What Still Burns

What Still Burns unfolds a material landscape made of more than a hundred real charcoal fragments—diverse in shape, size, and texture—arranged on the floor as a dense, almost uniform field. Each piece has been meticulously coated in glossy black acrylic paint, neutralizing its capacity to stain or leave a trace. Only one fragment remains raw: uncoated, active, still capable of contaminating. This minimal yet decisive gesture destabilizes the entire installation, revealing the paradox of a materiality that, once neutralized, exposes deeper layers of symbolic violence.

The work functions as an allegory of contemporary control: a regime that does not eliminate residue but aestheticizes and sanitizes it, stripping it of agency. The single unpainted piece becomes an uncomfortable relic, a non-domesticated element whose disruptive potential survives within the field of containment. The installation reflects on processes of standardization and symbolic cleansing within neoliberal societies, where even the most primitive fragments are subjected to regimes of aesthetic neutralization.

Despite the glossy uniformity of their surfaces, the morphological diversity of the charcoals asserts resistance to homogenization. By occupying the floor—a space historically associated with what is low, dirty, or discarded—the work activates a poetics of the residue that resists absorption into hygienic systems and reveals, through minimal difference, what still burns.