Overflowing with thick smoke, Dennis Dizon’s car installation hotboxx(2023) leaves passersby questioning whether disaster is imminent. As it makes its way through the slightly opened windows, the smoke carries the scent of pine, introducing an element of surprise, distraction, and additional confusion. The work stages dissonance, emphasising the precarity of sense in crisis: our rational thinking and perception grow increasingly unsteady, fragmented, or disorienting, because we may not know how to react in the face of disaster. hotboxx is located in the Dragonerareal in Kreuzberg, a location that inspires contemplation about the future of urban life and development.

Informed by the spectrum of “hot box” techniques—from smoking ceremonies in spiritual cleansing and relational cannabis sharing to forms of military torture—hotboxx expands Dennis Dizon’s ongoing research on the bleeding, or resin extraction, of pine trees, as performed in parts of the Mediterranean.

Considered a sustainable substitute for oil, pine resin is used in the production of cosmetics, ink, paint, and plastic, and even as functional biofuel, when extracted from certain species. It also functions as natural antiseptic for cuts and wounds and, when burned as incense, is considered a homeopathic cure for anxiety.

Despite pine resin’s economic potential, Dizon’s ongoing research reveals an ecological paradox: while a potential “relief” for rural and alternative economies, pine resin also is highly flammable, increasing the risk of damage and destruction in climate change-aggravated wildfires. hotboxx highlights these overlapping tensions, using the car as a ritual object of ecological despair and as a sacrifice to fossil fuel obsolescence.

hotboxx (2023) is part of Dennis Dizon’s long-term research project too cool to burn, which examines and reinterprets historical, existing, and future techno-ecological interventions in Southeast Asia. It reimagines climate sensitivity, a climate science equation that measures how much the earth will warm based on increasing greenhouse gas emissions.