The remains of the end by claudia ferreto
2016
My house was on fire and I could only save one thing. I decided to save the fire. I have nowhere to live but the fire lives in me. And discreetly defends me from everything impure. My future is no longer important. Only the intensity of the moment counts.
Jean Cocteau "Save the Fire"
What leaves the fire that erases traces and snatches existence? What remains after the end? asks Patricia Viel; that digs through rubble, rescues fire-resistant books, searches for research in that interval or interstice of what was and is no longer; explores the edge, the limit, in that space in which artists look. “The remains of the end” maintains continuity and congruence with his previous production, but in this work he does something else. Definitely something else. Here she jumps, stands on top of the story and this time she starts the fire, empowers herself and plays a fire game. The drone camera, contemporary, not only because of its technology, but also because it operates as an ubiquitous, simultaneous, hypertextual gaze, is a witness to the event. From a cartographic view, he puts us on stage and without delay confronts us with a row of objects that begin to burn, and we intuit, they all burn. In the immensity of the Patagonian steppe, he puts on a remake of the tragedy, but this time he multiplies the staging: he puts twenty-two cardboard houses in a row, sets them on fire and films them; houses that can be metaphors for refuge or urbanity, burning one by one, houses that are made of cardboard, because everything is ephemeral, she knows. In that scenario where synthesis and excess prevail at the same time, the different grays of the ashes, the light values in the flames, the shadows on the plateau, the contrasts in the sky are articulated as in a dance; subtleties of horror The accompanying heartbeat-like sound reinforces time, contracts and dilates the moment, and we can't help but see that hypnotic fire. The spectacle seduces us and thus we perceive the veiled paradox: there is beauty in this fire, it is an aestheticized sinister. The ending is quite a display: against a background of traces and footprints, the camera approaches curiously, anxiously, desiringly, it makes the ashes fly through the air and bare the scar; it seems that the end not only leaves remains, but endless new clues. Like the text by Jean Cocteau that she proposes to anchor her work, Patricia urges us to save the fire