In the winter of 2019 the annual burnings in the Amazon rainforest made a major appearance in western media. The new Brazilian government encouraged companies to use land grabbing on any unused piece of forest that is not protected by indigenous or environmental rights. Rubber or soy farmers would burn down pieces of forest in order to later regrow it as profitable monocultures. By giving out a free pass to the industry the burnings had an unseen peak early in the season with many fires escalating and becoming uncontrollable. The smoke and ash of the destruction was so enormous that it caused black rain to fall in Sao Paolo and other places.
The work which was funded by the Austrian Federal Chancellery is based on 3D scans of plants, roots, trees and flowers taken in the Amazon in 2019. They are frozen images of small objects in a vast space captured in a short moment of eternity. Those digital holographs are ghosts more than objects and ghosts tend to tell stories: stories of a faraway land with magnificent natural landscapes and stories of deep futures where the same mushroom that got captured in 2019 is now fossil fuel for some hypothetical engine in a world we cannot be sure will still exist.
As we leave all sane definitions of space and time we can see the agency which is inherent in all objects. Carbon based lifeforms transcend into fossil fuel or burn away releasing their carbon into the atmosphere. The mushroom is a mushroom and at the same time it is global warming and black rain in Sao Paolo. We can enjoy the breathtaking beauty of nature on one end of the Amazon while the other end is burning. Big ecological catastrophes like the annual burnings have a non-local quality to them which makes it easy for us to ignore and forget. If we look at this screen we do not really see plants but in fact we see the darkness that lies within all life.
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