Heat

 Screening Room III

“2024 was the warmest year on record globally, and the first calendar year more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels,” reports the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The science is unequivocal: human activity has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Industrial emissions have disrupted weather systems and locked the planet into a new climatic era. The signs are everywhere. Heat extremes are now the norm, their frequency and intensity rising with each year. Wildfires burn hotter and longer and sea-levels continue to climb. This Room brings cause and consequence into focus, with Burn Ceremony by Alexander Girav as the point of departure.

Burn Ceremony
Alexander Girav

Burn Ceremony is an observation of [redacted]’s largest oil refinery, processing 440,000 barrels of crude oil a day. By night, the complex becomes a heaving edifice of flame and fog. We witness its operation from afar as the inferno slowly engulfs the frame, accompanied by an original hypnotic soundscape by UK club experimentalist Loraine James.

This film offers a direct visual illustration of the intensive processes that are driving global warming: routine flaring of natural gas at oil operations is a major, ongoing source of CO₂, methane and black carbon – potent contributors to warming and air pollution. Girav’s film is a haunting spectacle, transforming industrial activity into a visual metaphor for the environmental costs of fossil fuel consumption. Through this lens, the refinery becomes both a literal and symbolic site of ecological transformation.

About A La Luz

A La Luz – meaning “to bring to light” – is an artist-led platform founded by environmental artists David Cass and Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero, with coordination support from Ivana Larrosa. We showcase environmentally engaged artistic practices across disciplines, grounded in the belief that art can illuminate the urgent, layered realities of our ecological moment. We believe that art holds the power to express complex ideas, offering space for reflection, resistance, grief, connection, and hope in the face of planetary crisis. Through creativity, we explore not only what is being lost, but what might still be possible. Alongside exhibitions and screenings, we host events and publish resources for and from artists, writers and thinkers. At every step, we ask what it means to make art in a time of climate crisis.

The Story of Cod
Marina Rees

Heating is upending natural cycles, ecosystems and the life-histories of species. The Story of Cod traces these changes through the life of the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua. As Rees states, the piece is “informed by current research, and the impact of warming waters on this species … some populations are already migrating to deeper, cooler waters in warmer seasons, and models predict spawning grounds will shift poleward as temperatures rise.”

She notes the food-web consequences too: “the favoured plankton preys of juvenile Gadus morhua in its larval stage – the copepods Calanus finmarchicus and C. glacialis – have started to shift their seasonal reproduction due to climate change, which is in turn, impacting the fish’s development.” This scientific frame underpins a film that seeks to reconnect us with a species often reduced to commodity. Rees writes plainly: “The Story of Cod seeks to reconnect with a species often overlooked, or simply seen as food ... So who is Gadus morhua, and what is their story?”

Narrated by Sigurþór Heimisson who lends his voice to embody Gadus morhua, and underscored by the fish’s own recorded sounds, the film resists speaking for the cod. “This is a human attempt to become more-than-human, to learn to identify with them and imagine a shared future together.” By opening this Screening Room with such an attentive portrait, Heat extends Ground’s examination of broken cycles – showing how surface-level practices are entangled with deeper seasonal and oceanographic shifts that together redefine the baseline of our present.

The Sturgeon Jumping Invitational
Luke Myers

Luke Myers’s unique form of hybrid sports film could be seen as a light-hearted celebration of an ancient species. It is instead placed here, among pieces exploring the theme of planetary heating. One might think of the Sturgeon as a living fossil; yet warming waters are a very modern threat. Small changes in river and estuary temperature can scramble the narrow windows they use to migrate and spawn, so eggs and larvae – which tolerate only a very small temperature range – suffer big losses. Warmer water increases metabolic demand and lowers oxygen, disrupts the bottom-dwelling prey young sturgeon rely on, and raises disease risk – all of which reduce survival and push fish into less suitable habitats.

Many sturgeon populations are already small and have reduced genetic diversity after decades of over harvesting, damming and habitat loss; their ability to adapt quickly to rapid warming is greatly limited. That makes conservation harder – restoring habitat or restocking fish won’t succeed if rivers and nurseries continue to warm.

The film may be seen as a call for protecting cold-water flows, restoring estuaries and river connectivity, and supporting monitoring and climate-aware recovery so this ancient fish still has a future, and spectacles such as this continue to captivate. “The sight of a fish breaching, silvery body arching high in the air, before a dramatic crash back into the water, has captivated us across time and culture” Myers tells us. “Ancient theories held that fish leap due to parasites. Recent scientific research suggests sturgeon jump for communication, or air bladder adjustment. But no one knows for sure.”

Canoe
Anne-Katrin Spiess

“For over a decade, my continued concerns about water issues and desertification have led to a series of projects and performances in various arid locations across the Western United States. When the water level of Great Salt Lake was at a historic low in the fall of 2022, I performed Canoe, which documents my search for water in a quixotic attempt to paddle across the lake but instead having to wade through layers of toxic mud.

This project is part of the larger Great Salt Lake Projects series, which addresses our illusion of having endless resources, of being above the rules of nature, and that, as humans, we are entitled to living a life of excess. In this group of videos, my Sisyphean attempt to water and mow a patch of sod, ride a bike on the parched earth, and pull a canoe through the toxic and nearly dry lakebed are subtle commentaries on the unquenchable thirst for human expansion into the desert.”

Remember Here
Keri Rosebraugh & Mike Marshall

This video documents the aftermath of the January 7, 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena, CA, USA. Using pastel chalk and drone cinematography, the piece captures both the physical devastation and emotional journey of the affected community.

Amidst the rubble of her neighborhood, Rosebraugh inscribes messages encouraging residents to remember, reflect, share their stories, and ultimately find release. Her choice of chalk as a medium deliberately emphasises the impermanence of both physical structures and emotional states.

“While the Eaton and Palisades fires are 100% contained, many of us remain displaced,” Rosebraugh explains. “Navigating through these hardships isn’t a sprint – it’s a marathon. I wanted to remind myself and others that we’re not alone, that it’s vital to support our neighbours, and that it’s okay to ask for help.”

The Viscous Sea
Kian Peng Ong

Kian Peng Ong’s film sets the scene as we move toward Room IV: Retreat. As temperatures rise – both physically and metaphorically – the Dead Sea becomes a kind of ecological mirror, its surface shrinking as temperatures increase. Physically, warming air accelerates its evaporation, driving the water toward a brine so dense it moves less like a liquid and more like a slow, mineral paste. What was once a sea is transfiguring into residue.

This sets the stage for The Viscous Sea, originally presented as a six-channel film installation that explores the Dead Sea as a site of ecological disaster. Death is a central concept in this work, as it raises questions about what it means for elemental water bodies to die, how the Dead Sea can die again, which actors are involved in the events leading up to its decline. This film weaves together fragmented imagery and sound, tracing the journey of an exhausted, dying body as it slowly makes its way to the Dead Sea, where it floats – silently, slowly drifting off, along with questions about its future.