“WHERE IS EUROPE?” BRIGHT FESTIVAL 2024

SCOPE

Responding to visit.brussels' call for the Bright Festival 2024 edition, we seized the chance, encouraged by their open invitation to architects. Our choice of a sublime venue and our collaboration with exceptional professionals, coupled with a carefully woven narrative, led us to be selected as the winning team, in charge of lighting up the iconic Ravenstein Gallery over four magical evenings.

This presented us with a unique opportunity to design a scenography that went beyond a simple decorative light installation, evolving into a performance-like experience with the visitors playing the central roles.

DESIGN APPROACH

We linked our site to the festival’s “Europe” theme by uncovering that the Ravenstein Gallery once showcased Olivier Strebelle’s “Abduction of Europe” statue as a centerpiece to the fountain lying under the dome, now obscured by a wooden platform.

“Where is Europe?” emerged as the ideal name for our installation: a multifaceted question, primarily evoking the symbolism of the location as well as its projection. Tapping into Brussels’ multiculturalism as the spirit of Europe’s capital, we aimed to invite each visitor to bring their own identity and heritage beneath a shared roof, once graced by Strebelle’s statute of Europa and Zeus, its faded presence subtly evoking the intangible.

The dome as a “gathering” element would be highlighted as a striking architectural element, while on the ground, a stage mirroring the dome and its visitors would talk about absence and memory.

The installation

The result was a captivating 30-minutes journey through light and sound revealing parallel narratives of stone and land, water and light, presence and absence, all woven around the myth of Europa.

These stories ebb and flow from foreground to background, preventing a linear narrative and instead offering glimpses that invite the audience to continuously re-engage with the unfolding story.

⇧ The show “in the sky” — through the dome, the light installation reveals both its architectural majesty and its delicacy ⇧

Visitors engaged in unexpectedly delightful ways, transforming into the actors we envisioned on our "empty" stage. From children to the elderly, they approached the mirror surface with curiosity—stepping, jumping, lying down, holding hands, dancing, or simply closing their eyes to soak in the light spectacle unfolding above, all while enveloped by the resonating soundscape throughout the gallery.

As the lights dimmed off after four magical evenings, our ears continued to echo with the "dream" of Europe.

(...) she dreams of lands, she dreams of seas, she dreams of rivers, she dreams of trees (...)

Team work and backstage

Our main challenge was to how achieve a sensorial and visual impact with a minimal intervention. Our partners from More to Show were essential in optimizing the budget and transforming our vision into a feasible lighting scheme. Structural and light studies and team professionals turned our concept to life both in the ‘air’ as on the ground.

The talented Dejana Sekulic completed the installation with her sonic poem inspired by the by the mythology of Europe, and constructed around the concept of duality: lightness and darkness, motion and stillness, noise and silence, freedom and captivity. The light “performance” evolved in tandem, responding to and complementing the soundscape.