“Aithō, I Burn” is a photographic tale depicting the disappearance of a human figure in the vastness of volcanic landscapes.
This tale transposes an experience of derealization that the photographer lived during adolescence. This dissociative disorder being the sensation of being detached from one's environment and one's own body, Adeline Care has thus developed an aesthetic of erasure and floating through climate changes captured at high altitude.
The photographer thus begins this photographic narration with the wandering of a human figure on the surface of a land that has become volcanic. All the work in this first part aims to transcribe the loss of materiality that the artist was able to feel. Playing with the loss of scale, the misty variations and the flat textures offered by Etna, she translates mental landscapes tragically prefiguring the inevitable return of the earth to what it was billions of years earlier: a sphere of rocks and gases.
The gradual burial of the character in the heart of the basalt undergrounds marks the end of this floating. Petrifying in the magma, the human figure thus gives body to this return to the mineral. Through this metamorphosis, she transcends her anxiety of disappearance by exploring the possibility of an inorganic world. Like this alter ego, she attempts to apprehend existence in non-vital perspectives; photographing matter for what it is, in a geological temporality, spacing each image by thousands of years.
The cave landscapes then become the site of a metaphysical journey between the depths of the earth and the soul. Red invades the image. The character no longer burns, he himself has become fire. A lifeless force, like that of Etna, the location of the photographs in the series, whose Latin etymology “Aithō” means “I burn”.
