Half-Life (Carbon) - video by Marina Fraga, 2011. Burn the mountain. Half of it will go up to the air, the other half stays on the ground. The human agents and the Earth: the invisible clock of matter stains our hands. This work investigates the combustion and the transformation of matter on the surface of the land. The project initiated during a residence program at Akiyoshidai International Art Village, in Japan, 2007, when I filmed an annual cremation of the Akiyoshidai Plateau. Later, the photographic and super8mm images joined an investigation of the burning of Carbon in the Terra Una artist in residence program, in Minas Gerais, 2011. A cotton fabric was placed over a bonfire producing an impression of the gases and flames. The burning cotton was also filmed in macro, so the fabric becomes a mountain to the unaware eyes. The encounter of humans and nature is the central point of my research, which leads to questioning the boundaries between the artificial and the natural. The Carbon element is a poetic node from where a number of artistic researches emerged. Through the investigation of the carboniferous materials (Indian ink, coal, graphite, asphalt, petroleum) we can think matter as an agglutination of time; a matter-memory of the Earth, continuously affected by humans. If plastic is made of million-year-old petroleum, what is new and what is fossil after all? Our lives are crossed by layers of time, from our personal memories to the material memories of the things that surround us, like the asphalt we daily stand over (also a fossilised reminiscence of life). We also burn charcoal and oil and lead it to the atmosphere transformed into gases - the same atmosphere from where phytoplankton and forests took the CO2 once. Clouded by the illusion of order, humans are essentially entropic beings that use the energy to create order and, at the same time, spread the disorder. My investigation is constructed as a material archeology, which is also an archeology of the human subjectivity. It is a matter of sediments and fissures drawn in the time-space that we blindly live in. The artistic work explores and creates poetic enigmas for this Era that some call Anthropocene. http://issuu.com/marinafraga/docs/marinafraga-portfolio2013-4light#
