Title: An Atmospheric Condition - No. 1
Artist: Javier Clemente Martínez
Year: 2026
Medium: Moving image - Videoinstallation - Experimental - Documentary
Duration: 03:39 seg
Format: ultra HD / black and white
Frame rate: 25 fps
Dialogue/Language: None
Sound: Yes, Stereo
Presentation: Loop
Short Synopsis
In the Anthropocene, catastrophe does not always arrive as spectacle. Sometimes it settles into the atmosphere.
Filmed in Trevinca, a protected Natura 2000 area in Galicia during the devastating wildfires of summer 2025, An
Atmospheric Condition observes fire not as an isolated event, but as a persistent state embedded in the landscape.
Through a fixed image conceived as a continuous loop, smoke, altered light and obscured land replace narrative
progression: there is no clear beginning, climax or resolution.
Rooted in the recurring fires of northwest Spain yet extending towards a planetary condition, the work reflects on
ecological collapse, territorial transformation and the political, economic and human forces entangled within them.
As the landscape burns, recovers incompletely and burns again, catastrophe ceases to interrupt normality and becomes
its atmosphere—no longer something we simply witness, but something we increasingly learn to inhabit.
Extended Synopsis / Artwork Statement
"Fire lingers as memory, revealing both collapse and the fragile possibility of renewal”.
This work resonates with a mode of attention grounded in slowness, perception, and quiet observation. It approaches the
landscape not as a spectacle, but as a space of subtle, ongoing relations between human and non-human forces—
where transformation often occurs at the edge of visibility. Through stillness and duration, the piece invites a form of
listening that attends to what remains barely perceptible: fragile rhythms, latent tensions, and forms of coexistence that persist, even within conditions of imbalance.
landscape not as a spectacle, but as a space of subtle, ongoing relations between human and non-human forces—
where transformation often occurs at the edge of visibility. Through stillness and duration, the piece invites a form of
listening that attends to what remains barely perceptible: fragile rhythms, latent tensions, and forms of coexistence that persist, even within conditions of imbalance.
In the Anthropocene, collapse does not always arrive as spectacle. Sometimes it settles slowly into the atmosphere.
What happens when catastrophe no longer interrupts the landscape, but becomes its climate—when collapse is not an
event we witness, but a condition we inhabit?
An Atmospheric Condition is a video work built around a single, fixed image of an ongoing wildfire. Filmed in August 2025
in the Trevinca area, in northwest Spain, within a protected Natura 2000 site and Special Protection Area for Birds
(ZEPA), the work emerged during one of the most severe wildfire seasons in Galicia in recent history.
Rather than representing fire as an isolated catastrophe, the work approaches it as a persistent condition embedded in
the landscape. The camera remains at a distance and refuses the spectacular conventions through which disaster is so
often represented and consumed. There is no dramatic climax and no narrative resolution. Instead, the image remains
with what persists: smoke, altered light, obscured land, and the gradual dissolution of the landscape into the atmosphere
surrounding it.
What happens when catastrophe no longer interrupts the landscape, but becomes its climate—when collapse is not an
event we witness, but a condition we inhabit?
An Atmospheric Condition is a video work built around a single, fixed image of an ongoing wildfire. Filmed in August 2025
in the Trevinca area, in northwest Spain, within a protected Natura 2000 site and Special Protection Area for Birds
(ZEPA), the work emerged during one of the most severe wildfire seasons in Galicia in recent history.
Rather than representing fire as an isolated catastrophe, the work approaches it as a persistent condition embedded in
the landscape. The camera remains at a distance and refuses the spectacular conventions through which disaster is so
often represented and consumed. There is no dramatic climax and no narrative resolution. Instead, the image remains
with what persists: smoke, altered light, obscured land, and the gradual dissolution of the landscape into the atmosphere
surrounding it.
The flame ceases to be an exception and becomes atmosphere—something that lingers, permeates the territory and
quietly redefines what a landscape is.
Conceived as a continuous loop without a clearly defined beginning or end, the work mirrors the condition it depicts. The
landscape burns, recovers incompletely, and burns again. The viewer may enter the image at any moment, yet there is
no definitive point of arrival, escape or conclusion. What initially appears to be a specific event becomes a persistent
present.
