blue fire

2020

Commissioned by Manuel Segade and Tania Pardo for Un Metro y Medio
Online screening programme held at CA2M Museum

blue fire is a short video that performs like a collage, made entirely from snippets of found footage. The title is taken from the name of a roller coaster that features near the middle of the work, and blueness and fire predominate through the scenes; they form a type of visual grammar around which the video structures itself, minimally articulated, subtle, and intense.

At the start, there is a brief cameo by a cartoon flame (whose name is ‘Joe’), and footage of deep undersea volcanic activity, which we are told in voiceover ‘has never been seen before, although eruptions like this make up 80 per cent of the Earth's surface volcanic activity’. There are various domestic scenes. Some are staged as spectacles: the water demolition of a house, an Olympic gymnastics routine, teenagers competing in a vaping contest. Others are impromptu, and record sudden emotions and reactions; wonder and joy in the presence of glowing bioluminescence during a family holiday, with a loved life partner, the airtight anxiety of flight turbulence. The footage of the rollercoaster combines and arranges them like a central spine; an elaborately staged spectacle that nonetheless provokes real screams of fright and delight from the passengers strapped into it.

The grammar runs beneath these volatile positions of artificial/authentic, performance/reaction, domestic/professional, and delight/dismay. You feel that each is in a constant state of being about to erupt, and are left with the sense that both states are somehow latent beneath the action on the screen.

This about to erupt never does arrive. Instead, the blue fire stays twisted through the slice-of-life scenes, pseudoscientific images, and youngsters’ experiments. Just like the roller coaster that names it, the video collects easy-going moments of awe, enjoyment, stress, and tension release, and builds them into a chain that progressively builds up. The work is oddly auto-terminating; whenever it comes near to the ecstasy, the sequence ends abruptly, with a common panic scene.

blue fire develops a visual language, glueing together separate instants of reality. It acts as something like a statement of intention, and similar gestures and imagery will go on to inform future works by Esther. In this video though, what you get is a carefully managed distance from the combustions and their varied moments of ignition and burst.