Under current climatic conditions, natural systems, resenting global warming - from intense heat and, consequently, unprecedented droughts, global meteorological symptoms out of sync with the expectations of the time of year - go into decline, and the most vulnerable humans suffer in multiple ways, including an alteration of brain functions, which provoke unpredictable and somewhat aggressive actions, similar to those that occur in psychotic episodes, which will soon generalise to the entire population. In this scenario, the cactus - native of desert geographies - is seen as an example of what survives and adapts to contexts made hostile, under high temperatures and water scarcity, without apparent change. However, apart from serving as a metaphor of survival, the usefulness of the psychotropic properties found in certain cacti - since they began to be recognised by western medicine for their benefits precisely in curing so-called mental illnesses, leading them to also stand out as curative plants - have popularised them, making their consumption commonplace, now divorced from ancestral indigenous traditions. On the other hand, these cacti are now subject to prohibitionist laws - perhaps less out of concern that extractivism will lead to the extinction of the species (already underway), than with the aim of exercising tight social control. In this complex equation between heat, changes in human behaviour and cactuses, climate circumstances also involve technologies - in the complexity of their existence which is already indistinguishable from ours -, pondering whether they will experience similar effects and questioning their framework in the current panorama: will they be a threat or an opportunity to establish alliances?

Refinaria is a dense network of micronarratives, and was built from a perceptive model that takes all existences as coexisting, comprised in an infinity of relations, which relies on the auditory stimulus to verbally evoke hypothetical thoughts, only in appearance disconnected from each other, and musically to cool the functioning of the brain under high temperatures.

2023