18’ Video, colour, sound
The starting point for this project is the archive of footage and the reports of the first house fire tests (The Saint Lawrence Burns), which are the base of fire safety codes in North America and Western Europe.
During the winter of 1958, the Canadian government, in collaboration with the British and American governments, burned eight buildings, carefully filming the process with a 16 mm camera, with a timer on the frame to systematize the duration of the destruction. The colour celluloid film was used as a tool for the empirical analysis of how fire spreads.
Throughout their residency, the artists reactivated these provocative and silent archive images, and they, also, combined research with experimental script writing, sound design, performance and recreation.