Void of human habitation, a patina of self-identity emerges from abandoned structures and substitutes the original man-made baptisms of name and function. These spaces anthropomorphize when they are empty. When we enter them, they die.

Ausencia y Abandono, Komanskop, Namibia, by Jan Smith

With our presence they become shells for the habitation of our consciousness, and their essence retreats.  Such structures exist for themselves only when they are empty. They live in a realm that shows itself and at the same time withdraws from us. Their acquired consciousness is like a horizon that defines itself by what we see, but also more largely by what remains veiled.

Gunkanjima mined coal from the seabed.  In 1956 it gained, and still holds, the record of most densely populated place on the planet, at 85,000 persons per square kilometer. In Kolmanskop, miners literally picked diamonds from the surface of the desert.  Its expanse was so vast that population density was less than two persons per square kilometer. Although now removed from mainstream memory, both supported well known corporate empires –DeBeers and Mitsubishi—and both at one time used slave labor to prosper.

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