Collapse is not only an end-of-world stage but marks beginnings and opens possibilities for familiar objects. It is a state where old values crumble, and only some things endure. This article explores these ideas by weaving a film review into lived experiences. What can architecture learn from film and art about what we preserve? What lives through mundane acts of preservation?

Have we lost our ability to explore the future with curiosity and imagination? Somehow it feels like our buildings are becoming more and more the same, even though we live in a time when we are finally aware of the great diversity of people and ideas. Why don't we see this revelation reflected in the buildings we make? Is it true that, out of fear of making mistakes, we have stopped daringly experimenting? It seems like a new crisis has occurred: our imagination is lost!

"Our ghosts are the traces of more-than-human histories through which ecologies are made and unmade."

- Anna Tsing, 2017

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After the end of the Second World War, one of the first sights encountered by residents returning to Warsaw were burnt walls and “a desert of debris”. Ruderal vegetation quickly began to transform the rubble, initiating ecological succession - if left alone, in a few decades a forest would grow on the ruins of the city¹.

Instead, thanks to the work put in by the residents, the debris got transformed into the man-made ground of Warsaw as we know it today. Visual traces of ruin and violence, when embedded within the landscape, operate at both archaeological and infrastructural levels. Architectural wreckage thereby reads as a palimpsest of hybrid transformations performed by both mankind and nature.