Equinox

“Dennis Del Favero's three-part immersive installation, Equinox (2026), places audiences inside a real-world extreme wildfire as the fragile balance of the planet approaches an irreversible ecological tipping point. Through enveloping cinematic imagery, a mesmerising soundtrack and a spatial configuration that frames the viewer as an engaged participant, the work foregrounds the visceral dimensions of ecological catastrophe.

Equinox unfolds in three parts. The first two parts are 3D computer graphic scenographic installations. The first, Black Milk, is set inside a pine forest wildfire, viewing it across its canopy from a sinking lookout platform. The second, Eyebright, is viewed lying on one’s back, looking up into what cannot be seen up close in real life, the ferocious yet alluring burning core of a wildfire itself. The third, Interregnum, is the single-channel AI based computer graphic and features groups of young people gathering in the twilight — as if on the verge of an awakening, confronting and arguing about a world transformed into walls of fire, skies smouldering with a glow and the air thick with embers. 

Each of these works is in dialogue with the Romantic landscape tradition, most notably Caspar David Friedrich's paintings Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818) and Das Große Gehege (The Great Enclosure, 1832). Where the Romantic sublime offered its viewers a safe, contemplative vantage point onto disaster, Del Favero's work removes that distance: there is no position from which the audience can observe the crisis without being complicit. 

Rather than offering audiences the distanced, contemplative position historically associated with disaster imagery, Del Favero's installations sensorially immerse viewers directly within unfolding ecological crisis — spaces of calibrated proximity and vulnerability in which interactivity produces not mastery, but a heightened sense of entanglement with forces now emerging beyond control, with which we have to reconcile.”

Brigitte Schenk and Joana Weitzdorfer, Galerie Schwenkweitzdorfer, Cologne. 2026

Black Milk. 2026.

Black Milk Image

3D scenographic computer graphic installation and single-channel video (6.5 mins). Colour. Stereo.

_{Artistic Director and Sound Designer: Dennis Del Favero.} 

_{Writer: Dennis Del Favero & Stephen Sewell}

_{Programmers: Navin Brohier, Nora Perry, Dylan Shorten. 3D Modellers: Lara Clemente, Scott Cotterell. Composer: Kate Moore. Voice-Over: Leeanna Walsman.}

_{(Mozart Requiem in D Minor)}

Positioned on the platform and enveloping flames consuming a dense forest, visitors to Black Milk confront a relentless ember shower, accompanied by the immersive, storm-like soundscape of an inferno, punctuated by charged choral passages taken from Mozart's Requiem in D minor. The viewing platform and its staircase are angled at 15 degrees to the horizontal, so that visitors must tread with care — reinforcing a deeply sensed uncertainty and offering an unstable, precarious vantage point onto an increasingly volatile natural world.

The exhibition’s title carries its own conceptual weight. Astronomically, the equinox marks the brief moments in the year when day and night stand in perfect balance, before the Earth tilts once more toward light or darkness — a fragile equilibrium that becomes a metaphor for the precarious threshold at which the planetary system now stands: a momentary poise before irreversible ecological tipping points. Equally significant is the ritual dimension historically associated with the equinox across cultures as a time of transition, sacrifice and renewal; the installation's choral soundscapes resonate with this sacral temporality, transforming the wildfire into something akin to a planetary rite.

The title Black Milk references Paul Celan's poem Todesfuge (Death Fugue), in which the oxymoronic image of black milk encapsulates the paradox of nourishment turned lethal. By invoking this phrase, Del Favero transposes its resonance into the context of environmental devastation — what once symbolised poisoned sustenance under genocidal violence now stands as a cipher for the poisoned atmosphere of a planet in flames.

Eyebright. 2026.

Black Milk Image

3D scenographic computer graphic installation and single-channel video (4 mins). Colour. Stereo.

_{Artistic Director, Sound Designer and Writer: Dennis Del Favero.} 

_{Programmers: Navin Brohier, Nora Perry, Dylan Shorten. 3D Modellers: Lara Clemente, Scott Cotterell. Composer: Kate Moore. Voice-Over: Leeanna Walsman.}

Eyebright references the flower in Celan’s Todtnauberg and suggests an enigmatic hope that needs to be grasped. Visitors lie along the floor. Above them is a sky of extreme fire flaming as might be seen from the inside of the flames themselves. An impossible viewpoint but one makes visible the burning dynamic that is shaping the present and future landscape of life. 

Interregnum. 2026. 

Single-channel video (3.3 mins). Colour. Stereo.

_{Artistic Director, Sound Designer and Writer: Dennis Del Favero.} 

_{Composer: Kate Moore. Voice-Over Actress: Leeanna Walsman.}

Interregnum takes its title from the historical term for the interval between two regimes — a suspension of established order, and a time of uncertainty in which authority and direction remain unsettled. Within the context of the climate crisis, it designates a collective condition of living in-between: between the collapse of the present and the as-yet unarticulated possibility of what comes next. 

Hiatus. 2026. 

Digital Prints on Lustre Fine Art Paper. 67x120cm.

_{Artist: Dennis Del Favero}

_{Programmer: Nora Perry}

Hiatus captures key moments from Equinox that sensorially encapsulate the fluid dynamics of fire, its infinity of aesthetic form and terrifying power.