The Mark of a Terrible Sun

A photographic exploration that seeks to engage with the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 40,000- kilometer circular zone of disasters that includes 90 percent of all earthquakes and 75 percent of all active volcanoes across the globe.

Disasters are the absolute event of history and any knowledge we have of them is built around, with and against the marks left behind them. The Mark of a Terrible Sun is a photographic exploration that seeks to engage with the Pacific Ring of Fire as the geographical zone of the ‘ultimate natural disaster’ on Earth.

Stretching around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, this circular ring of disasters is a 40,000- kilometer zone that includes roughly 90 percent of all earthquakes and 75 percent of all active volcanoes across the globe. The first part of the project focuses on the lands and people under the shadow of the volcanoes situated on the southwest trench of the ring and more specifically on the part of the region of Melanesia including Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, seeking to investigate how these ongoing disasters, as witnessed through archives and re-lived today, can shape a culture of resilience shared amongst the Melanesian communities impacted.

Photographed under the lava and ashes of past and ongoing volcanic activity and the historical remnants of the Pacific war in the region, the work is primarily concerned with the obscure traces of the disaster as an interspace dealing with ideas of destruction and survival and the exploration of heterotopias that might creatively synthesize new composites and assemblages of interpretation. In this sense, the images blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction reflecting upon the possibilities an expanded photographic practice can offer in relation to the disaster as the prompt for future scenarios positioned in the gap between historical knowledge, presentation, the image and narration.

The series is composed of analogue medium format images which have been afterwards marked with the stains of magma captured digitally while expelled in the air during volcanic eruption aiming for the final works to become the carriers of the solidified marks of the residues of the catastrophe serving as the mementos that reminds us of the fragility and resilience of life.