No Trace of Accelerator

Summary, in English

No Trace of Accelerator takes as its starting point the mysterious incident of a series of apparently spontaneous fires that broke out in an isolated French town in the mid-1990s. The cause of the fires remained unexplained for some months, a period when all kinds of fear, panic and superstition gripped the small community. The fires were eventually explained, but the reaction of the towns-people became the subject of a case study into the social amplification of risk, written by anthropologists Marc Poumadere and Claire Mays.

Drawing on her own research into the events—Wardill uses the figure of fire itself as a way to explore the physical, psychological and narrative implications of trying to "model" entities, energies or objects that are in constant flux. Filmed on a series of constructed, stylised sets with a cast of archetypal characters loosely based on the real protagonists, Wardill introduces the idea of fire as a chaotic and unpredictable object—a metaphor for various conditions of fear, instability, uncertainty, and horror.

• Author: Emily Wardill
• Department/s: Malmö Art Academy
• Publishing year: 2017
• Language: English
• Document type: Artistic work
• Topic: Visual Arts
• Status: Published