A pioneering visual artist who burns her own work to highlight the ongoing threat of wildfires caused by climate change will be exhibiting her unique images at the University of Winchester’s West Downs Gallery.
Open Fire is an award-winning multimedia project created by Marilene Cardoso Ribeiro, a former Visiting Research Fellow at the University’s School of Media and Film.
Using an analogue camera Marilene photographed conservation areas in her homeland of Brazil and then, after developing the film, she burned it to replicate the process which has erased many of the country’s other natural and cultural landscapes.
The resulting three-dimensional pieces have been digitized and displayed alongside captions and narrations, in Marilene’s own voice, drawing on news stories about the wildfires and her own insights.
Marilene points out that the fires are mostly man made and in Latin America have been the result of political conflicts. She was inspired by reading reports of Brazil’s ‘Day of Fire’ – August 10, 2019 – when agribusiness operators set fire to huge areas of the rain forest in a co-ordinated action spurred on by the anti-environmental policies of the then President Jair Bolsonaro.
"A few days after, the black smoke arrived in São Paulo, over 1,200 miles away from where the fire had taken place, and day became night in the largest city of the Americas," said Marilene.
She describes Open Fire as: “…a window to expose a contemporary issue that has injured the planet in a cyclic fashion, over and over throughout the years, and therefore demands society, decision- and policy-makers to take action.”
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Visual artist Marilene Cardoso Ribeiro
Open Fire has won the Photoworks Digital Residency Award, the Royal Geographical Society’s prestigious Earth Photo 2024 contest, as well as Brazil’s National Arts Foundation Marc Ferrez Photography Prize and the POY Latam/Environment Photography Award 2023.
The exhibition comes to the University’s West Downs Gallery in the Autumn and opens with a roundtable discussion, open to the public on the evening of October 2.
The panel will be made up of Marilene together with Dr. Rachel Carmenta – Assistant Professor of Global Development and Climate Change at University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre and School of Global Development, who is an expert on tropical fires; and Danny Lee, a Trustee of Winchester Action on the Climate Crisis (WinACC) and Green Party Councillor on Winchester City Council.
The event will be chaired by Professor Laura Hubner, co-convener of the Culture-Media-Text Research Centre at The University of Winchester.
To book your place visit Open Fire Tickets | Eventbrite.
following the opening event the exhibition runs until November 16. West Downs Gallery is open Monday to Friday from 8am to 6pm and Saturday from 8.30am to 4pm.
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