{"id":368589,"date":"2023-04-14T16:17:40","date_gmt":"2023-04-14T14:17:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/artigos\/2023\/04\/14\/todos-os-lumes-368589\/"},"modified":"2023-04-14T19:08:40","modified_gmt":"2023-04-14T17:08:40","slug":"todos-os-lumes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/artigos\/2023\/04\/14\/todos-os-lumes-368589\/","title":{"rendered":"All fires"},"content":{"rendered":"

We sometimes want to see fire as that mythical creature that relates us to the original defencelessness of the species, but the truth is that several civilisations were built on fire. That fire is the great transforming element of history and that a home is a fire. Perhaps also because of this, because of its dependence on danger. It is essential, but it is deadly. Fire came with us. It is us.<\/p>

Then there are the fires of the mountains and we want to suffer the biblical curse of not being able to distinguish one from the other. Of not wanting to move beyond that metaphor of understanding all the fires as the same fire. As if they were all fed by the same invisible wick that makes it appear here and there. But everywhere it appears mythical, like a plague, like an impossible combat that humanity has been fighting since the beginning of time. Since before there was humanity. Before civilisation. Before there was capitalism.<\/p>

We give the blue fire of the boilers and the golden fire of the chimneys the same importance. As if the gunpowder of pyrotechnics were the same as the gunpowder of bullets. It is true: we confuse the symptoms with the causes and we are imprisoned like those who do not want to look down to see the bottom of the well. Because the well is us, and at the bottom there are always the remains of a fire that we light and the cultural intuition that without drama there is no progress. Without blood, rights cannot be defended. Being rational is frowned upon because it doesn’t move. But fire does. Fire moves all the dormant parts and we start running in the opposite direction to the smoke, which is not always the right direction because it is not always the opposite of the fire.<\/p>

We need the fire to keep civilisation going. It needs us to ignite it. In the strange complementarity we put fuel and regrets at the same time, Jekyll and Hide seamlessly in the double face of civilisation, in the vicious circle of all accounts.<\/p>

Then there are the mountains and we prefer regrets to care. The same is a permanent attitude that has no disguise when you look at the black skin lying on the horizon. There are the mountains, which is certainly an imprecise definition because it alludes in part to the uncivilised, to the jungle, to that place of dense and fleeing bushes in times of war. The mountain, in Galicia, has that mythical uncultivated, that space to be cultivated where there are still tales of wolves. The limitless place where you can lose yourself. That space that is beyond the place without cover. The final frontier. But all this is defensive literature. None of this has any correspondence with reality even though anyone can wander in a bush for hours. The bush, like almost everything else, has its own rules. If you leave it, it grows. If you let it, they set in motion their own animal and plant society in which there may be a non-rational part, but it is almost never by chance.<\/p>

The bush burns and in that fire burns many contradictions of western society. The one that tries to forget its rural past, the one that applies out-of-context criteria, that overreacts in apologies rather than acting with remedies. The same one from which hang a million reasons that almost never coincide with the needs.\u00a0\u00a0They are reasons that have a Christian sense of discourse: to alleviate guilt, to direct it in another direction. To get rid of it with the pretended importance of repentance. All the rhetoric aimed at making the portrait in ashes that remains the ideal after a fire.<\/p>

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The Incendios project by Miguel Mosquera will remain at the Fundaci\u00f3n Laxeiro de Vigo until July 2023<\/figcaption><\/figure>

Miguel Mosquera’s portrait is made by rationally reviewing the elements that surround the fire. This nuance is important. As in the best written dramas, it is important to review what happens after the fire. But it is fundamental to see what happened before. When there is fire we find the headlines, the measurements, the marks, the damage. Fire is like war. The alteration of the present that doesn’t let us think. Miguel Mosquera makes a new map of these relations between before and after. In a rational sense, the artist “forgets” the fire in order to make us see the rest of things. Among that rest is the territory and the way in which we relate to it. There are the people and the way they inhabit the territory. There is, with special attention, the symbolic relationship between us as a society and the bush as a space. That relationship and the words that burn in the fire and those that remain as ashes. Words of a discourse that, in the past fire, seems to be set alight by the corrective spirit. They are the words that decay as soon as October or the first rains arrive, whichever appears first on the horizon. They are the words of the fire industry and the game of whether to inform or misinform about fire. They are the words of viewers who, once they get into the sports section of the news, forget the strategic sense of planetary life. Miguel Mosquera does not explain why it burns, Mosquera explains the meaning of what burns.<\/p>

There is an intimate relationship between us and fires. Periodic. Revenge. In the sunny afternoons of winter we could go out into the territory and perhaps see the scars in the still blackened extensions of the mountain and in the greenness that appears timidly, which I don’t know if we can describe as tight. We could go out into the bush in any one of a thousand more springs and witness the stubbornness of regenerating nature and be optimistic and unconcerned, or be realistic and calculate that without us none of this would have happened.When the heat that wants to be summer comes, we may become afraid of not having done our homework and hope for rain or any of those other demobilising hopes. We can look at the landscape and give it all the literary explanations we can come up with in terms of fantasy or escapism. What we will not find so easy is to see the causes of the fire. It will not be so easy to see the ultimate consequences of each of these scars. Because you can see the consequences here.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the beginning is fire. The ancient, primitive, urgent relationship, like animals that are very afraid of each other even though they need each other. In the beginning there is always the intense sense of danger of any mammal frightened by the limpets that stir the nervous matter to the last of the brains. Like the rabbit in front of the weasel. As if the fire was before us. But this is only the first of the errors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":368488,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-368589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fatiga-ocular-en"],"acf":[],"post_template":"reportaxe","post_subscription":"no","pretitle":"","content_extract":"We sometimes want to see fire as that mythical creature that relates us to the original defencelessness of the species, but the truth is that several civilisations were built on fire. That fire is the great transforming element of history and that a home is a fire. Perhaps also because of this, because of its...","reading_data":{"word_count":"1094","reading_seconds":"262","reading_time":{"minutes":4,"hours":0,"seconds":22},"reading_string":"4'22''","reading_human":"4 minutos"},"announcement":{"finishdate":"","finishdate_text":""},"opinion":{"subject":"","subject_info":[]},"event_info":{"startdate":"","starttime":"","enddate":"","endtime":"","entertainer":null},"interview":{"interviewed":""},"phototext":{"text_author":"","text_photo":""},"video":{"video_source":""},"promotion":{"action":"default","action_data":""},"categories_list":[{"name":"Eye strain","id":191,"slug":"fatiga-ocular-en","parent":0,"template":"default"}],"visible_author":"Camilo Franco","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368589"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368589"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":369078,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368589\/revisions\/369078"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/368488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}