An Atmospheric Condition — No.1

HD / 16:9 / B&W / 3′39″ / 25 fps / 2026 / Experimental Film / Video Installation

Collapse does not always arrive as spectacle. Sometimes it settles into the atmosphere.

“An Atmospheric Condition — No.1” observes wildfires not as an event, but as a persistent atmospheric state. Filmed from a fixed, distant position in the protected landscape of Pena Trevinca, within the Natura 2000 network in Galicia, Spain, during the summer of 2025—one of the region’s most devastating wildfire seasons in recent history—the work refuses the spectacular image of catastrophe. There is no climax or resolution. The camera does not pursue the event; it remains. Through duration, the disaster ceases to be information and becomes presence.

Conceived as a continuous loop without a defined beginning or end, the work mirrors the recurrence it depicts, inviting us to remain with an image that might otherwise be consumed and discarded in seconds.

The lack of visible human presence does not imply absence from what is taking place. The landscape carries the traces of decisions and systems that remain outside the frame: changing land use, rural abandonment, failed models of forest management and monoculture plantations, extractive practices, and the growing pressures of a changing climate.

Galicia is a territory deeply shaped by wildfires, where recurrence has become entangled with landscape and memory. Here, the ecological and the spiritual are difficult to separate: land is not merely environment, but inheritance, memory and belonging. As wildfires return, what burns is more than vegetation. They expose a fracture in our relationship with the land and the living world.

How much can a landscape be transformed before it is no longer the same?