Pyrocene is a durational video work that responds to the Australian megafires of 2019-20 as a harbinger of further ecological catastrophe.
The video evokes the experience of Australian cities and suburban areas blanketed by smoke from the bushfires. Studying how our ecological crisis can feel at once distant and intimate.
The work displays various security camera footage of an empty house filling with haze: speculating society’s self-made, collective-immolation due to ongoing, ever-increasing catastrophic events.
Inspired by Stephen J. Pyne’s proposal of the Pyrocene - a new ‘age of fire’ to replace our current geological epoch the Holocene or the wide-spread suggestion of the Anthropocene.
The work considers fire and smoke as a narrative, one of the oldest known to humanity, that defined our distinctive ecological agency and exemplified our manipulation of it. Our alliance with fire has morphed from a beneficial symbiosis to an encroaching unstoppable force that lends only to helpless observation and existential insecurity.