Curatorial Direction: Elena Posokhovа

Artists: Arash Hanaei, Olivia Baes, Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel, Alessandra Craba, Anna Nezhnaya, Ildefonso Aguilar, Atchen Pounapal, Yann Toma, Azadeh Nilchiani, Dana-Fiona Armour, Melia Roger, Andrew Erdos, Astrid Dick, Jeff Frost.

Support: CulturFoundry (Paris), Frédéric Lorin; Casarusa foundation, Anna Silyunas (Barcelona); MARLANDS (international project about islands).

The exhibition emerged as an immediate response to massive fires across Europe. The voices of curator and artists responding to these events created an impulse to produce new works and present previously created pieces. The project brings together artists, filmmakers, and sound artists articulating urgent perspectives on the crisis—on solidarity and action, on restoration and destruction, on fragmentation and community, barriers, myth-making and identity, its transformation and loss. On fire between us.

Fire is a symbol of dual energy: simultaneously destructive and creative, a paradox that emerges, for example, in Gaston Bachelard's "Psychoanalysis of Fire," where fire attracts, unites, and destroys. This project addresses the reality of the Anthropocene, when human influence increasingly intertwines with natural processes. Forest fires, scorched landscapes, ecological collapse carry material and sociocultural consequences. Here fire functions as a metaphor: rifts in identity, political tension, erasure of memory, destruction of habitat. Yet the same force that destroys territory and culture is capable of uniting—gathering people around warmth, creating relationships between people, within the self, between humanity and nature. Fire carries transformative power—a symbol of purification, renewal, and collective gathering. It illuminates, warms, and regenerates, transforming matter, energy, and consciousness. In ritual and moments of everyday connection, fire becomes a force of healing and transcendence.

Each artistic project experiences fire in its own dimension. In "The Last Hidden Words" by Arash Hanaei, fire burns trees and architectural materials, pointing to the collapse of utopian ideals of the recent past. In "Diary of the Earth" (2026) by Olivia Baes, screens transmit the wildfire crisis, simultaneously connecting and distancing us from reality. Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, through the image of a melancholic pyromaniac in "Il faut regarder le feu ou brûler dedans" (2022), transform fire into a healing of Corsica's devastated land. Alessandra Craba in "Burn Art - Not Earth," through the gesture of burning the sky in photography, addresses the language of social media, mobilizing a collective response to climate catastrophe. Anna Nezhnaya in "my mental health this monday morning" depicts psychological burnout from the continuous consumption of digital catastrophes. In the context of Lanzarote, Ildefonso Aguilar in "Horizonte" (2023) transforms volcanic fire into a visible process of geological transformation, while another artist working there, Atchen Pounapal in "Arqueología del ciclo," uses fire as an instrument of decolonial memory and ritual burning of cultural identity.

The project privileges artists working in the context of France, Spain, and Italy—territories where climate crisis and identity transformation constitute lived reality—as well as those engaging with island territories. Islands represent unique spatial configurations where ecological fragility intersects with cultural precarity. The volcanic geology of some of these territories establishes a direct correlation with fire as both a geological phenomenon and a historical force—landscapes formed by fire and subject to perpetual vulnerability to volcanic activity.

The exhibition program presents previously created works and pieces specially developed for this project in August-September 2026, as well as works in process: video-documented performances, audio and video works. This section of the program includes works exploring the power and force of fire, its political and geopolitical dimensions, its connection to emotions and passions between people, as well as the importance of unity in preventing and responding to catastrophes, protecting nature and lives. This section features works by artists: Yann Toma "Dynamo-Fukushima," Azadeh Nilchiani "Ceasefire," Melia Roger "Deep ears," Andrew Erdos "WALK FASTER RAISE HELL," and Astrid Dick "Vanity, all is vanity."

These works will be presented within the framework of a special meeting with artists, curator Elena Posokhovа, and organizers CulturFoundry (Paris), represented by Frédéric Lorin, who provided support for video work presentations, and Anna Silyunas and her team of CDR foundation, supporting curatorial and cultural projects in Barcelona.

CulturFoundry unites art enthusiasts and passionate supporters of contemporary artistic creation. The association gives visibility to artists not represented by galleries, finances contemporary art exhibitions in unconventional spaces in France, and organizes visits to artist studios and art centers to discover contemporary creative practice.

The Cultural Foundation “Casarusa in Barcelona” CDR is a Spanish charitable private foundation presenting various educational and cultural projects aimed at a wide audience. It organizes exhibitions in collaboration with the MARLANDS project – a curatorial platform dedicated to the development and promotion of contemporary art on islands and in coastal zones.

