Midburn 2025, ISRAEL
Co Creation : Daniel Nachmias, No One's Art Team

Pedro is a wooden sculpture towering to a height of 12 meters, integrating the worlds of art, design, and engineering. Its visual language draws inspiration from the saguaro cactus and the wachuma (San Pedro) cactus. The cactus’s ability to grow in majesty and grace from limited resources mirrors the reality in which we live.
The sculpture underwent a transformation and was originally planned for the 2023 Burn. After reality shattered around us after the 7/10, we chose to work with the destructive, burning energies that overwhelmed us. We decided to burn the sculpture’s outer skin in order to create the image of a tree that survived a forest fire and has begun a process of renewal and rebirth.
In this way, Pedro grew in the heart of the desert, slightly altered, magnificent and sincere, sorrowful yet flourishing. A cactus that shed its thorns, inviting closeness, connection, listening, and touch.
Pedro’s surface was adorned with more than 2,000 stars that glowed at night, representing the souls of those who have fallen since the beginning of the war that severed the continuity of our lives.
Surrounding Pedro was a ceremonial space, an altar and gateway elements that provided a feminine counterbalance to the sculpture and fostered deeply moving human gatherings.
During the day, the natural beauty of the charred wood was revealed through plays of light and shadow, textures and tactile details that infused vitality into the industrial material of the outer shell. At night, Pedro transformed into a different, vibrant presence illuminated from within and without, changing character through dynamic lighting installations that moved between stillness and motion.
Toward the end of the Burn, we bid farewell to Pedro in a ceremonial burning, an event infused with joy and sorrow, memory, commemoration, and release. Thus, the creative cycle was completed, from dream to reality, and back again to a dream forever etched in our hearts.
After the fire, the presence of Pedro’s absence remained, bearing witness to the transformation it made possible for all of us. Pedro is not merely a sculpture, it is a story of creation and friendship, of flourishing against the odds within a complex reality, of honesty, of tenderness within hardness, of a human choice for change, of dignity and grace. It is our story as a reminder to broaden our shoulders to hold what is different, to be gentle with ourselves and with the world, and to cherish what is present.