Club Efemeer was asked to create an in situ installation reflecting about the lack of nightlife at Stelplaats, a youth community center in a former repair shop for buses. Because of COVID restrictions the space itself was closed and the work could only be experienced through the glass doors where the busses used to enter.
In most of our installations immersiveness plays an important role and we encourage the spectators to roam around the space and discover our installations from different perspectives. As this was not possible we decided to create a text-based light installation which eased the communication of the content and the aesthetic through the glass barrier. The text was written by Betina Abi Habib, a Libanese visual and performance artist based in the Netherlands. Her poetic text highlights the emotional and physical longing for each other, the (shared) space and its political dimension within club culture.
A 12 meter long red LED ticker, suspended in the space, behaves both as a carrier of the message and a light source which plays with the speed, position and intensity in which the words appear. Sometimes fast and flashy, other times slow and fragile. A sense of melancholy emerges from the installation as the text evokes feelings of missing, longing and loneliness; enclosed in the red light as the only light source interacting with the large empty space that should be filled with people.
