La Memoria del Fuoco

Fire is mysterious, its consistency is evanescent and its origin is divine. Men stole it from the gods and domesticated it by learning to provoke it. Like time, its flow is irrepressible and uncontrollable. Fire feeds on its own action since it survives only by burning, and when it finds nothing left to burn… it runs out, slowly fades and dies.

Fire and time share the same damnation: they both consume what they touch, they eat and annihilate it by exiling it into the past. Just as time feeds on memory, fire is a heterotrophic body that feeds on another one from which it sucks the sap necessary to survive, until it is consumed and exhausted. Every object it ignites is condemned to be only a memory transported into the future under a new form, incorporeal and invisible, ethereal and transcendent.

In OOOPStudio’s work, those objects, whose ordinary and predictable presence has often gone unnoticed in the daily routine, are represented as symbols of something destined to be archived and forgotten in the distant past and that time has already consigned to abandonment. Fire is burning them, allowing their extinction and even bringing with it the continuation of their existence. The cathode ray tube television set, the telephone booth, the walkman, the telephone with a dialer disc, the carousel… burnt and contained by the flames, are destroyed but also saved from the condemnation of oblivion.

A burning thread unravels, connecting each video to the following one and each object to the next: it is the thread of memory that prevents the fire from completely going out, from perpetuating its action, from transferring the mnemonic process to the next object. City noises, people passing by, cars whizzing… life beyond objects goes on heedless and frenetic in the continuous renewal of modernity.