All that Burns Melts Into Air

All that burns melts into air as “All that is solid melts into air” by Marx and Engels brings us to an imaginary of the present time marked by the reality and urgency of global warming. 

From the metaphor that everything that burns (often in attempts to erase memories) melts and merges with air in a transformative process, it refers to social and political changes in Africa. During the rise of liberation movements in Africa, Socialism explored the experience of modernity, in its utopia and in its fall from a safe institution to something decadent very different from its initial project. A partly fictionalized and partly documentary portrait, All that burns... shows places between ruins and the forest, between the utopian visions of the modernist avant-garde and the post fall images of Socialism and its ideologies. In the film soundscape an imagery we immersed ourselves in a set of spaces on the island of Sao Tome. In this immersive process we almost forget the physical dimensions of this island located in a country with less than a thousand square kilometers. 

In the video, the colonial buildings without end, a platform that is a bridge broken to the sea confront us from their paradoxical magnitude of rubble left by the Portuguese during the colonial period. 

These spaces are presented as the remnants of colonialism and represent the fall of an empire. These residues go far beyond the physicality of matter - the ruins of the present - to the immateriality of the memories of the past that were imprinted in spaces and that are transported to the present. In these temporal journeys, both spaces and memories are subject to processes of appropriation and transformation.