Through the lens of temperature and the concept of the ‘thermal border,’ Hyperthermal Tales explores climate precarity by interweaving the lives of sea turtles, lionfish, and olive trees in Pylos, Greece.
The project documents how climate shapes behaviors and ecosystems, revealing a fragile balance between human and non-human actors. Humans appear in dual roles: both predators and caretakers, capable of preserving, adapting to, but also forcibly altering nature. This approach raises ethical and ecological questions about how we define and categorize species: what does it mean to be “native,” “invasive,” or “migratory” in a world of constant change?
The work unfolds as a triptych of moving images, including thermal camera footage, a technology originally developed for military surveillance to detect human body heat as a target. Here, its use is subverted: heat is no longer a crime, an invasion, or a threat but a force of connection. The thermal camera captures heat as an invisible energy moving through space—not to isolate subjects, but to place them in relation to one another, without hierarchy.
Rather than being confined to Pylos, the project resonates on a planetary scale: any place, any human, any tree, any fish becomes part of a delicate ecological balance. The collected material is not meticulously curated or personally directed but emerges as a spontaneous archive of encounters between turtles, lionfish, olive trees, and their interactions with humans. To record is to crystallize fleeting moments, making perceptible the subtle transformations that link the immediate present to a broader temporal scale.
Viewers experience the film under an installation of infrared heating elements, immersing them in a physical perception of heat that shifts between comfort and discomfort. And so, the central question arises: where is the thermal border that compels human migration and action?