Go to school, go to work, sleep, repeat.
Check your phone on the bus. Between classes. Walking down the street.
Student debt. Work two jobs. Sleep five hours. Go back to class.
“Our lives are super-abundant in ‘somethingness’ and we are constantly over stimulated. This over-stimulation is what makes us numb and the numbness is what we call boredom. The abandoned place, with no functioning purpose has the antidote we require to all of that: nothingness” (Romany, 2012). Urban exploration can provide an escape. A place in the ruins, in the abandonment to collect ourselves and reflect back on something else.
We run away to the nothingness and escape modern day society. Each abandoned building tells a different story and asks different questions. Searching for sublime – that mix of fear and pleasure, urban explorers hunt for the stories that may unfold.
Ross (2016), in Appropriating the Past goes into detail regarding the mystification which “abstracts the building from its historical ties, transforming it from the site of what once were very real living, labor, and struggle into a romanticized mythic symbol of history to be experienced almost exclusively as emotion” (p.38). When entering each property, we runaway and escape from modern day society, unraveling the life and history which lays within each home.
Previously this month I came across an abandoned home in Erin, Ontario. The home was covered in garbage and vandalism. Warily I walked up to the home with a friend and we entered the property through the back entrance. Floors were rotting and falling in, paint chipping away, and the house was infested with critters. Yet, besides the most common characteristics of homes that have been left behind, there was still a story here. The home was discarded and moved on from, but hints of a previous life was still left behind. A teenage mutant ninja turtles’ garbage can, dishware, etc. Among all of the items left behind there was also evidence of other urban explorers that have visited the home.
