BUGS - The Day of The Dead

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BUGS - The Day of The Dead is a light installation for the Light Festival Copenhagen, February 2022. The project received full funding from Copenhagen Light Festival & Københavns kommune. It was also installed in Fælledparken in autumn 2022.

 

BUGS are 10 lantern sculptures shaped like the heads of various species of insects. These large lanterns are created to hang on the existing light poles in the Remise Park, Copenhagen.  The project uses only the light that is already generated and adjusts it with the lanterns as shades, thus reducing light spreading from the lamps.

 

In the movement of the night air, the lanterns look like billowing masks, large glowing sculptures.  These are not depictions of real insects; the masks exaggerate and play with insects’ characteristics and features to bring out something magical, fantastic but also scary and disturbing. 

 

As in the Day of the Dead, a festival that carries both joy of memory and grief, these insect-like representations commemorate insects that are dead because of light pollution. The project speaks about the impact of light pollution on nocturnal creatures. 

 

The shapes and designs were developed together with a group of design students from the Royal Academy of Arts, Copenhagen. There were workshops with school children aged 10-12 who made their own insects' heads after an inspirational trip out in nature together with a biologist. Then details and patterns were added to the original shape to create these fantastic and magical heads.