This visual essay arises from an experience in abandoned spaces, once places of labour, encounter, and circulation, now suspended in a silence that seems definitive. Ruin is not treated here as a fetish, nor as a pejorative record of what has been lost, but as a field of resonance. Even in abandonment, these places still vibrate latently, carrying echoes of what once moved through them. The photographic gesture is thus not to fixate abandonment, but to experiment with ways of returning life — as if each image could act as an electric shock: not nostalgic restoration, but an attempt at reanimation, to make what has become still pulse again. Inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), I understand the body as a space of resonance with the world, a site where all sensory experience takes shape. To photograph a ruin is, above all, to listen to it with the body. The staircase that no longer leads anywhere, the fragmented wall, the broken reflection are not merely forms or textures, but vibrations. It is in this intertwining that affect occurs: the space touches me, alters my perception, and demands a response. Photography emerges from that contact, as a perceptual extension. This project presents images that refuse documentary neutrality and instead approach perceptual vibration. Manual editing — distorting, fragmenting, layering — becomes an act of reanimation. Each intervention acts as a defibrillator, reopening the possibility of movement in crystallised surfaces. It is not about erasing the history of abandonment, but about returning a sensitive frequency to it: making the space vibrate again, even if only for the duration of the image. At the same time, the work addresses abandonment as a social and political condition. In Portugal, as in many places marked by interrupted cycles of industrialisation, abandonment is not an exception: it is part of the everyday landscape. Stations, factories, and houses remain as testimonies of suspended progress, of a time that ceased to fulfil itself. This essay does not seek to denounce this reality directly, but to re-inscribe it within a sensitive field. The images attempt to resonate with what still persists, with the mute vibration of a territory that no longer breathes yet continues to echo. The project unfolds in three movements: first, the encounter with the interrupted space and the listening of abandonment as latent vibration; second, the phenomenological practice in which the body recognises itself as a site of resonance and response; third, the transformation of the image into a defibrillator — a device that attempts to return a pulse to the world. Each photograph is thus less testimony than attempt: an insistence that something might still vibrate, that silence might not be final. The result is a series of images that do not portray ruin, but the possibility of its reverberation. Photography does not heal, but listens; it does not repair, but insists. What is sought here is the resonance that resists within abandonment — the minimal vibration that, like a reanimated heart, continues to beat.

Images as Defibrillators: An Attempt to Resuscitate the World

 

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