A series of mysterious, casualty-causing fires, which remained unexplained for a long time, took place in a remote town in the French mountains in the early 1990s. They give rise to a scientific case study on modelling risks, which attempts to rationalise the horror of uncontrollable dangers as an abstract calculation. Wardill’s No Trace of Accelerator starts from this study and redirects its movement into a filmic narrative that is just as unstable, shape shifting, and unpredictable as fire itself. In a sort of chamber play, three figures based on real participants in the events (the perpetrator and two of his victims) encounter one another. What unfolds between them in a set that looks like the faded copy of an interior space is a theatre of affects that presents not only the what, but also the how of speaking and acting, remembering and showing. It gives rise to a fragile reconstruction of events, emotions, and attitudes that is suspended between the production of truth and the production of desire and is spectacularly fragmented again and again. (Katrin Mundt)

Courtesy the artist and Carlier Gebauer, Berlin, STANDARD (OSLO) and Altman Siegal, San Francisco

• Sektion Section: Film
• Programm Programme: Emily Wardill 3