An attempt at portraying the undomitable and irreducible vibrancy of the multitude that is a forest, in the aftermath of fires. Through recomposed infrared images, a summoning of the force of defiance against the storms that are unleashed.
It was uncanny the way the midday summer sky had darkened. Warm ashes, like negative snowflakes, gently falling along the shoreline absorbed the remaining light, swallowed the receding horizon. The camera’s settings matched another time, another season, another place.
But we couldn’t really conceive of the raging storm that was to come.
In the aftermath of the fires, months later, I returned t to the forest. Anxiously, I made way to the habitual spot where I’d go to salute a group of large trees that seemed to stand guard for the sprawling forest in what had become a very private ritual.
What was left to see, at first, was a spectacle of desolation; having been engulfed by flames, all that seemed left was a vast expanse of contorted and calcinated trees wrapped in the most awkward silence – no traces nor sounds of animals or insects.
But the devastation was offset by the dense weave of new grasses that formed the new undergrowth on the scorched earth beneath my feet. When I reached the “guardian trees”, they appeared covered with tiny shoots sprouting directly from their blackened trunks – epicormic growth: a last gasp attempt at photosynthesis, a survival reflex by which the trees squeeze brittle leaves through their burned bodies, a fragile and radiant membrane like a new skin.
Mesmerising, like a physical aura, the new growth revealed the force animating those trees. Looking at this phenomenon was like gazing beyond the shape of things into the flow of life.