Combustion (April-May 2025)

        Last winter, I read the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges’ short story titled “The Circular Ruins” from his collection Fictions (1944). “The Circular Ruins” is one of his most powerful explorations of reality and dreams. It can be interpreted as a story about artistic creation or as a reflection on how we understand the world and our place in it. The following passage served as initial inspiration for my final project:

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He walked into the shreds of flame. But they did not bite into his flesh, they caressed him and engulfed him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mereappearance, dreamt by another.

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         I want to make something out of the “shreds of flame,” thought I. And with a touch of dream, which will be done through a surrealist aesthetic approach. I aim to address the public with a dreamcore nostalgia of childhood with a burning carousel, which comes from my own childhood memory. Fire rages to bring childhood away, yet it’s like a dream that will always stay. There is a horse in the middle ground is the closest to the viewer and is not touched by the flame. It carries a Dalí’s melting clock[1] on the back as if to break the limitations of time in real life. Further behind is a door that brings to a sea of clouds in the sky. And in the foreground, all over the sides are curtains, as if the scene was just a show (not saying that it is).

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[1] Salvador Dalí’s famous painting Persistence of Memory depicts three “melting” clocks