Cinder Oasis

The camera moves slowly over fire-blackened ground. From the ashes emerge small life forms: lichens, mosses and fungi. In Cinder Oasis, Oscar Furbacken looks at what happens after the fire. Close-range, almost floating camera movements follow a quiet process in which life returns to a small scale, while the landscape simultaneously bears witness to a larger destruction. The small organisms that sprout from the ashes bear a singular beauty, but also the tale of increasingly extensive fires in a changing climate. The sound moves like a rumbling echo of something that has not yet subsided. The work is part of a longer project in which Furbacken examines nature’s microscopic courses of events. The film is shown as a loop with evocative audio created in collaboration with sound designer and composer Robin af Ekenstam.