Paper short abstract:

The Encyclopaedia of Images of Fire is a multimedia project at the intersection of art, anthropology and advocacy that casts a glance at the imagery of fire in Western media and across human cultures in an attempt to reinvest the phenomenon with an adequate dose of mythical symbolism.

Paper long abstract:

"Fire is the greatest image, the most complete image of annihilation", stated French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his "Talks on the Poetic Imagination", broadcast by Paris-Inter radio in 1954. But the images of fire, like flowers of language, appear to express the whole gamut of human passions in their conflicts and their ambivalences. And so, "next to such active images of fire, next to images that incite action and violence", he remarks, "we would find images that teach us tranquillity and happiness". Nonetheless, the imagery of fire in contemporary media and arts circuits seem to rest on its destructive power –especially in the last decade, when megafires have become ever more common around the world.

The Encyclopaedia of Images of Fire is a multimedia project at the intersection of art, anthropology and advocacy that casts a glance at the imagery of fire in Western media and across human cultures in an attempt to reinvest the phenomenon with an adequate dose of mythical symbolism. As advances in chemistry and thermodynamics explained away the properties of fire, the phenomenon became progressively depleted of its poetic substance. "Fire shrank from Heracleitean universality to a laboratory demonstration. Once the manifestation of the deity and the source of life, fire had become alien, a destroyer of cities, a savager of soil, a befouler of air" (Pyne 2001:138). We invite artists and scholars to contribute to this project with their artwork, expertise and ideas.