Guardian of fire

A single shot shows a man tending a fire, accompanied by dramatic classical music and singing.

Almost every day during our stay at the Glasgow School of Art, we watched this spectacle from the back window of the Barnes Building: A locksmith from the small garage directly opposite burns the garage’s soiled cardboard shims in an old barrel at the same time every day at noon. A ritual, with uniform calm and slow movements, which seems to become a strangely mysterious allegory through the barren backdrop, the grid, the wind that fuels the fire and whirls up the flying pieces of ash.

As we watched this process over and over again, BBC Classic radio was playing in the room from which we were watching the man. The mostly dramatic music often heightened this scene to such an extent that we suddenly thought we were in a mythological scene.