Darkness Matters is a tentative reconstruction and virtual exhibition of recorded historic nightscapes, featuring examples from antiquity to the Industrial Revolution, when light pollution started, and continuing up to now. Digital and AI quality enhancers are sometimes used to requalify or re-imagine the nightscapes through my artistic practice.
Like an archaeologist, I am digging into the past to find both ancient and more recent representations and recordings of night skies, being interested both in how and why they were captured that way.
Trying to recover the first still images and motion pictures taken from nocturnal landscapes and their descriptions, I want to act like a treasure hunter and display them in a sort of Annales of Darkness.
There will be a deliberate big leap from prehistoric sources to modern ones, as well as from archaeological artefacts and written historical records to the mediated experience of paintings, photography and cinematic devices.
The audience is invited into virtual rooms where they can have a journey through time and the different expedients that were used to picture, film and record nocturnal environments.
My practice-based intervention will be almost like the one of a documentarist, a curator and archaeologist that finds the material, choses what she wants to intervene upon, possibly also transforms it for an entangled fruition, and exposes it in specifically designed vitrines and shelfs.
As an artist and filmmaker, I am interested in the mediated reception and experience of darkness.
As an artist, film-maker and documentary producer I put equal weight on how to vehiculate my content towards an audience to debunk the ordinary fear of darkness and have a societal impact, when it comes to re-appropriation.
To create an order and a flow through how this possibly culturally learned fear has been growing, I am re-imagining micro-stories around some findings. These findings might be close to the ground, leaving the earthly field of view, looking up in the nocturnal sky, and reaching out, further up, into the interstellar darkness. I will use the tools that I consider the most appropriate, sometimes in my own personal practice the only possible way to present something that got lost.
I want to offer a collage of still and moving images to be experienced as ar(t)cheological artifacts made accessible “again” through my interpretation, combining auditory-sensory connections. The overarching project Too Loud and Too Bright contains a sound dimension, which I decided to skip in this exposition.
I consider these applications as opportunities to represent environment history and to deliver a journey through light pollution and the anthropic activities, that have transformed our nocturnal habitats since the introduction of artificial light. I consider them opportunities to reflect on the efforts made to depict dark eco-systems as well as answer existential questions, like: "where do we come from?".
To work efficiently on the reconstruction of the development of light pollution through archives, and to be able to re-imagine our fruition of nocturnal skies, I want to investigate some aspects and techniques of restoration in conjunction with digital curatorial aspects.
What and how did we see at night in the 19th and 20th century? How does it differ from today?
Did we perceive the night and absence of light as something uncanny, something unheimlich, not familiar - according to Freund? Or according to critical theory and Julia Kristeva, as something causing abjection? Are comfort and discomfort cultural constructs?
Whose interest was and is it to look up into the vast dark universe above us and why is it important for whom to be face to face with it?
Through my work I want to re-embrace the starry nights we can hardly see anymore, the Cosmos behind, the idea of infiniteness, and the symphonies of orchestras hidden in the eco-systems we can hardly hear anymore - two underrepresented micro-stories of our times.
Why? Because I love the night, the fireflies and the Milky Way.
Because like Carl Sagan said: As children, we fear the dark. Anything might be out. here. The unknown troubles us. Ironically, it is our fate to live in the dark. This unexpected finding of science is only about three centuries old. Head out from the Earth in any direction you choose, and—after an initial flash of blue and a longer wait while the Sun fades—you are surrounded by blackness, punctuated only here and there by the faint and distant stars. Even after we are grown, the darkness retains its power to frighten us. And so there are those who say we should not inquire too closely into who else might be living in that darkness. Better not to know, they say. There are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Of this immense multitude, could it be that our humdrum Sun is the only one with an inhabited planet? Maybe. Maybe the origin of life or intelligence is exceedingly improbable. Or maybe civilizations arise all the time, but wipe themselves out as soon as they are able. Or, here and there, peppered across space, orbiting other suns, maybe there are worlds something like our own, on which other beings gaze up and wonder as we do about who else lives in the dark…Life is a comparative rarity. You can survey dozens of worlds and find that on only one of them does life arise and evolve and persist… If we humans ever go to these worlds, then, it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage—or to the advantage of the human species… In our time we’ve crossed the Solar System and sent four ships to the stars… But we continue to search for inhabitants. We can’t help it. Life looks for life.”
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Here on the right you can find your way through the exhibition either by reading further into my premises and reflections, just pressing on the NEXT button, or choosing to move randomly / freely through the rooms.
The "relics", that will be displayed include petroglyphs (stone carvings), asterisms, cartography and paintings, daguerreotypes, old glas plates from Observatories, still photography, 16- and 35-mm footage, and James Webb Telescope pictures. Field recordings will be part of another exposition.
I will make an excursus in forms of representation in the antiquity, because as an artist I want to understand the historical context before I start conceptualizing.
The context will extend to old(er) techniques but considers also contemporary aspects of exhibition design.
As a creative documentary filmmaker, I am more interested in how to inventively use the archive and how to compose, decompose or recompose it.
Some findings have already been exposed to alterations, restorations or animations, and composition processes, and I will present them as I found them.
When I decide to intervene, it will be with a personal non-judgmental approach.
I want to create new pieces with decisions that bring together artistic, curatorial and technological factors.
Therefore, my role in this project, as briefly stated before, resembles the role of the curator, the archive footage assimilator and the archaeologist, exploring an environmental issue from an historical perspective, that in this case goes along with the possibilities given by scientific and technological progress.
To portray the night might be an interest of a few artists, to be able to do so, an interest by a few scientists and engineers, to observe it in its depth and long-term development an interest by many astronomers, physicists, and philosophers. All of these interests have had consequences on our knowledge.
The work with space and spatiality is central to this exposition, especially because my work is conceptually bound to an understanding of the the environment as a space to share, and of our planet as a shared territory, where any vision and hearing, all ways of experiencing it count.
This includes my memories as an own private territory, "my" fireflies, and "my" Milky Way.
I have reserved a separate room for them, a room of my own, which implies a metaphysical and embodied site of experience. This room can be understood as a form of entry or passage to the rest of the virtual rooms.
The rest of my findings will be classified and put in a chronological order. The common denominator for the different artistic processes is that they all engage in re-interpretations.
These processes will create new knowledge about our perception, reception and observation of the night and the cosmos with its depth behind the celestial vault visible to our eyes, ideally making the fearful ordinary observer coincide with the fearless astronomer, to open up minds in comprising darkness and feel empowered in the lust to explore who we are and what place we have in the Universe.
The visitor / audience / reader can navigate a starry night from how I saw it in my past, see it how it once appeared and how it appears to us today – within a creative journey. After passing a room of my own, they will experience a new collection of items that I found and dealt with, handling a theme that is very dear to me: light and sound pollution.
The first experience is a meditative long personal re-appropriation of nocturnal endeavours from my side with my audio-visual artwork, showing dark olive groves and forests, and alpine spaces below and above the horizon. The visitor / audience / reader will watch “darknesses” until their rods will adapt (around 25 minutes) and they can start to see fireflies and blinking stars (again).
