Mogadishu is a quite ruined city. It brings to the foreground the antihistoric rhetoric of modernity (and to some extent postmodernity), which has has lost favor. The ruin is a specific "remembrance" of the past and the ground for ruins, and our interest in them, is memory, and along with it, matters or affects such as continuity, stability, nostalgia, desire.

Jose Miguel Calatayud, old Italian lighthouse Mogadishu, 2010

The ruins of something is a powerful source of conceptual remodeling of the past, rather than the ruin being just a former building with certain functionalities--an edifice. Our interpretation of ruins can redefine the past and the future. Dictatorships have engaged in a struggle to erase a past that was not convenient and that which was a trace, in ruin, was recontextualized, thus offering a “different vision” on the past.

The same ruin can be interpreted and reclassified according to different interests. In the The aesthetics of ruins Robert Ginsberg sets out to celebrate ruins in themselves, fragmented and incomplete.