Environment and Planning A 2014, volume 46, pages 2569 – 2584 doi:10.1068/a46179 The future of ruins: the baroque melancholy of Hashima Carl Lavery Theatre, Film and Television, College of Arts, University of Glasgow, Gilmorehill Halls, 9 University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland; e-mail: carl.lavery@glasgow.ac.uk Deborah P Dixon ¶ School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, East Quadrangle, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland; e-mail: Deborah.dixon@glasgow.ac.uk Lee Hassall Fine Art, Art and Science Building, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool, Lincoln LN6 7TS, England; e-mail: lhassall@lincoln.ac.uk Received 2 April 2013; in revised form 7 July 2014; published online 16 October 2014 Abstract. Here, we present an iteration of our theoretical/creative writing project Hashima, begun in 2012. The paper is a collaboration and draws on the different discourses, practices and sensibilities of a performance theorist, a geographer, and a visual artist. For us, Hashima, located off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, and a former site of forced labor and intensive offshore coal-mining, is a provocation for experimentation. Hashima, exploited and abject, has offered itself, unsurprisingly, to the fetishistic gaze of artists, photographers urban explorers, and ruin enthusiasts. The logic here is to control representation, and to determine and fix the meaning of the island as always in reference to something else and elsewhere. Paradoxically, there is no sense of temporality or transformation in these representations of ruins; time has been stopped in an image. By contrast, we want to draw out the allegorical value of Hashima not as a site of loss, but as a baroque, blasted landscape of monstrous becomings that resists, and forefronts, this tendency to collapse history into nature. In the following, we introduce the island before turning to an exegesis of Walter Benjamin’s writing on German baroque tragedy in order to demonstrate how representation itself becomes tainted through a material encounter with the baroque’s two primary topoi, the ruin and the labyrinth. To do this, we finish with a creative narrative and two images illustrating our methodology. Keywords: allegory, ruins, history, creative writing, experiment “ Allegories are in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.” Walter Benjamin (2003, page 178) Introducing Hashima Hashima Island is situated in the East China Sea, roughly 18 or so kilometers from Nagasaki City and, prior to settlement, was a reef extending around 125 by 300 meters. The small- scale mining of exposed coal beds had been a feature of neighboring island economies for centuries, but increased demand for coal for the Japanese salt-making industry, and emerging fleets of steam-powered ships, in combination with the introduction of mining equipment from Britain, initiated a major drilling project on Takashima Island in 1869, and its neighbor Hashima Island in 1887. Three years later Hashima was sold to the Mitsubishi company, a fast-growing shipping enterprise. On Hashima the tunnels and chambers carved out of the rock ¶ Corresponding author.