Serbian Artist's Berlin Exhibition Reframes Fire as Ecological Stewardship, Exposing Colonial Fire Suppression's Legacy
Original framing: “Mirjana Vrbaški explores fire, ecology and regeneration in Berlin exhibition” — bing news
The 1852 Prussian Forestry Police Law (Forstpolizeigesetz) criminalized all unauthorized burning, establishing the template for global fire suppression exported to colonies. Yugoslavia's 1949 Forest Law intensified this, nationalizing forests and banning pastoral burning — coinciding with forced sedentarization of Vlach and Romani communities. The 2007 Greek fires and 2017 Portuguese fires revealed the pyrogeographic consequence: monoculture plantations replacing fire-maintained mosaics created 'fire traps.' Vrbaški's Berlin venue sits in Grunewald, a 19th-century Prussian state forest designed on suppression principles — the exhibition space itself embodies the history it aestheticizes.
Vrbaški's exhibition inadvertently stages the central tension of the Pyrocene: fire as state monopoly versus fire as communal relation.
The Berlin gallery — built on Prussian forestry logic — displays photographs of burns that would be illegal if performed by the Balkan shepherds whose fire knowledge the artist aestheticizes. This is not merely an omission but a structural reproduction of the epistemic violence that turned Europe's fire-adapted landscapes into fire traps. The solution pathways converge on one mechanism: restoring fire authority to those who hold the intergenerational knowledge of how to burn rightly. When Sorbian heathland burners, Dinaric shepherds, and Romani fire-tenders regain legal standing as fire stewards, 'regeneration' ceases to be an artistic theme and becomes a measurable ecological outcome — as Catalonia's 60% wildfire reduction proves. The trickster's lesson: the flame that destroys the plantation liberates the grassland. The question is who gets to hold the match.