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THE HEAT WITHIN: TERMOX2, from Dubai to Paris
After the exhibition experience in Dubai—a global crossroads of technology, experimentation, and new visions of the future—TERMOX2 arrives in Paris carrying with it a research practice that is now mature, layered, and deeply self-aware. Its presence in the European capital marks a significant transition: from the hyper-contemporary, technology-driven context of the Middle East to a symbolic space steeped in historical and cultural memory, where art has long been called to engage with time, the body, and matter.
With The Heat Within, TERMOX2 investigates the concept of endurance as a threshold condition of human and technological existence. After two years of work across the most important international endurance circuits, the collection takes shape as a reflection on the moment when time ceases to be an abstract measure and becomes a concrete test—physical experience, mental threshold. The number of works—twenty-four—symbolically recalls the twenty-four hours as the ultimate expression of endurance: an absolute temporal arc in which body, machine, and mind are pushed beyond control, entering a dimension of pure resistance.
Through thermographic photography and video—brought together for the first time in a single, organic art collection—TERMOX2 makes visible what normally remains invisible: heat as the primary trace of effort, energy consumption, and vital tension. The images emerge from fieldwork carried out in real contexts during international endurance events, without mediation or reconstruction. Heat is not an aesthetic effect, but real data—a direct recording of human and mechanical presence at the moment of extreme exertion.
The transition from Dubai to Paris strengthens the project’s conceptual reading. If in Dubai The Heat Within engaged with ideas of the future, innovation, and advanced technology, in Paris the research confronts a more intimate and reflective dimension, where heat becomes memory, a sensitive archive, a writing of the body through time. In this context, thermography takes on an almost archaeological value: what remains when the action is over, when the machine stops, when the body has crossed the limit.
TERMOX2’s research extends beyond the visual dimension, constructing a hybrid artistic ecosystem. Each photographic work is transformed into a physical artwork and is accompanied by an NFC that links to a unique NFT containing the original video associated with the image. Static image, movement, and sound coexist in a 360-degree immersive experience, where the digital does not replace the real, but completes it, certifies it, and renders it traceable over time. The NFT thus becomes an integral part of the artwork: a narrative extension and a tool of authentication.
The Heat Within ultimately introduces an ethical and human dimension that strengthens the overall meaning of the project. Each work is symbolically associated with an orphaned child, and part of the proceeds from the collection is dedicated to supporting their life journey. Endurance, from an extreme condition, is transformed into responsibility; art, from representation, becomes concrete action.
In this collection, heat is not merely a physical or technological phenomenon. It is memory, sacrifice, presence. It is what remains when everything else comes to a halt. With The Heat Within, TERMOX2 brings to Paris a body of research that crosses geographies, languages, and systems—from Dubai to Europe—restoring to art its task of bearing witness to what endures, at the precise point where the limit becomes experience.
Elisa Larese, Art Historian