The five channel video installation Cull, part of the bigger project Fire-Complex, was Kögelsberger’s response to the 2020 SQF fire complex that destroyed 174 acres of Sequoia National Forest, 14% of the world’s Giant Sequoia population, as well as half the community of Sequoia Crest including Kögelsberger’s home.

Fire Complex unpacked the complex social and political undercurrents of wildfire prevention and forest management in California. It brought together photography, video and performance. The works first appeared in the public realm to raise momentum and resources for the regeneration of our forests. It is a project that starts from the personal to reflect on a global emergency and to open-up new possibilities.

As part of this body of works Kögelsberger initiated and devised a collaborative community-based replanting effort in collaboration with Forest Services, Cal Fire and the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive that put over 6000 trees into the ground. This replanting effort was visited by six bi-partisan congressmen and women who subsequently signed the Save our Sequoias Act.  Because of, this according to employees from forest services, the mobilisation of constituents as part of Fire Complex that contributed to changes in wildfire prevention in Giant Sequoia groves.

The video work Cull was shot in the community of Sequoia Crest. It highlights the gigantic task of the clear up process after the wildfires. It follows the work of the strike teams over a one-year period as they are cutting down the so called ‘hazard trees’ left standing that are now endangering the infrastructure. In an orchestrated choreography each tree is documented as it comes crashing to the ground, like a dead carcass, sometimes with such force that the earth shakes. Sounds punctuate the motion of collapsing trees which squeal under their own weight. The occasional sound of an axe acts like a metronome triggering the drop of a tree, pacing the work into a score. Mostly the loggers cutting the trees are not visible in the frame. Every so often they appear, ant sized, dwarfed by the scale of the disaster we have created.

Kögelsberger says: “Over the last fifteen years, I have watched this forest gradually being transformed by the stresses of human-made impact—drought, mismanagement, pine beetle infestations—until the wildfire eradicated it. It is hard to verbally describe how profoundly disturbing it is to be faced with this level of destruction, especially knowing that we are all in some way responsible. Even though the investment into fire prevention has risen to an annual $113million since the 2020 wildfires this number is dwarfed by the actual costs of wildfires which are estimated to be more than $19 billion. What is the logic in that?