Artists and works

Arash Hanaei - In the Night Garden, Light a Fire Under Your Skin, 2022
Duration: 1 min
Format: HD video
Sound: Whispered narration by Sarah Knill-Jones
Special effects: Yaser Aghrani

Arash Hanaei explores the collapse of utopian architecture from the 1960s-80s — residential complexes that today exist as ghostly presences.
The artist works with video, 3D graphics, and installations where burning trees transform the material of architecture into a ghostly and poetic image. Holographic words, nocturnal visions, wooden landscapes, and sculptural forms create a space between "the sheer wildness of an undiscovered forest and the anthropological order of the garden." Whispered voices, visual disturbances, and ruptures in the image convey trauma of memory in the digital age.

The work advocates for understanding the relationship between nature and culture — nature possesses "its own resilience" against urbanistic control.
In an era of new technologies and Big Data, which themselves function as contemporary utopias, the architectures of the past reflect the cyclical nature of promises of the future — and their disappearance.

Artist biography
Arash Hanaei is a Paris-based visual artist whose work examines the relationship between urban form, political memory, and systems of representation.
Between 2002 and 2008, he researched war documentary photography and the circulation of digital images in the Middle East, working with both state-controlled and independent archives. In parallel, he investigated the internet as an informal archive of leaked and displaced images, observing how documents change meaning once detached from institutions and re-enter public space.
From 2008 to 2015, he developed the Capital series in Tehran, digitally simplifying urban photographs to reveal overlapping languages of ideology, commerce, and architecture. Works from this series were exhibited at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Ludlow 38 / Goethe-Institut New York.
Subsequent projects, including Cyclothymia of a Land and Suburban Hauntology (BMW Art Makers Prize, Les Rencontres d'Arles), expanded this inquiry to European suburban architectures and their political and environmental contradictions.
His recent work integrates digital modeling and image analysis to explore how technological systems reshape perception and collective memory. In 2024, he presented the installation Foggy Memo at Collection Lambert, Avignon, in the exhibition Revenir du présent.

Olivia Baes - Diary of the Earth, 2026
Duration: 5 min
Format: 16mm, digital video, archival footage

Diary of the Earth moves between 16mm, digital images, and archival news footage to explore the unstable space between physical territory and its mediated representation. Against landscapes marked by the devastating fires of 2026, an anchorwoman attempts to describe a world that increasingly escapes the language of the news.
As her speech and image begin to fragment, the camera itself acquires another presence: the Earth is no longer simply something being observed, but now appears to look back at the human figure. Moving between embodied and virtual points of view, the work considers how the contemporary images circulating through our screens simultaneously connect us to and distance us from ecological reality.

Filmed around the total solar eclipse of August 2026, Diary of the Earth has been produced by Anna Sanders Films and conceived specifically for LOOP Barcelona and the group show The Fire Between Us.
Production: Anna Sanders Film

Artist biography
Olivia Baes is a French-American artist and filmmaker based between Paris and Catalonia.

Trained in comparative literature and cultural translation, her practice moves between image and text, spanning film, writing, translation and archival work. She has translated works by Marguerite Duras and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz into English, and her writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Asymptote and Public Books. Her debut feature film, Je suis fleur (Buffalo Films, Imagic Films), starring Iman Pérez and Thalia Besson, is forthcoming. She is also curator of the James Baes Foundation, dedicated to the preservation and recontextualization of her late father's photographic archive. In autumn 2026, she will be a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel - One must watch the fire or burn inside it, 2022
Duration: 18 min
Format: HD video

One Must Watch the Fire or Burn Inside It (2022) is a video produced during a summer residency in Corsica. In a deteriorating nature ravaged by flames, a pyromaniac moody-girl tends the earth by fire: she cauterizes it. The island suffers from hypertourism, its scars of concrete, its packaging waste (Miel Pops and Kinder Bueno), and its sad vacant neighborhoods.
On this arid land, fire is a causeless and purposeless disaster. Amid dense purple smoke, the carcasses of cars ignite. To ecological disaster corresponds an imagination of riot and insurrection; to devastation joins cathartic disfigurement; to chaos ties an amorous tragedy; to the desert a sentimental ballistics.

(Translated from French title: "Il faut regarder le feu ou brûler dedans).

Artist biography
Caroline Poggi was born in 1990 in Ajaccio. She studied at the University of Corsica and then graduated from the University Paris 8. Born in Toulouse in 1988, Jonathan Vinel studied editing at La Fémis. They began directing solo before embarking on a collaboration for As Long As Shotguns Remain, awarded the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at the Berlinale. Their first feature Jessica Forever premiered at TIFF and the Berlinale. Eat the Night was presented in Cannes Directors' Fortnight 2024.

