‍ThermoSibirsk is a series that analyzes - through thermal photography - the correlations between energy and knowledge and technological progress and its undeniable links with survival and destruction in a context of global environmental impact. The project has been carried out in Siberia, one of the regions of the planet most affected by climate change.

Equipped with a thermographic camera, Gregor focuses on the visually intangible energies that unfold from the icy Siberian daily life - where any manifestation of life symbolizes an act of achievement - to the new expressions of global warming. Like the steam engine converted heat into movement, the thermographic camera transforms the temperature into an image, acting at once as an interpreter and record, both human action and the mark it leaves on the territory.

In ThermoSibirsk, the codes of photography sympathize with those of scientific imaging, revealing expressive silhouettes, illusory colours and pixelated forms. The territory reveals animal sketches in a disturbing environment. These felled tree trunks have a treasure of inner energy, anthropomorphic figures where the living merges with the inert, ancient traces on lifeless objects that seem to come to life, faces or masks that emerge ghostlike. Climate change in Siberia is reducing the size of permafrost to alarming levels. This thawing continuously releases greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2, accelerating global warming and starting a process of automatic acceleration that could have catastrophic consequences for all of humanity. Framed in the new era of the Anthropocene, ThermoSibirsk appeals to the transforming capacity of the human being and therefore to the corresponding responsibility towards the planet.

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About

Sasha R. Gregor (Barcelona, 1970) is a graduate in Technical-Scientific Photography (Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, 1998) and Diploma in Optics (UPC 1993). He has a degree in Philosophy from the Universidad de Barcelona (2012) with a Master’s Degree in Art Theory (UAB 2004). He has taken several specialization courses at the ICP in New York. Alter ego of photographer Roger Grasas, Sasha R.Gregor is a visual artist passionate about physical optics that investigates the phenomenon of light as a source of knowledge. Through his projects, Gregor draws connections between art and science, simultaneously adopting both a hyper-technological approach to creation and an aesthetic vision of epistemology. Hand in hand with technology, the cognitive power of the photograph becomes an instrument capable of tracing the contours of another kind of beauty. In his work as a documentary photographer, Roger Grasas addresses the role that technology and post-capitalism play in a globalized world, as well as the state of alienation suffered by human beings in an increasingly sophisticated contemporary landscape, full of paradoxes and indecipherable symbols. His work has been shown by art centres and galleries in Europe, America, Asia and Australia and has received various awards. Sasha R. Gregor combines his photographic projects with teaching at IDEP Escuela de Fotografía y Medios Audiovisuales and at the Institut d’Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya (IEFC).