Biological programming prompts a reflex to stay away from fire if it cannot be contained, such as in the case of a wildfire. A ‘meditation on fire’ may therefore sound like a contradiction. Inspired by the inquiry in the amount of power needed to produce a digital “still life” of fire, a task likely to set the computer system on fire, Wildfire confronts the biological and the digital. Prolonged shots of silenced fire comply with the notion of biological breathing time, while the abstract nature of the burning fire serves as a metaphor for the technological abstraction linked to its making, hinting at the increasingly abstract world we live in.

Magali Reus’ series Settings (2019-2021) takes the NO PARKING road sign as its starting point. Immediate graphic communication is the architectural essence of road signs: their message is a first and primary function – go this way, stop here, warning: dog. Yet nested into the public sphere over time they accrue fragments of information, contradictory patterns, or surface interventions that open them up to material collage. Like cultural artefacts they are a quiet canvas for a more unhinged type of mark making: the obscure shadow-play of nightlife, globs of bird shit or chewing gum, busted headlamp residue, lost dog pleas, advertising, and pornography. In Settings the toughness of the baked enamel surface has been perverted with process interruptions: the surfaces are sanded, masked, adjusted, airbrushed. In each, deliberate erosion creates a slippage of the NO PARKING function, thus altering the original simplicity of the circle-slash pictogram with a more metaphoric type of weather.

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