Sergi Doria: In your work, you analyse what you call “mass marketing of nostalgia”…
Andreas Huyssen: If there is an entire cultural industry based around Holocaust when considering traumatic pasts, there is also a fashion for nostalgia…
SD: And a “nostalgia for ruins”, in your own words…
AH: The nostalgic desire for the past is always the desire for somewhere else. That’s why nostalgia may be a distorted utopia. Architectural ruins arouse nostalgia because they indissolubly combine the temporary and spatial desires of the past. I suspect that this obsession with ruins hides a nostalgia for an early era of modernity, when the possibility of imagining other futures had yet to fade away.
- Interview of Huyssen in Barcelona Metropolis, here.