Ruin-Hunters Drive Down Mexico's Forgotten Railways Jonathan Jones - The Guardian
go to original June 19, 2014

SEFT-1 Abandoned Railways Exploration Probe, Los Ferronautas (The Arts Catalyst)

The lure of ruins is complex. Ruins inspire the imagination, incite pleasantly melancholy thoughts, and humanise a landscape. Only in the wildest places can we walk without coming across some kind of ruin – some human trace of enigmatic predecessors on the remote pathways. Even in the highest mountains in Snowdonia, you constantly come across quarry workings, abandoned huts and tumbledown walls. The marks of human industry are everywhere.

Modern ruins are the strangest of all.

In their project SEFT-1 Abandoned Railways Exploration Probe, the Mexican artists Ivan Puig and Andres Padilla Domene used a car converted for rail travel to investigate the power of modern ruins. Adapting their car into a small personal railway locomotive, they travelled Mexico's forgotten railways, many of which have slumped into disuse since the national railway system, created in the 19th century, was privatised in the 1990s.

Ruinous desolate stretches of track slowly decay back into the fertile landscape in the pictures they took on their journey into a past that is also an image of some dystopian future when our world is abandoned and reverts to jungle and forest.

Read the rest at The Guardian

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