggesting that all ruins tell stories while all narratives essentially embody fragments of ruin. It argues that narratives are co-produced through consumption and the influence of external agents, and highlights how contemporary artists like Stephen Turner use ruins to reflect on ecological and historical narratives. The document emphasizes the importance of recognizing the power of these narratives to connect past and present experiences, suggesting that storytelling is vital for understanding both self and society.

1. All ruins are narratives. All narratives are ruins.
All narratives are co-produced.
Dan Keech, University of Gloucestershire
and Owain Jones, Bath Spa University
dkeech@glos.ac.uk
o.jones@bathspa.ac.uk
RGS-IBG Annual International Conference
28th August 2014
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2. This presentation is in three parts, following the title
1 – All ruins are narratives: this is a relatively straightforward
claim, (we hope), and will be discussed with reference to the
works of Wordsworth, Sebald and especially the contemporary
artist Stephen Turner, and ideas of future ruins.
2 – All narratives are ruins: this claim is more
speculative/provocative, but, with reference to Serres, Thrift and
others, can be argued in a number of ways.
3 – All narratives are co-produced. We feel this is in 2 ways.
Firstly in their consumption, narratives are re-created; secondly,
drawing upon Sebald again, in how the agency of things – or
others – co-construct narrative.
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3. Part 1 – All ruins are narratives
Portals to stories know and unknown
Ruins speak of other (past) stories. That “of” is important because
it implies complexity and variation in how they do so.
(i) The ruin is a material indicator of some chapter (narrative) of
something that has (in some sense or other) ended. The chapter
itself may be known, or not. In this respect, ruins are portals to
(other) narratives – both known and unknown
(ii) Ruins as portals into unknown narratives have a great
(affective) power – “there is some great story here but I don’t
know what it is”.
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4. Ecologies of narratives
Ruins not only portals to other narratives
but connectors between narratives – esp.
life stories and history
Wordsworth’s poem Lines Written a Few
Miles Above Tintern Abbey…
(i) He begins by refamiliarising himself with
the physical aspects of the landscape of the
place, after a 5-year period of absence.
(ii) The Abbey, there, but not emphasised in
the text itself, we feel, offers a prompt for
melancholic reflection on his aging and
changing, and how the landscape holds both
shadows (ruins) of his former youth and the
‘sober pleasure’ of his maturity. A prompt to
think about time, self, others. 4

5. Ecologies of narratives
Shelley in "Ozymandias", illustrates how ruins are both direct
narratives of history but also portals to unknown narratives and
deferred narratives – ‘I met a traveller from an antique land who
said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone…’ "I am great
OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,"The King of Kings; this mighty City
shows The wonders of my hand."
A narrative of a narrative of a narrative…
Nature itself can also offer such links of narrative chains. In
particular, ecological renewal is a form of narrating past chapters,
as well as re-creating narrative patina (to follow).
In summary - Because of their temporal signatures and their
resonances, ruins are precociously eloquent, but perhaps in a
foreign tongue, or perhaps in how they whisper new life and
directions (cf. Wordsworth) into people’s own/other stories.
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6. 6
The trouble with heritage
There are critiques of, and much debate
in, organisations such as English Heritage
about the extent to which, and
consequences of, heritage narratives
being made over explicit e.g. through
digital/locative media
“If only we could accurately interrogate
this millennia-long memory, we would
somehow discover what the monument
truly is and, in the process, find out who
we, the English, are.” (Will Self)

7. Imagined – future ruins - narratives
Woodward opens his book on ruins
with a reference to one of the great sci-film
moments - the closing shot of
Planet of the Apes when Charlton
Heston finally realises he is on planet
earth when he comes across the ruins
of the Statue of Liberty
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8. A number of artists similarly imagine narratives of the near
future – e.g. climate change – through future ruins
Jethro Brice – Future Museum - M5 Bridge Avonmouth
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9. Ruins as dynamic 3 ecologies
(Guattari)
In A Natural History of
Destruction, Sebald explores
the consequences of WW2
allied bombing in Germany,
citing Böll’s description of
desperate people living among
the ruins.
Sebald describes nature reclaiming these cities: “nature’s
ability to regenerate did not seem to have been impaired by
firestorms. … many chestnuts and lilacs had a second flowering
in Hamburg…” (p.40)
Like in the Gormenghast trilogy – Mervyn Peake – ruins not
only speak of narrative – but are (made) narrative 9

