«This was a particular feeling of which he himself was never free, which he had found confirmed by many others and which he assumed was shared by millions, a feeling that he was inclined to call a sense of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded — as it were ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ‘volcanic’.»

In physics, heat is associated with the acceleration process of particles and elements. It increases their instability and potentiates the transformation and decomposition of matter in ways that usually occur through the action of time, while increasing their energy.

Similarly, in politics, the fire of passions accelerates the flux of events and of history, propelling decompositions and transformations, destabilizing ideas of order and injecting a renewed level of entropy in the systems it affects.

At a time of anthropogenic acceleration of time — as if seized by a vertiginous attraction towards the flame or by an Empedocles-like impulse to plunge into the volcano’s crater —, that leads to a significant increase in the levels of insecurity and imponderability, the world is apparently placed in the metaphoric situation of «sitting on top of a volcano» while at the same time nurturing a barely disguised desire to jump into it.

Through a set of drawings and a collection of archive images and texts on the close relationship between fire and humanity, this publication weaves a series of narratives that cross different times and geographies laying out a speculative and deliberately inconclusive investigation into the existence — or not — of what could perhaps be termed as a «volcanic impulse».