In Memory of Professor Antônio da Silva Melo, Doctor, Teacher and Essayist

The Ruinist often seeks their own Le square des Missions-Etrangères wherever they are lucky enough to find themselves. As is the way, the combo of detective work with maps + chance encounters meeting animal omens = sites of mysterious splendour. A moment of finding, collecting, being seduced by these discovered places. Always out of time of course. Here where you can ramble against time and space and lose yourself even if only for an hour or so.

On a journey of investigation that The Ruinist will soon present, The Ruinist came to the end of the line where no further foot traffic was possible. But here prestigious public works had turned ruins. What had once been in 1975, the ornate and ordered Largo do Prof Silva Mello, in memorial to the Prof who had died in 1973, was now overgrowth and melancholy debris and three delightful hens that were running wild. The hens leaping out of the undergrowth in the opposite way to the hens of the Giardino Pubblico in Trieste just sitting quietly on the grass.

 

No longer did the ornamental lamps stands work but their very lamp heads had been guillotined. No longer did the shrubbery bloom in super-arrangement but instead creeping and outside flora had run riot. All that worked was the series of stone slabs for seating that followed the semi-circular path that itself follows the crescent shaped site of the Largo. Too big to be half-inched they remained for any bum to waste some time here. The Ruinist did so raising a toast with the Matte cup to Professor Silva Mello, remembered in 1975 with civic grandeur but now not even featured on any modern map of The City.