Open fire | POY Latam

On August 27, 2019, I read on BBC News Brazil: “August 10th can be classified as a key moment in recent Amazon history. It is now known as the ‘Day of Fire’, when rural producers in the northern region of Brazil [located in the Brazilian Amazon] are said to have started an organised movement to set fire to areas of the largest tropical forest in the world. The General Attorney of the Republic said there were indications of an ‘orchestrated action’ to set fire to several forest areas. […] The first news about this was published on August 5 by the Folha do Progresso newspaper, in the city of Novo Progresso, state of Pará. The article reported a conversation with a leading producer of the town who promised to promote forest fires on the 10th. Brazilian National Institute for Space Research’s satellite data show that, as of August 10th, there was a significant increase of fires in forest areas. This increase occurred mainly in forest reserves in the municipalities of Novo Progresso, Altamira and São Félix do Xingu. On the 10th, Novo Progresso presented 124 active fire records, a 300% increase from the previous day.” [end quote] A few days after the ‘Day of Fire’, the black smoke arrived in São Paulo, over 1200 miles away from where the fire had taken place, and day became night in the largest city of the Americas.

In 2020, the Pantanal, one of the planet’s megadiversity regions and the world’s largest floodplain, experienced an unprecedented fire season, where a third of its area was turned into ash and at least 17 million animals burned to death. In a geographical and temporal dimension, it was as if more than half of Switzerland had been burnt in just nine months. That year, more than 90% of fires were started by human action and the extremely dry air, strong wind, logistical difficulties, negligence and the consequent lack of equipment, water and personnel created hell, where a few firefighters, veterinarians and biologists made superhuman efforts and countless animals found themselves trapped, many succumbing to the flames. Animals and rescue teams were witnesses to, and victims of, an ecocide. In the photographs and videos produced on site, the fire line and smoke were so extensive that it seemed impossible to extinguish them; animals were dying or were reached too late, already charred. Those were difficult images to look at without being terrified. Despite the horror that was reported daily in all national and international media and the analyses that pointed out the causes, and their prevention, the scenario in the Pantanal region managed to repeat itself in an even more cruel fashion in the following year of 2021.

When the field work was finished and the rolls of film had been developed, I would move onto the next step, which was to burn the films – the films that I myself had photographed. Despite having already planned this step well, I kept putting off the actual moment of burning, like someone who postpones a crime that she will commit. I was trying to postpone the pain. The pain of aggression, the pain of irreversibility. The pain of the impossibility of revisiting that landscape in that unique vision of its existence. The pain of violating such places of beauty and teachings. After the burning, there would remain something mutilated and in a way that I still couldn’t even know, since fire is a powerful weapon, a weapon that one can’t completely control. Then, I remembered the fires in the Pantanal, the Amazon and the Brazilian savanna, I remembered that this work of mine proposed to emulate those violent acts involving fire, using the same element to this end, and thus symbolically remembering them, since violations that are not remembered by society tend not to be fought and, consequently, to be repeated in the future. In the end, the crime I proposed for me to commit took place: holding my breath I lit the match and brought the photogram closer to the flame. The landscape burned and deformed. I remembered all those fires. Once again, I was outraged. I felt the pain.

The indigenous Guarani Kaiowá people’s prayer house was criminally burnt down this Saturday, October 2, in the community of Tekoha Guapo’y, located in the municipality of Amambai, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Elizeu Guarani, the executive coordinator of the Brazilian Indigenous People’s Council and of the General Assembly of the Kaiowá and Guarani people, declares: ‘We are sad because it is our sacred temple. With much sacrifice we built it and now in the blink of an eye it has been burnt down’. ” Brazilian Indigenous People’s Council, October 3, 2021, on a social network.

During the burning of the photographic film I noticed that my fingerprint remained on the molten emulsion, merging the identity of the perpetrator with it. That reminded me of photojournalist Nina Berman, during a deep conversation the two of us had about visual narratives that chronicle themes of violence, injustice and violations of Human and Nature Rights. She said: “one must show the perpetrator and not only their victims.

The black of night filled the infinite space of the lagoon and the dense tropical forest that surrounded it. Actually, it was an almost pitch-black, as the starry sky was duplicated onto the dark water mirror of New Lagoon, mixing the brightness of the stars above with that of the scales of the fish below. The silence was also an almost silence, since it shared its space with the sound of animals that slept and those that did not. The humic smell and white mist evaporated from the water and expanded into the almost pitch-black. Along with the night, the boat flowed into the smell and mist. We stopped there on the water waiting for the transcendental moment that was about to happen. We stayed there, still, breathing in communion with those who slept and those who didn’t. At a certain moment, we saw the silhouette of a mountain take form in the infinity. And then another. And the alchemy of the sun transmuted the almost pitch black into blue and then into red. The mist absorbed the celestial blush for itself and spread it throughout New Lagoon. The evaporating water and its floating lilies found themselves turned to a mysterious, ethereal crimson. All of this happened in a tiny fraction of time and in near silence. There was no applause. As the boat returned to the base, we, who had just witnessed the sublime, thought to ourselves: – “This spectacle happens every day at dawn at the New Lagoon.” – “And hardly anyone sees it…”

What is the future of our natural landscapes?
What is the future of our references and 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 a consequence of climate change, but in Latin America also an outcome of political conflicts, in this series I appropriate the violence of this element upon natural and cultural heritage to unveil the unrecognisable environment it leaves for future generations to live in. With OPEN FIRE, I aim to encourage debate around a contemporary issue that is of global relevance: it is environmental, social, historical and political, and urges to be discussed in a framework in which society would play the role of protagonist and not of spectator.

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 the photographic film – reproducing on the representations the aggression that has been openly inflicted upon the actual landscapes. After burning them, the resulting three-dimensional pieces are digitized and presented in juxtaposition to captions that consist of news-sourced stories involving fire that have happened recently in Brazil as well as to insights I have during the making of the work, echoing the magnitude of violence and destruction by fire we have been facing in the Anthropocene in Latin America.