Installation for Amsterdam Light Festival 2018-2019

The Japanese artists Kazue Monno and Takeshi Nagata, who make up the duo TOCHKA, are specialised in light painting animations. They regularly organise educational projects including workings in light painting at schools or public spaces. In collaboration with Stichting Juf op Straat, they worked with children from 30 classes in Amsterdam to create light painting animations for their artwork 'Neighbours'. 

The subject of this work of art is the communication that we have with people in regular home environment, such as family members, roommates, and neighbours. With these people, we send and receive numerous messages on a daily basis, with all of our senses playing a role in that process. In small groups, the schoolchildren came up with different 'activities' to represent this theme: lighting the candles on a birthday cake to wish your father or mother a happy birthday, singing a song because you're happy, or banging the ceiling to stop the noise from the upstairs neighbours. The children painted these scenes using small light sources. Every time, twelve short recordings were made, showing the scene change bit by bit. Played back in succession, these images together form a short animation. The children could watch the results live on a screen, making it immediately visible that light, in addition to paint, chalk and pencil, could be used as a 'medium'. This way, they had the chance to experience what it’s like to be a real artist. 

Monno and Nagata combined the children’s eight domestic scenes from each school class into one big ‘house’, projected on the quay of the Schippersgracht using special, analogue projectors built by the duo. This type of projector, that plays the individual images (or light paintings) in a loop, is known as the theâtre optique and was invented by Émile Reynaud in 1888. The result is a simple, nostalgic animation that contrasts with our modern (HD or 3D) films. 

Those who watch 'Neighbours' will never see the same thing two nights in a row. Each night the animations from a different class are projected, making the night a ‘premiere’ of sorts that the children can celebrate with their classmates during a boat tour along the festival.