Scrying the Lanscape XX

"... the desiring aspect of fire comes into contradiction with its destructive aspect. 

Perhaps death by fire is a kind of transmission, the somewhat santized fire of the electric chair representing an act of transmission [...] namely, if you live by fire in the burtal pursuit of your passions I.] you will go up in smoke. This is how you lived and this is how you die." 

Inspired by elemental forces, the 20th edition of Scrying the Landscape sets itself alight, opening with a flint-spark before rising into an all-engulfing, uncontrollable blaze. 

From the magenta heat of a torrid flame to the dying ember, fire is an unwieldy element 

- simultaneously destructive and life-giving. In recent years, wildfires have decimated landscapes in the Californian Sierra Nevada, the Australian coast, and the ancient forests of Ukraine. Yet fire is also symbiotically implicated in all forms of existence. In many places, controlled or prescribed burnings have been part of millennia-old cultural practices, binding local communities to the land, clearing dead foliage to make way for new life, with the ashes feeding the soil. 

Fire has long captivated human understanding, inspiring myths and theories about its origins and effects. In the medieval hypothesis of phlogiston, a combustible, alchemical entity was thought to be contained within bodies. This early theory points to Western science's struggle to grasp the process of oxidation, as well as a deep-rooted fascination with fire's power and metamorphic potential. 

Scrying the Landscape XX is punctuated by exerts of Gregory Whitehead's 'Lovely Ways To Burn' (1990). The hybrid documentary play weaves together a witness account of an execution by electric chair; memories of burns, fires and suburban oblivion; and an imaginary philosopher contemplating the phenomenology of fire, neurobiology, and ecstatic death. 

[Image: video still from Eiichi Yamamoto's Beladonna of Sadness, 1973]