Two disasters struck the valley of Ponte da Mucela in consecutive years — a flood in 2016, and on 15 October 2017 the wildfires that swept central Portugal, among the deadliest in the country’s history. Kilometres of forest burned and lives were lost across the region in a national catastrophe.

The fire reached the home and studio Celia de Villiers had made after relocating from South Africa in 2016. It took her garden and olive grove, and the warehouse holding most of her shipped possessions — her macro collection of vintage textiles, yarns and artworks, books, family heirlooms, and both her and Kris van ’t Hof’s power-tools for sculpture, reduced to micro-fragments. The same night, a 1940s truck-repair station they were converting into an arts hub — the Garagem — burned to its shell. A cast-iron coal stove, carried years before from her South African garden, was among the few things left standing in the rubble.

Glass begins to melt at around 780 °C; the distorted glass and mangled metal recovered afterwards measured the heat of those spaces. Yet the burnt debris, the smoke and the rain that followed also yielded astonishing tints and textures — corrosive marks and contorted shapes that compelled her to make.

Rather than abandon the ruins, Ponte d’Arte rebuilt the Garagem out of the ashes — slowly, and, through an administrative misfortune, without insurance. In 2019, two years after the fire, traditional Portuguese music filled the rebuilt hall for the first public gathering held there: a community celebration of the region’s resilience and recovery, alongside mourning for those who had died. The space would later host the Forgotten Lands programme and the Feito & re-Feito exhibition.

This online gathering brings together the drawings, fibre works and installations made in and after the fire: from the Drawings of Burnt Power Tools, made beside the salvaged objects, and the embroidered Beyond an Inferno they became, to Ravaged by Time, the scarred derelict hotel above the river, and on into the ecological work that reads regeneration in burnt ground — mycelium, lichen, roots and the slow return of life.