Ogni fuoco diventa cenere
Common Index x Situ
Medium
Interactive installation
Role
Creative Technologist & Interaction Designer
Deliverables
An interactive archive exploring fire and memory through thirty years of data, collective writing, and recorded voices.
© Carmelo Lenzo
Ogni fuoco diventa cenere is an interactive installation by Common Index that explores what survives after a fire, and how its traces continue to shape the present. Presented at the seventh edition of SITU Festival in Brolo, Sicily, the work brings thirty years of scientific records of fires across the island into contact with myths, rituals, and oral histories. Images, objects, and voices form a fragmented archive whose relationships change as visitors move through the space.
In Sicily, fire belongs to both the landscape and the practices of those who inhabit it. Summer wildfires and ritual bonfires carry different meanings, placing destruction, protection, and transformation within the same territory. We began with what these fires leave behind. Ash holds traces of something whose original form has been lost: a deposit from which we can recover information, recognise connections, and imagine what might follow. It also raises a question about reconstruction: what should be carried forward, and what might need to change?
The scientific records give the installation a chronology. As the dataset unfolds, dates, locations, and images enter a changing visual composition, building up and breaking apart over time. Information moves between readable evidence and a more uncertain visual residue. This tension informed the way we approached the archive: each record preserves something of an event, while leaving much of its experience beyond reach.
Alongside this chronology, we developed a collective writing process around stories of fire. Myths, legends, and rituals passed between participants, who rewrote and interpreted them through successive contributions. Each passage introduced changes, making the act of transmission visible within the stories themselves. The resulting texts were recorded as voices, bringing the rhythms and differences of their telling into the installation.
Interaction brought these materials into relation. Visitors’ presence activated objects, sounds, and narrative fragments throughout the space, creating different combinations as people encountered the work. Together with the sound design by XONEX Studio, the recorded voices gave the archive an audible presence. The technical system made it possible for these contributions to meet in changing arrangements, allowing each encounter to form a temporary reading of the material.
For us, the work became a way of exploring memory through the processes that alter it: recording, retelling, listening, and forgetting. Its partial and unstable nature leaves room to consider what survives, whose words are passed on, and what disappears between one telling and the next. Like ash, the archive holds evidence of what came before while remaining available for transformation. What we make from those remains becomes part of the story.