Arde

 

On March 9, 2021, at around 4 in the afternoon, I saw a column of smoke rise from the north. I was at home in El Hoyo, with a panoramic view toward El Bolsón — the direction the fire came from. In what seemed like minutes, a second fire broke out. The wind was extreme. By nightfall, seven communities were burning.

 

I started photographing that same day. I was there, I was living through it, and I had a camera. Not as a witness from the outside — as someone whose home, whose friends, whose landscape were inside the fire.

 

Over the next six months I documented what became the most devastating wildfire in the history of an Argentine population. But Arde is not only a record of the fire. It is a record of everything that made the fire possible: the disputed territory, the invasive pine trees that turned entire hillsides into tinder, the illegal land seizures, the years of neglect over a forest that nobody ever fully protected. The fire did not come from nowhere. It came from within.

 

I photographed at night. In one of the images, published by National Geographic, my rubber soles burned on the still-hot ash as I walked. In the second room of the exhibition, called La danza de los pinos — The Dance of the Pines — a forest of charred trees stands almost as a sculpture in the darkness.

 

This fire is a premonition of what is to come. A mirror of what is already happening in other parts of the world. We inhabit a planet that is warming, in which we are both accomplices and actors in our own destruction.

​

— Alejandro.

​

​

​

Technical Sheet

​

2021  ·  Comarca Andina, Patagonia, Argentina

Six months of fieldwork  ·  March–September 2021

Digital camera  ·  Night photography  ·  Long exposures

One photograph published by National Geographic

 

In collaboration with: 0800 Don Rouch — silver jewelry series embedded with fire and landscape images.

 

​

Selected Exhibitions

 

2024  ·  Arde  ·  Gachi Prieto Gallery, Buenos Aires  ·  in collaboration with 0800 Don Rouch

2024  ·  MAPA Feria de Arte, Buenos Aires  ·  Gachi Prieto Gallery presentation

​

​

​