Cush Rodríguez Moz “Future Remains” The Common Magazine (Fall, 2025)

Jan 30, 2026

Cush Rodríguez Moz, a Madrid-based journalist, writer, and photographer who covers environment, agriculture, and urbanism. He recounts visiting Villa Epecuén and how a travelogue became a personal essay. He explores ruins, preserved decay, the allure of disaster tourism, photographic process, and links between environmental and political decline.

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ANECDOTE

Deep-Fried Record Players

Cush Rodríguez Moz describes record players coated in salt and rust in Villa Epecuén's museum display.
He recounts the town's 1985 flood that submerged buildings and later revealed petrified ruins when waters receded.

INSIGHT

Ruins As A Lens On National Change

The essay uses a ruined town as a lens to explore Argentina's broader historical rise and decline.
Visiting ruins prompts reflection on national decline, climate change, and cultural fascination with decay.

ANECDOTE

A Trip Made Despite A Bad Leg

Cush recounts planning the trip to Villa Epecuén just before moving to Italy and selling his motorcycle.
He visited despite a leg injury sustained at a medieval-battle reenactment, photographing and taking notes for a planned piece.

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Cush Rodríguez Moz speaks to Emily Everett about his essay “Future Remains: The Mysterious Allure of a Town in Ruins,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. The piece chronicles a trip to Villa Epecuén: once a vacation destination for the wealthy in Argentina’s golden age, now a site for disaster tourism after salt-water flooding first ruined and then preserved it. Cush discusses how the piece evolved from simple travelogue to a complex personal essay examining national and personal decline, climate and political change, and our fascination with destruction and decay.

Cush Rodríguez Moz is a journalist, writer and photographer currently based in Madrid. His investigative articles and long-form narrative pieces cover an array of themes that include environmental issues, agriculture and urbanism. His work has appeared in El Malpensante, Altäir, The New Yorker and Climática, among other outlets. He also collaborates regularly with Revista Late. He holds degrees in history, geography and journalism. Prior to Spain, he lived in Italy and Argentina.

Read Cush’s essay in The Common here.

Read more from Cush at linktr.ee/cush.moz, and follow him on Instagram @cush.moz.

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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