Through this temporal suspension, the image shifts away from conventional documentation towards a state of sustained
attention. Duration itself becomes part of the work: an invitation to remain with an image that contemporary visual culture
might otherwise consume and discard within seconds. This suspended temporality echoes the nature of ecological crisis
itself—not something that simply erupts and disappears, but something that accumulates, persists, transforms and
returns.
In the summer of 2025, more than 171,000 hectares burned across Galicia (5,020 hectares of protected land within Pena
Trevinca—around 20% of this Natura 2000 protected area—according to the European Forest Fire Information System
(EFFIS) of the EU’s Copernicus programme) during one of the most devastating wildfire seasons in Spain. Protected
ecosystems, communal forests and territories that had sustained rural communities for generations were affected within
weeks. Trevinca became part of a geography increasingly defined not by exceptional disaster, but by recurrence.
This recurrence is central to "An Atmospheric Condition". In Galicia and across the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, fire cannot be understood solely as an ecological phenomenon. Its recurrence is entangled with a complex network of social, political, economic and territorial forces: forestry models, monoculture, changing forms of land use, rural abandonment, energy interests and extractive practices, alongside the growing
pressures produced by a changing climate.
pressures produced by a changing climate.
The absence of visible human presence in the image therefore does not imply human absence from what is taking place.
On the contrary, it points towards an inseparable entanglement between human activity and environmental
transformation. The apparently empty landscape carries the consequences of decisions, systems and forms of
intervention that remain largely outside the frame.
By refusing to isolate the wildfire as a singular catastrophe, the work also draws attention to its normalization. Repetition
exposes not only ecological fragility and environmental degradation, but forms of institutional inertia and, at times,
political and social passivity that allow these cycles to persist. A protected territory appears before us, yet protection itself
becomes unstable: a designation unable, on its own, to shield a landscape from the wider forces transforming it.
At the same time, this is not only a Galician landscape.
From the Mediterranean to the Americas, Australia and the boreal forests, increasingly recurrent wildfires reveal a
planetary condition shaped by rising temperatures, extractive land use, monoculture forestry, abandonment and profound
transformations in the relationship between human societies and the territories they inhabit. Smoke crosses borders
more easily than political responsibility does. It becomes a transnational signal—a shared veil through which
geographically distant landscapes begin to resemble one another.
Beyond its material and ecological consequences, fire also opens a less tangible dimension within the work. The altered
landscape reflects a growing disconnection from land, ecological balance and forms of sensitivity towards non-human
life. Visible destruction coexists with quieter forms of erosion: an erosion of attention, responsibility and care.
The landscape therefore becomes both witness and body—a surface marked by processes that exceed what is
immediately visible, carrying traces of previous events while already anticipating those that may follow.
In this sense, An Atmospheric Condition moves between the documentary and the contemplative, between ecological
reality and a more interior, almost spiritual awareness of loss, transformation and interdependence. Fire emerges as an
ambiguous force: evidence of collapse and destruction, but also part of the unstable processes through which territories
continually transform. The work holds this tension without attempting to resolve it—the tension between destruction and
regeneration, disappearance and persistence, vulnerability and renewal.
It offers no solution and no heroic perspective. It does not attempt to explain the landscape from outside it. The image
simply remains.
landscape reflects a growing disconnection from land, ecological balance and forms of sensitivity towards non-human
life. Visible destruction coexists with quieter forms of erosion: an erosion of attention, responsibility and care.
The landscape therefore becomes both witness and body—a surface marked by processes that exceed what is
immediately visible, carrying traces of previous events while already anticipating those that may follow.
In this sense, An Atmospheric Condition moves between the documentary and the contemplative, between ecological
reality and a more interior, almost spiritual awareness of loss, transformation and interdependence. Fire emerges as an
ambiguous force: evidence of collapse and destruction, but also part of the unstable processes through which territories
continually transform. The work holds this tension without attempting to resolve it—the tension between destruction and
regeneration, disappearance and persistence, vulnerability and renewal.
It offers no solution and no heroic perspective. It does not attempt to explain the landscape from outside it. The image
simply remains.
What happens when catastrophe stops interrupting normality and becomes normality itself? When environmental
collapse is no longer something we momentarily witness, but something we gradually learn to inhabit—and even to
breathe?
A landscape breathing through smoke.
A protected territory that could not be protected.
An atmosphere of recurrence, where land burns, heals incompletely, and burns again.