The Sky is on Fire is an example of Van der Auwera's research into how technological developments alter our way of seeing, understanding, and interacting with the world. Like many of his works, the point of departure is in the blur of taboo or tragedy as the location is set in the zones connecting documentary, reconstruction, and fictional genres to map the intersections of physical and digital space.
The Sky is on Fire begins with a monologue from a troubled man who comforts himself with the thought that nothing will ever be destroyed or lost, because everything is being backed up and technology will save us. It's a transhumanistic position. As the man's monologue moves between calamity and calm, the images traveling in the screens are also eschatological--uncanny technological reconstructions, molds with no substance, an applied sense of hollow and sleek aesthetics that seem almost real. The images were built by walking around areas of Miami and using an application called SCAN3D, which takes photos of objects and turns them into 3D renders.
This larger than life reconstruction speaks of contemporary life as it is, at once superficial and immersive, over exposed and over connected, pervasive and discontinuous, an environment representative of the civilizational malaise of our current relationship to the world. The meticulous approach with which the artist compiles, stitches, and composes a visual narrative from an infinity of images bound for virtual oblivion perhaps prefigures the approach that future archaeologists will use as they wrestle with the work of reconstitution from the remains of files floating in the sidereal digital space.
Text: Harlan Levey

Director: Emmanuel Van der Auwera
Assistant director: Thomas Depas
Sound editing and mixing: Pierre Dozin
Special Thanks to: Sophie Sherman, Gregory Thirion, Olivier Burlet
Produced by: Cigo, Harlan Levey Projects
With support from Botanique Museum, Brussels

Emmanuel Van der Auwera (BE) lives and works in Brussels. Through filmmaking, video sculpture, theatre, printmaking, and other media, Van der Auwera sets up encounters with images that provoke a questioning of our visual literacy: How do images of contemporary mass media operate on various audiences and to what end? With the formal rigor of a logician, the artist dissects how images are engineered, mastering specialized industry techniques and intervening in their protocol. In so doing, Van der Auwera brings us no closer to a monolithic truth, but constructs new paradigms for reading images and understanding our relationships with them. Van der Auwera is a 2015 Laureate of the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) post-academic course in Ghent and has exhibited widely in Europe and the US. He is represented by Harlan Levey Projects.