Work

Neighbourhood Light Choreography

Context: Urban Species, for the Citizen Lights festival, Schaarbeek (Brussels) · Year: 2018 · My role: concept development and neighbourhood engagement · Technical development: Crafteke and Deepwater

The street at night: coloured lamps burning behind a ground-floor window, with blue-lit buttons standing in the street.

The question

For the Citizen Lights festival in February 2018, Urban Species made an interactive intervention in Rue Fiers in Schaarbeek, together with the inhabitants of that street. The question was twofold: can people with no technical training genuinely co-design a high-tech installation, and can an ordinary residential street become the stage itself rather than the backdrop?

What we made

Inhabitants who wanted to take part were given a network-connected dimmer, into which they could plug any standard 220V lamp. That produced a sampler of domestic light: design spots, glowing globes, children’s animal lamps, and even home-converted mining lamps. The set-ups ranged from small lanterns behind closed curtains to high-power bulbs that lit up entire rooms.

Four push buttons stood in the middle of the street, each connected to one zone. Pressing all four at once — which took several passers-by working together — triggered a choreography of every lamp in the street.

We ran participatory workshops to define the animations together. The difficulty surfaced immediately: how do you co-design a high-tech installation with people who have no technical background, even when you hand them tools to see and steer the result? In the end we chose not to build one large overarching story, but to put the inhabitants’ own styles, objects and tastes in the foreground.

The project ran on the neighbourhood’s existing social fabric, with the local organisation L’Ile Aux Bains as its linchpin. The dimmers had to be installed in time, and households without a dimmer took part too: by keeping the lights off in their street-facing rooms, they made the installation carry further.

What came of it

The installation makes visible what appropriation means in practice. The neighbours’ lamp stayed the neighbours’ lamp, with their taste and their history, and at the same time became part of a work that spanned the whole street. The interplay was not in the technology but in the agreement between residents, and between passers-by who could only set the street dancing together.

A child's illuminated bear lamp sitting in the window, taking part.

A design lamp glowing warmly in a living room, the dimmer on the floor beside it.

The four push buttons with their blue light rings, ready on the workshop floor.

Participants soldering circuit boards together at a work table.

Dimmers handed out in the street at night, checklist in hand.