Documentary might seem the most obvious tool to (re-)propose something from the past, looking for new angles and perspectives and unique selling points on what stories to bring alive for a specific audience. Documentary is also the one method that has been interested in treating history and hidden stories from the past as a canvas to make a tableaux vivant of. Especially with the claim from the film and media industry to connect those found stories to something relevant, and to transmit those stories to an audience in the present or the future and influence it with an appropriate impact campaign.
The micro-stories of light (and sound) pollution seem therefore relevant and urgent to me as a practitioner, as a producer and film-maker. I want to use them to challenge the dominant narrative of light = safety; darkness = unheimlich, inducing abjection.
Commonly children are afraid of darkness, criminals act in the dark, from the dark evil comes out and in the dark evil lives, a dark wood, a dark street is full of dangers.
Even I am afraid of walking alone on a dark street at night and startle over every sound.
When it comes to sound it is more complicated to boil it down to a dichotomy. A jungle is very loud, almost as traffic and if an environment is too loud it has to do with what we perceive as comfortable.
In his book, Tystnader (Silences), Peter Bryngelsson writes that we experience rest and silence as a noise-free Sunday in the countryside sitting in a lilac grove and think that this is how it must have been in the past. That everything has become noisier over the years is a common perception. He adds that paradoxically, the more our need for silence is satisfied, the more it increases. When train carriages no longer thump along the tracks, we demand carriages free of mobile phones and children; when crowding decreases and flats become more and more shielded from the sounds of the environment, complaints about the noise of our fellow human beings increase.
I am welcoming this part of environmental history to shape the understanding of pollution and comfort, what is safe or dangerous for our health, and for other eco-systems and Planet Earth.
I am welcoming posthumanist theory as well, and the consequences of considering others than humans at the centre of story-telling and possible narrations.
The method I decided to use is somehow a documentary: it will appear both as a documentation and re-interpretation of documents, sources and records displayed and edited in a virtual room, and as a new audio-visual experience through my work, presented in the room of my own.
