OPEN FIRE

What is the future of our natural landscapes? What is the future of our references, of our identity? What is the future of our collective memories? Fire is a sharp weapon. Focusing on the destructive fires that have recently swept away landscapes around the globe, the majority of them interpreted as a consequence of climate change, a chronicle of the Anthropocene, but in Latin America also an outcome of political conflicts, the work OPEN FIRE incorporates the violence of this element upon natural and cultural heritage and exposes the damage fire has caused to our planet, leaving for future generations a harsh, unrecognisable environment to live in. This work is founded on the miscible relationship that photography holds with its referent and also on the uses of that medium as an object to safeguard collective memory. By employing a provoking technique, pushing the photographic medium to express my understanding on this situation from a Latin American perspective, the work develops as follows: first, I take photographs of natural areas of high relevance for conservation in my home country, Brazil, with a medium-format analogue camera. After being developed, I systematically burn these photographic films – reproducing on the material that carries the representation of these places of great immaterial value the aggression that has been openly inflicted upon the actual landscapes. After burning them, the resulting three-dimensional pieces are digitized, edited, and juxtaposed to insights and daily life situations that I have experienced concerning that contemporary matter (which are presented here as the captions that accompany each image), inserting the images in the context they belong to. With OPEN FIRE, I aim to encourage debate around an issue that is environmental, social, historical and political: an issue that urges to be discussed in a framework in which society would play the role of protagonist and not of spectator and accomplice. OPEN FIRE has been awarded the Brazil’s National Arts Foundation Marc Ferrez Photography Prize, presented as a multimedia (sound-image-text) online show which is available at www.openfireart.com