Fotograf Magazine

In 1755, the city of Lisbon was shaken by a destructive earthquake that became a turning point in European history: a trigger of the Enlightenment and our faith in progress, as well as a formative event for the establishment of a new type of beauty, taste, and aesthetics. In 1931, the philosopher Walter Benjamin selected this earthquake as one of the topics of his radio program for children, to whom he explains that this earthquake shook the world of the eighteenth century like nothing else. Given that it was based on information about this event that Immanuel Kant laid the foundations of scientific geography, Benjamin tells the children at the conclusion of his show how today, thanks to technological developments, we are able to predict earthquakes.¹ Voltaire, in a poem written immediately after the event, rejected the period explanation of the earthquake as divine punishment; Zygmunt Bauman then connected the devastation of Lisbon with the beginnings of the development of secularism: “Its project was to tame nature and make it the subject of voluntary action, hoping that if everything was planned and arranged, the age of catastrophes would be over.”² In 1978, Lisbon’s natural history museum burnt down and the scorched remainders of fossils gave rise to an exhibition realized by Katarína Poliačiková in the spaces of the museum itself.³ Although these two events are incomparable in scale, Katarína’s research on the potential of crisis as opportunity and the search for beauty in the scorched fossils of Souvenirs of Fire (2019) functions like a flashback that reawakens the repeatedly mediated memory of the Lisbon earthquake.