Emmanuel Van der Auwera's The Sky is On Fire is exclusively showing starting February 24, 2021 in MUBI's Brief Encounters series.
Ever since I was a child I have been enthralled with the notion of America. I had a large picture of New York in my bedroom, and this image of a city unlike any I had seen in Europe intrigued me. As I got older, it became easier to be in touch with America: through media, images, and the internet. I started working with material I came across via online communities early on in my artistic practice. There seemed to be a desire to leave one’s mark, to show our existence; who we were at a given point in time. My interest for online cultures was developed alongside research into the consumption of images, and how the media shows images of disasters - never showing the actual event, they show images of grief, crowds of supporters or mourners, often looking off into the distance at a horror that the viewer of the image never actually witnesses.
The Sky is on Fire was not a film I had originally planned. It came up accidentally, organically, while I was working on another film based in Miami: The Death of K9 Cigo. These two films have a close relationship between them, both stemming from the same intrigue. I had been in Miami for Art Basel Miami Beach, and the Parkland tragedy happened shortly after. I imagined the trauma in the area I had recently been in, and I decided to investigate the shockwaves emitted by the event through the live streaming application Periscope. A horrific incident of this magnitude creates a sort of zeitgeist, which I observed and was able to create points of contact with, even while living in Belgium. From everything I had been observing over the past few years, the Parkland shooting particularly struck me as emblematic of the continued drama that seemed to be happening in America, and in Miami in particular: the election of Donald Trump, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and now a massacre in a school. From this came the idea to create a film, and I identified a few potential protagonists amongst the frenzy of Periscope users around Miami. One person stood out particularly - I only knew his username; he called himself Chaz. He would often give monologues to his smartphone from his car, his home, or around his neighbourhood, slipping in somewhat crazy ideas in what was almost a philosophic soliloquy.
“Chaz” speaks about a subject that was present in The Death of K9 Cigo, but that was not directly addressed: the relationship between our online existence and immortality. By recording ourselves and through our online presence, we leave a trace—even if only on the internet. When we are no longer on Earth, we will still leave digital vestiges of ourselves behind. "Chaz” also speaks about another idea: our unspeakable desire for catastrophe. We almost hope that the world will extinguish itself along with us, as it seems inconceivable that the planet will keep spinning when we are no longer on it. This monologue was the perfect companion for the archeological digital footage I was experimenting with, and idea for The Sky is on Fire was born. Since I was using Periscope to compile The Death of K9 Cigo, the film inherently treated ideas of voyeurism and the power dynamics of consuming images of other people’s grief. For this second film, I wanted to take a different approach, and I knew I wanted to return to Miami to document the city in my own way. I used the smartphone application Scan 3D, which is designed to scan objects but not large structures. By using this to work on landscapes, it picked up forms that approximate reality, but that are riddled with flaws. While walking through Miami and picking up details of cars, homes, and other details, I had the impression of creating samples in the same way that an archeologist would explore a vanished city. The final renderings of these images gave them a ruinous quality—as if America had been recorded, its portrait taken, before its imminent dismantling.
These images were taken after the tragedy I was studying took place, and they appear as a world which has since disappeared - a landscape removed from time. As I roamed the streets, I recorded tens of thousands of images, combining their elements later on. Places depicted in the film look plausible, but don’t actually exist. The first part of the film shows a reconstructed view of a street in Parkland, close to where the tragedy took place. These manicured views later give way to urban streets in a state of decay. The technology that was used in the making of the images transform these streets into ruins of reality. Film, images, and documentation are now simply digital ruins, and this film is an exploration of them.