Atchen Pounapal - Archeology of the Cycle, 2024-2026
Duration: 15 min
Sound: Kravirus

Atchen Pounapal's work speaks to the island history and decolonial identity of Lanzarote. In this work, fire functions simultaneously as a metaphor for the consumption of layers of history and culture, and as the material force that created the volcanic landscape.
The artist works between performance connected to embodied practice, installation, video, and sound imagery, which were created in collaboration with sound artist Ayta. Here, the presence of fire addresses the metaphor of ritual burning, demonstrating the force of all-consuming transformation.
The visual sequence of the work gathers the image of island identity from details connected to artifacts, traditions, and the artist's biography. This approach both demonstrates knowledge of the subject and imbues it with a particular warmth bearing the imprint of personal experience, deep inhabitation of the territory, and knowledge and practice of local culture, with a desire to share.
"Fire is not only fire," — the artist's textual image continues the video work: a building in flames, beams falling like pestles to the ground. Priestesses with palms knowing heat do not retreat. Fire burns without destruction, without salvation — it simply burns. And in this burning, meaning opens: fire is not only fire; it is the language of the island speaking about itself.

This image reveals fire's destructive force, its indisputable power over everything that seems stable.

Artist biography
Atchen Pounapal was born in Arrecife, Lanzarote. He holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of La Laguna and won an international theater award at the Agadir International Theater Festival in 1998.

A multidisciplinary artist working across illustration, painting, performance, photography, and acting, Pounapal has been a key figure in Lanzarote's cultural scene for over a decade. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and collaborated with various cultural collectives including El Nucleus and Parto Cerebral. He served on the jury of the Lanzarote International Film Festival and regularly publishes in the magazine "Mar y Arte."

Currently, he performs in theater productions and pursues studies in Philosophy through UNED.

Idelfonzo Aguilar, Horizon, 2023
Duration: 18 min
Format: HD video

Horizon is an audiovisual work exploring the slow transformation of the island's geological forms over time. The horizon is the line where cooled fire meets sky and ocean. There is no narrative—only a process, into which the viewer enters midway and exits. Sound is inseparable from image: volcanic textures and a sound track composed of field recordings from the island form a unified sensory field.
Aguilar materializes time through landscape: volcanic fire from the past left geological formations that now slowly transform. Time is visible in process—in the textures of cooled lava, in the island's sounds, in silences.

Idelfonzo Aguilar (born 1945) has worked with Lanzarote for more than fifty years. His musical background determines his language: painting creates sounds; sound creates images.The central theme of his practice is not the representation of landscape, but its experience. Vision is guided by textures, densities, shadows, and pauses. The artist materializes the perception of surrounding environment, involving the viewer in the emotion and energy emanating from it.

Artist biography
Ildefonso Aguilar was born in 1945 and has lived in Lanzarote since infancy. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (1963-1968) and worked as a professor before dedicating himself full-time to artistic practice from 1986 onward.
A multidisciplinary artist, Aguilar expresses his connection with the island's landscape through paintings, photographs, musical compositions, and architectural artworks. He works with volcanic ashes and sands in acrylic paintings, creating surfaces of many fine layers that capture the geological essence of Lanzarote. He founded and has since directed the Visual Music Festival of Lanzarote.
Recognized as an important representative of the ecology movement on the island, Aguilar is considered a spiritual successor to César Manrique. He received the Gold Medal of the Canary Islands in 2015 and was named Adopted Son of Lanzarote in 2016. His work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in major Spanish and German museums.

Alessandra Craba, Burn Art, Not Earth, 2026
Duration: 3 min
Format: HD video
Sound and Production: Alessandra Craba

Burn Art, Not Earth. This series of short videos begins with photographs taken by the artist, later processed by burning sections of sky. The burned areas appear where the sun should be, creating the image of a global eclipse—a picture of the Anthropocene as an age of darkened horizons, ecological collapse, and climate anxiety. The work was conceived during the days when Europe was burning. From Venice, a city historically defined by its relationship to water, Craba responded to her sense of artistic powerlessness by directing fire toward photographic images that constitute the starting point of her practice, where she normally paints in oil.The first work is titled "Burn Art, Not Earth"—an intentionally simple, almost onomatopoetic statement using the immediacy of visual and digital language to make the message accessible.

