Burning Garden (2024)

Single-channel video, 7 min 43 sec
Animation and soundtrack by Marcello Mercado

Burning Garden was made from 3D scans of the garden surrounding my house, my dogs, and my own body. I recorded them with the LiDAR sensor of an iPhone 12 and then moved the incomplete scans directly with my fingers on the phone’s touchscreen.

Fourteen recordings were superimposed to construct a garden that never remains still. Plants, dogs, parts of my body, shadows, empty spaces, and scanning errors turn and pass through one another. The familiar garden gradually becomes unrecognizable: green gives way to grey, white, orange, yellow, and black, until the image appears to burn and disappear.

The soundtrack is built around my voice speaking an invented language—a kind of jitanjáfora made from words and sounds without fixed meaning. The voice does not explain what we see. It accompanies a world that is losing its recognizable forms and becoming something that can no longer be translated.