10. Introducing Turner
Sebald’s narrative connects
characters of historic
‘catastrophe through its ruins in
the present’ (Presner, in Hell &
Schönle 2010, p.205).
Similarly, work by Turner, which
is simultaneously narrative,
creation and performance,
connects past realities with
current life by crossing temporal
boundaries between culture and
nature.
Pic: Turner
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11. (WW2) Ruins as vibrant habitat
The interface between
obsolescence (ruin), nature and
art is a central theme in the work
of Turner, via this illustartion of
Seaforts. www.seaforts
In the summer of 2005, ST spent
6 weeks living on a former air-raid
warning fort in the Channel,
8 miles from land, mirroring the
tour of duty during WW2.
Pics: Turner
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12. Exbury Egg
Turner’s latest project, The Exbury Egg, saw his
isolation extended to a year. Living on a wooden
egg-shaped boat near Lymington, he noted,
through real-time film (a 1:1 map?), the effects
of climate change on shorelines, bird migration
and plant life.
‘50˚47’08.10″N x 1˚24’27.91″W
July 13th, 2014
Last year the Samphire grew thickly on the
marsh beside the Egg, but this year there is none
at all in prospect here. The mud bank has lost
height and has been covered in a thick layer of
green algae for the last few weeks, which may
have had an effect. My sense overall is of the
width of marsh narrowing.’
Pics: Turner
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13. Pin-ups, impressions, seabirds
‘I will enter one room at a time, exhaustively examine all the nooks and crannies. Each
doorway is the threshold to a different stage of a journey; where the decaying reality of
the fort …is, from within, the shaper of memories… It seems important to take this process
slowly and for it to comfortably fill the time.
…Today amongst a pile of feathers on the floor, were the leg rings of weary homing
pigeons that never made it back – GB 2000A25848 and GB99 S44807. They lay not far
away from a pair of Royal Artillery luggage labels belonging to RA140507 and RA171317.’
(Turner 2006 p. 14)
‘A cupboard on a stairwell is littered with fish bones… last night a gang of around forty
[comorants] arrived ad took over the control tower and the eastern gun tower. I realise
that the fort has never been abandoned at all.’ (ibid., p. 26)
The floors are rich in stories, and their careful sweeping is at the core of creative action.
(ibid., p.20)
‘The surface of the floor is a bituminous material…
Partition walls, fixtures and fittings have very slowly sunk
into it; leaving […] impressions… How many footsteps are
Also logged here?, but just harder to see? … what
percentage of the fort might now be part of me and me of
the fort? (ibid., p.28)
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14. Part 2 – All narratives are ruins
‘The fort buildings are decaying, as we all are. Ruin is what we live with.
What keeps things alive is the telling of stories… about remembering
sharable moment. …it has to be beautiful, otherwise it’s just more
data.’
‘Inside [the seaforts] was full of stuff and memories. Stories came thick
and fast. I occupied one room and spent the first day sweeping up
some debris to clear space to put up the tent. In the morning I noticed
that the pile of debris was full of the skeletons of birds and bits of
equipment’ he realized that if he wasn’t careful, he’d destroy them.
‘They were the stories of the building.’
From interview with ST 28th March 2014
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15. 15
Humans are storying creatures
“Stories are the essence of life, the essence of time” (A. S. Byatt)
Narratives are key to senses of self, community, politics.
Damasio (1999) has stated that affective becoming make us transient entities of the
present moment, and yet, at the same time, we have an ‘autobiographical self', ‘a
nontransient collection of unique facts and ways of being of systemised memory’ (17).
So we are very good at concocting them - pulling together fragments and filaments into
an apparently coherent whole.
But all such narratives are full of ghosts (as any good ruin is) and ruptures, and scars of
old ruptures
Thrift (2008, 118, citing Gell 1998, 222–223) say that people are:
rather ill-defined constellations [ …] not confined to particular spatio-temporal
coordinates, but consist of a spread of biographical events and memories of events,
and a dispersed category of material objects, traces, and leavings.

16. Mantel writes in her memoir Giving Up The Ghost
‘When the midwife says “it’s a boy” where does the girl go?’
Tamboukou (2010 ) turns to Michel Serres’s work on narrative as a
source of methodological innovation and political possibility. For
Serres narrative offers proliferation of difference and possibility
through “the process of bifurcation”. Sense appearing not in
coherence but in the ‘eruption of the moment’, which is constructed
within “the here, there, yesterday, tomorrow” within the specifics of
unfolding space-time . Narrative is a ‘force’ (ibid) [which] appears as
fluent [ ] flow and eddy or backwash, pulling its elements forwards
in a single direction but also redistributing them in new
compounds, vortices, turbulences (16)
Narratives: force (or field), rather than
lines (cf. Ingold).
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17. We suggest that even the most coherent, compelling narratives are
confections of constructed order which overlay filaments, fragments,
disjunctures, ghosts and untruths.
Deconstruction
“Narrative displaces and overlooks discontinuity, fragmentation and
ambiguity.” Boje and Jørgensen (2008)
We need, therefore, to analyse narratives and life materials, in order to
treat them as instances of social action – as speech-acts or events with
common properties, recurrent structures, cultural conventions and
recognisable genres. (Atkinson 2005, 6)
Noticing how someone narrates their life, we become aware of the ‘versions
of self, reality, and experience’ (Chase 2005, 657) their story telling produces.
This allows us to see how they conceive of their place in the world, and
understand them as socially inscribed beings.
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18. Part 3 – All narratives are co-produced
In 2 ways at least:
• Firstly and simply - a story only lives when it is consumed and in the
consumption it is created afresh
• Secondly in how the agency of things – or others – co-construct narrative.
This happens as a matter of course, but some writers embrace it explicitly.
Sebald’s method: profoundly ad hoc (cf. Waterman 1993) and a form of
improvised co-production.
‘But then as you walk along, you find things. I think that’s the advantage of
walking. It’s just one of the reasons why I do that a lot. You find things by the
wayside or you buy a brochure written by a local historian, which is in a tiny
little museum somewhere, which you would never find in London. And in
that you find odd details which lead you somewhere else, and so it’s a form
of unsystematic searching, which of course for an academic is far from
orthodoxy, because we’re meant to do things systematically.’
This brings us, in conclusion, back to Turner.
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19. Summary observations
Ruins hold known and unknown stories. Stories
themselves are kinds of ruins/fragments/ghosts.
Ruins are socially and ecologically produced in
everyday experience but we are often to busy
tidying them up to read their (our) narratives.
Impressions are not simply perceptions but
faint, palpable archaeology. Turner follows
many in making creative use of isolation.
However his isolation, while enabling removal
into a different daily experience, nevertheless
enables him to retell and share.
Turner’s narratives allow transgression of
temporal nature-culture interfaces – this means
that narratives, as soon as they are articulated
become ruins (artefacts) and by recounting
them, we can use the past to co-produce their
resurrection in the present.
Former seafort medical
officer. Pic: Turner
Many thanks to Stephen Turner for his
help and supply of photos.
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