Controlled Burn, 2022

Controlled Burn invites the viewer on a cosmic journey through deep time, soaring through an aerial landscape of imploding fireworks. Shot with a first-person drone, this disorienting voyage takes in open-pit coal mines, decommissioned oil rigs, and rusting cooling towers, celebrating their dereliction.

Throughout, amid whirling smoke and fire, implosions are interrupted by flashing images of primordial unfurling ferns and fluttering moths—beings that evolved during the carboniferous geological period. Appearing at subliminal speed, Charrière offers these organisms as both spirit guides and living tokens for the vitality of fossil fuels—and, additionally, as markers for how the agency of coal, oil, and tar has come to haunt our contemporary imagination. It has taken root in our dream life, infesting visions of the world to come. Particularly the oil rig in the video acts as both monument and warning—a relic of the hunger that drives us to extract, exhaust, and abandon. It speaks to our careless framing of the oceans as machines: engines of transformation that crush, dissolve, and remake matter across immense timescales, which we hubristically imagine that we can tap into, plunder, and control without consequence. Linking celebratory pyrotechnics with extraction architectures, explosive momentum with technological obsolescence, Controlled Burn questions this state of affairs—staging the fantasy of a dramatic return to sources of energy via implosion: a time before smoke.

Every Thursday at 7:45 pm

Credits
Co-Director & Editor: Johannes Förster
Score: Felix Deufel
Sound Design: Felix Deufel, Matthias Schubert
Colorist: Julien von Schultzendorff
Editing Assistant: Paloma Schnitzer
Drone Operator: Per Jacob Blut
FPV Drone Pilots: Benno Knarr, Leon Knarr, Clemens Wronski
Camera Assistants: Aurel Salzer, Maxim Pechersky
Digital Imaging Technician: Phil Jungschlaeger
VFX Editors: Sean Sams, Seb Caudron, Moritz Freudenberg,
Neil Reynolds
Motion Graphics: Anika Spereiter
Post-Production Management: Yasmin Balai
Pyrotechnicians: Felix Rausch, Felix Münch
Pyrotechnician Assistants: Vincent Schaack, Christian Kuhlmann
Production Assistants: Yasmin Balai, Carl Maria Kemper,
Simon Mellnich, Alexander Paul Probst, Y-ul Suh, Cleo Wächter

Special thanks to: Martin John Callanan, Nicolas Kandler, Katie Paterson