Antigua Abstracted #3

One of Antigua’s many attractions is slowly discovering the piled and jumbled beauty of ruined buildings scattered throughout the old city. The romanticism and nostalgia of shattered architecture has always drawn traveler’s and tourists to places such as these- from the 19 Century grand tours taken by Europeans through Ancient Greece and Rome- to present day seekers of lost cities in the Guatemalan jungles. These half remembered places of the imagination hold a nostalgic and irresistible fascination for us, with their gaping windows and palimpsest scarred walls holding up nothing but empty sky and stars. These are places where episodes of history become entangled with our dreams- where stories and fables are as intricately woven together as the creeping vegetation that threatens to overwhelm the architecture itself. The effects of time, events, catastrophe, and nature have all worked away at the stones as a sculptor might, creating in the end, physical poetry.

text and photos by Michele Woodey.

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