The work Fire Stone Water: Summer Rituals (2018) articulates a durational practice grounded in material recurrence and lived temporality. Conceived not as a singular artwork but as a constellation of repeated gestures, the project situates itself within an expanded field of art where daily life, ritual, and environment converge. Fire, stone, water, wood, smoke, and waves are not symbolic props but operative agents in a thermodynamic system of exchange. The piece unfolds through months of outdoor living in rural Galicia, where bathing in the ocean, walking dunes, collecting pinecones, lighting fires, and cooking local produce become iterative acts. Duration here is not endurance for spectacle but persistence as ethics: a commitment to staying with processes long enough for transformation to occur. The artwork resists the economy of the event, replacing it with cyclical time, seasonal rhythm, and maintenance. In this sense, the work aligns with post-minimal and eco-critical practices while remaining resolutely unromantic. Nature is not idealised; it is worked with, negotiated, and inhabited. The repeated dismantling and rebuilding of structures foregrounds entropy as method, proposing art as a continuous calibration between body, matter, and climate rather than a fixed aesthetic outcome.
Material intelligence is central to the project’s conceptual coherence. The reuse of centenary, worm-eaten wood, the reconstruction of a stair using slate, granite, and cement, and the accumulation of compost operate as gestures of material memory. These actions reinsert vernacular construction techniques into contemporary artistic discourse, not as nostalgia but as embodied knowledge. Fire functions as both tool and threshold: it cooks, warms, destroys, and transforms, situating the work within a lineage of elemental practices that precede industrial modernity. The ocean, with its repetitive yet never identical waves, becomes a counterpoint to the fire’s volatility, establishing a dialogue between dissolution and concentration. Importantly, the work is porous to social exchange. Neighbours greet, offer good evenings, and become unwitting participants in a social sculpture that unfolds without announcement. Flowers grow freely, refusing compositional control, while the landscape asserts its agency. This is not land art in the heroic sense but a modest, embedded practice that privileges care over conquest. The piece thus reframes sustainability not as a theme but as a lived, material condition enacted through repetition, repair, and attentiveness.
From a theoretical perspective, the project can be read through the lens of thermodynamics as cultural metaphor. Energy circulates: wood becomes heat, heat becomes ash, ash feeds soil, soil feeds plants. These cycles resist linear productivity and instead propose a circular economy of gestures. The daily rituals—coffee in the morning, fire at dusk, ocean immersion—structure time without instrumentalising it. Such practices echo phenomenological approaches to art-making, where meaning emerges from sustained engagement rather than representational intent. The absence of spectacle and documentation-heavy strategies further distances the work from institutional validation, situating it closer to an ethics of presence. Yet this withdrawal is not escapist. By foregrounding labour, repetition, and bodily exposure to weather, the work implicitly critiques accelerated urban life and extractive cultural models. It offers an alternative pedagogy rooted in slowness, craft, and ecological literacy. The dismantling of materials and their recomposition into functional forms underscores an anti-monumental stance: nothing is permanent, everything is provisional. Art here is not an object but a set of relations sustained over time, fragile yet resilient, contingent yet meaningful.
In conclusion, Fire Stone Water: Summer Rituals operates as a quietly radical proposition within contemporary art. Its power lies not in visual novelty but in the insistence on continuity, locality, and material accountability. By collapsing distinctions between living and making, the project redefines artistic practice as a mode of dwelling. The elemental triad of fire, stone, and ocean anchors the work in both geological deep time and immediate, daily necessity. This dual temporality allows the piece to function simultaneously as personal ritual and critical statement. In an era marked by ecological crisis and cultural acceleration, such practices offer not solutions but orientations: ways of being attentive to cycles, limits, and interdependence. The work does not seek to represent nature but to participate in it, acknowledging human presence as neither central nor negligible. Through repetition, the gestures accrue meaning, becoming a form of embodied writing in space and time. Ultimately, the project asserts that art can still be a site of ethical calibration, where matter, energy, and community are held in provisional balance, and where making is inseparable from living.
Lloveras, T. (2018) Fire Stone Water: Summer Rituals. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2018/10/fire-stone-watersummer-rituals-2018.html
