Title: An Atmospheric Condition - No. 1
Artist: Javier Clemente Martínez
Year: 2026
Medium: Moving image - Videoinstallation
Duration: 3:39 seg
Format: ultra HD-4k / black and white
Frame rate: 25 fps
Sound: Yes
Presentation: Loop
Caption:
"An Atmospheric Condition - No. 1" observes wildfire not as an event, but as a persistent atmospheric state. Filmed at a distance, the image resists spectacle and narrative progression, focusing instead on the slow transformation of air, light, and landscape. Smoke becomes a material presence and evidence of catastrophe, suspending time and attention. Conceived as a continuous loop, the work has no defined beginning or end, allowing the viewer to enter at any point. The piece reflects on wildfire as an ongoing environmental condition - a threshold between visibility and disappearance, where the landscape continues to breathe under altered ecological circumstances. “An atmosphere of recurrence, where land burns, heals incompletely, and is burned again.”
While rooted in a specific territory, An Atmospheric Condition – No. 1 speaks to a broader, global reality. Across different geographies — from the Mediterranean basin to the Americas, Australia, and boreal forests — wildfire has ceased to be an exceptional disaster and has become a recurring environmental condition. Rising temperatures, land-use transformation, and extractive models of management have reshaped vast territories into landscapes increasingly prone to combustion. In this context, smoke functions as a transnational signal: a shared atmospheric trace that collapses distance and connects distant regions through a common experience of loss, instability, and ecological disruption.
According to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) of the Copernicus program, over 171,000 hectares burned across Galicia in the summer of 2025 during one of Spain’s worst wildfire seasons. Several villages, protected reserves, communal forests, and agricultural systems that had sustained rural communities for generations were lost within a single fire season.
The Trevinca mountain range is part of a network of protected landscapes designated to safeguard biodiversity, water sources, and ancestral forms of land use. Yet protection on paper proved fragile in the face of fire. As flames advanced across the mountains, emergency responses arrived late and with limited capacity, allowing the wildfire to spread and reshape the territory largely unchecked for days. This image does not depict an isolated incident but reflects a pattern that has repeated across Galicia and much of Spain in recent years. Rural abandonment, weakened land management, monoculture forestry, and rising temperatures have transformed large areas into highly combustible landscapes. When fire arrives, it does not only consume vegetation; it disrupts ecological memory, communal systems, and the fragile balance between people and land. The smoke that fills the sky over Trevinca signals the normalization of loss: a territory repeatedly exposed, repeatedly burned, and repeatedly mourned. In Galicia, fire has become a recurring condition, leaving landscapes shaped by absence as an enduring trace. This photograph is part of an ongoing project examining the social and ecological consequences of wildfires in Nortwestern Spain, while also exploring pathways of resilience, land stewardship, and ecological recovery.