The original photographs measure 10 × 15 cm. For LOOP Barcelona, they become short animated videos in vertical Instagram Stories format, accompanied by music reminiscent of the language of online memes and social media trends. This choice intentionally opposes the superficiality, speed, and repetition of digital media, while simultaneously acknowledging their potential as tools of mass communication. Following Gaston Bachelard's reflection on fire as a force that simultaneously destroys and unites, Craba's work explores this same paradox. Fire erases and transforms; social media can trivialize reality, but they can also connect, amplify, and mobilize. By adopting the visual language of mass media, the artist seeks to reclaim it as a contemporary artistic tool for confronting the climate crisis—transforming the spectacle of catastrophe into a moment of reflection and collective responsibility.

Artist biography
Alessandra Craba is a Sardinian-born artist whose practice sits at the intersection of image, material, and cultural criticism. Trained at the IUAV University of Venice, she works between the city and various international contexts, exploring how visual language shapes and distorts our understanding of place.

Jeff Frost, California on fire, 2019
Format: Single-channel 4K video (color, sound), 24:50
Techniques: Time-lapse photography, video, electromagnetic spectrum field recording

This film is structured around the stages of grief and goes all the way to the fireline to witness catastrophic destruction intersecting with time, where the land itself is the main character. To create it, I trained as a wildland firefighter, gained full access to more than 90 wildfires, and shot half a million high-resolution photographs over nine years.

The California on Fire film project is the genesis of the Netflix docuseries Fire Chasers, and Frost appears as one of the primary subjects in each episode.

Artist biography
Jeff Frost is a contemporary artist from southern California currently in the MFA program at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. His work reasserts connection to landscape through technologically mediated means within an expansional definition of a word that should not be: nature. Think of it as science fiction for trees. Within this framework, Frost's explorations of identity, ritual, death, grief, and ecology are explored through two primary mediums: time and sound, which extend into many secondary mediums: installation, mural, painting, photography, sound art, and music. Threaded together, these strands form uncanny cinematic moving image works greater than the sum of their parts that defy easy explanation.
Frost's work has appeared in museums, exhibitions, film festivals, and publications worldwide, including Clermont-Ferrand International Film Festival (Audience Award for California on Fire), Mana Contemporary, Palm Springs Art Museum, ArtNet, Art Forum, Der Spiegel, CERN, MIT, Forestry England, National Geographic, and many others.

Anna Nezhnaya, My Mental Health This Monday Morning, 2026
Format: Animation, loop

In this work, Nezhnaya experiences fire as a metaphor for the structure of her own contemporary digital consciousness: a state in which her mind is continuously subjected to overwhelming streams of mediated catastrophe, and in which her attention becomes simultaneously a site of consumption and slow internal combustion.
Every day the artist enters the infinite stream of social media and news. She scrolls through images of war, catastrophe, violence, political conflict, ecological destruction, desire, and fear. She consumes one crisis after another, moving through an endless cycle with no real exit. She knows it overwhelms her, but she returns to it again and again. 
Anna imagines this cycle as contemporary Hell—a digital version of one of Dante's punishments. She is not forced into it; she enters willingly. She continues to scroll, watch, absorb, and return to the flames.

Fire in her experience is therefore not only an image of destruction. It is the sensation of a mind continuously subjected to information and emotional excess. Her psyche burns from repetition, from proximity to events she cannot physically reach, yet which she is constantly forced to see. The distance between reality and its digital representation collapses, and catastrophe becomes part of her everyday mental landscape.
Repetition is crucial to this experience. Like someone repeatedly entering the same fire, she returns to the screen, knowing what it will do to her. There is something compulsive in this movement—a simultaneous attraction to and destruction by the flames.
For the artist, fire becomes a metaphor for this contemporary state of consciousness: she is simultaneously a viewer of inferno and its participant. She watches the world burn, while the constant act of observation slowly burns something inside her.

Artist biography
Anna Nezhnaya is a visual and performance artist who has lived and worked in Berlin since 2016. With her background in graphical arts trained at Moscow State University for Printing Arts and Graphics (B.A.) and at Greifswald University (M.A.), Anna's artistic research is dedicated to traditional images in contemporary settings. For her, digital drawing is the perfect connection to light art, serving as a field of experimentation from which her iconic neon sculptures emerge. Anna's work oscillates between objectivity and abstraction—both manually and digitally—and explores identity in the post-internet age. With her paintings, light objects, and drawings, she investigates the slippery divide between physical and virtual reality. Furthermore, Anna Nezhnaya is developing experimental ways to attribute surface structures with new painting techniques. The artist reflects on topics of grotesque feminism, exploring images of femininity in the realms of mysticism and metaphor.

