Prophecies after the blaze is a project that inquires about strategies adopted by humans to deal with the unpredictability of the future in times of crisis. During the last year I started to look at numerous videos on youtube of people asking Siri or Cortana when the world would end. This new form of divination led me to question the role that technology plays in our search for answers about the future. Among the many divinatory forms of antiquity and vernacular culture, “spodomancy” used the ashes of a fire to foretell looming events and to understand the uncertain present. The question was written in the ashes and the changes made by the surrounding environment were deciphered. Fire is the first technological tool that human beings have used, not only to warm and feed themselves, but also to create community and, in the case of “spodomancy”, as a semantic device. Fire could be defined as the first search engine.
Ash is the residue of a joyful proximity but also what remains after a violent cataclysm. During the pandemic period, I collected ashes produced by the fireplace of an apartment I shared with other roommates. The hearth was the only place where it was allowed for us to recreate a community and where we welcomed our friends, on the fringe of legality. I saved the ashes of these warm dates and I solidified it through natural glues and fibers, using this mixture to write my own spell/poem about desire and the future. The fragility of the work involves its inexorable and unpredictable transformation.
We are living in a period of epochal cultural transition, the end of one world and the beginning of a new one. Our thirst for understanding the real clashes with fears about a nebulous future and the lack of proper tools to decipher it.