Works in Progress and Video-Performances

Works in Progress and Video-Performances

The exhibition program also includes works in progress and performances that explore themes of fire's power and force, comparisons with political and geopolitical control over resources, emotions and passions between people, and the importance of unity in preventing and responding to catastrophes while protecting nature and lives.

This program includes works by Yann Toma, "Dynamo-Fukushima"; Azadeh Nilchiani, "Ceasefire"; Mélia Roger, "Deep Ears"; Andrew Erdos, "Walk Faster Raise Hell"; and Astrid Dick, "Vanity, All Is Vanity".

Azadeh Nilchiani, Ceasefire 
Format: Video art project (work in progress)

"Ceasefire" refers to the suspension of armed conflict, the interruption of violence. The video explores the relationship between fire, war, and oil as one of the main fossil energy sources sustaining contemporary power. Oil never appears on screen; it enters only through sound, evoking extraction, circulation, and combustion as the energy that fuels these conflicts. This unseen presence ties the fire in the images to the industrial and geopolitical systems built around the control of resources. Ceasefire questions these intertwined cycles of energy, power, and destruction, and the possibility, however fragile, of interrupting them.

Artist biography
Azadeh Nilchiani is a Franco-Iranian artist, researcher, and academic currently pursuing postdoctoral research for the DEM'ARTS project at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She holds a Ph.D. in the Arts from Gustave Eiffel University and is a graduate of the Tehran School of Fine Arts, the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris (Art-Espace program), and the École nationale de musique de Pantin (electroacoustic composition program). Her multidisciplinary practice includes installations, electroacoustic compositions, video art, and drawing. Since 2002, she has presented her artwork in Iran, France, Chile, Greece, Myanmar, Mexico, South Korea, Portugal, the United States, Sweden, Dubai, Finland, and Spain.

Mélia Roger, Deep Ears
Format: Audio-visual installation, film and multichannel vibrational platform
Duration: 20 min, loop
Collaboration: SECAC, Lanzarote

Deep Ears is an immersive sonic film examining the care gestures of a group of women bioacousticians and biologists studying the local population of cetaceans in Lanzarote. Rooted in the volcanic soundscape of this island, the film explores the silent scientific preparations conducted in various locations: a whale cemetery where they buried stranded animals so the bodies could decompose; the collection room filled with more than three hundred skulls of whales and dolphins; an office where they listen to recordings of bioacoustic surveys and describe the vocalizations they hear.

How can we deeply connect with cetacean culture through sound? Deep Ears exists at the intersection of an artistic film, an experimental documentary, and an immersive soundscape composition, exploring cetacean culture from the surface with the women scientists who dedicate their lives to the conservation of their population.

Artist biography
Mélia Roger (born 1996, she/her) is a field recordist and artist engaged in inspiring ecological change through environmental and empathic listening. Her work explores the sonic poetics of the landscape, searching for the invisible layers between human and non-human beings. Coming from a sound engineering background (ENS Louis-Lumière in Paris, ZHdK in Zurich), Mélia is developing a twofold activity between immersive 7.0.2 sound recordings within HAL-audio, as well as a more experimental and naturalistic approach to listening. Now at Le Fresnoy, she is a practice-based Ph.D. candidate at the University of Lille, focusing on the relations between sound arts and acoustic ecology.

Yann Toma - Dynamo-Fukushima, September 17–18, 2011 - Grand Palais
Attendance: 24,000 people over two days
Curator: Jérôme Neutres
Format: Participatory and monumental art piece - video by Elliot Storey, filmed by Hadrien Postel-Vinay

Yann Toma, perpetual chairman of Ouest-Lumière, an artistic energy company, created a human chain under the Grand Palais hall to celebrate Heritage Days. Through playful and federative installations, Ouest-Lumière intended to mobilize common energies and express solidarity toward Japan, to support the populations experiencing the nuclear disaster of Fukushima. The audience was invited to be active and productive while living—both a motionless and metaphoric journey.

Accompanied by the Japanese community in France, the Fukushima dynamo participants formed a microorganism for two days, grouping themselves around numerous electric lights they illuminated by cycling for Japan. Artists, musicians, thinkers, photographers, philosophers, poets, and Japanese VIPs contributed their own energy and elevated it. By creating a human chain under Europe's largest glasshouse and using everyone's energy as raw material, the project sought to turn the Grand Palais into a massive light antenna directed toward the Japanese population. This form of artistic and collective energy diffusion aimed to stimulate an electric circuit, to link people together and put them into motion to serve the future of our planet and humankind. The goal was to create a common work and to be directly connected through a "thought of shivering," following Edouard Glissant's concept.