Luzinterruptus

We continue developing new ideas while working on ongoing projects. Today we present “A Place to Rain”, a new work connected to our current interest in care, simple pleasures, analogue interaction and respect for the environment.

As climate change becomes increasingly evident — although some still go to great lengths to deny it — we find ourselves looking differently at things that once felt completely ordinary. Rain, sunshine, wind or tides now often arrive with warnings, predictions and fear.

We miss being able to simply watch the rain.

So we imagined a light installation where it rains: a place to step inside without rush or fear, get wet, play, walk under an umbrella and enjoy something as elemental as water falling around us.

Hundreds of simple metal lamps hang at different heights beneath a truss structure. Fine rain falls over them, runs across the metal and drops from one lamp to another. Cool light creates reflections, shadows and flashes, while thousands of drops hitting the metal produce an ever-changing soundscape.

The water is collected beneath a permeable platform, filtered and pumped back up in a closed loop, so nothing is wasted.

Visitors can choose how to enter: getting wet, using an umbrella, wearing a transparent poncho or putting on rubber boots.

And to recover a calmer way of looking at rain, we found ourselves returning to cinema — to rain on windows, puddles, reflections and water simply falling.

Luzinterruptus

Thanks ORA NEWS

Fifteen years after we first started bringing books into the streets to give them back space, light and readers, we are still moved to find new perspectives on Literature vs. Traffic.

It is probably our most referenced work, and one that seems to have acquired a life of its own over time. It keeps resurfacing in different countries, languages and contexts, while raising questions that remain painfully current: the place we give to culture, who occupies public space, and how much room we still leave to stop, read and think.

We were especially moved to see this article in Ora News bringing the work into conversation with writers we deeply admire — Borges, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Alberto Manguel — and their reflections on books, memory, reading and culture.

We like to think that a work does not end when it is dismantled. Sometimes it keeps travelling, is read again from somewhere else and, many years later, can still open a small door in someone’s mind.

Thank you Ora News and Albert Vataj for looking again at Literature vs. Traffic and keeping it in circulation.

https://www.oranews.tv/newsmobile/1345267/ Luzinterruptus

In Spain, new measures are beginning to come into force aimed at reducing packaging waste and progressively limiting certain single-use plastics. After decades of wrapping, packaging and protecting practically everything in plastic, it seems we are finally beginning to accept that perhaps using an almost indestructible material for objects designed to last only a few minutes was not such a good idea.

And, as has been happening lately with far too many environmental stories, we immediately thought of one of our pieces.

The Plastic We Live With was created in 2017 precisely from that feeling of literally living surrounded by plastic.

In its first version, we filled the windows of a building in Bordeaux with more than 6,000 used plastic bags. We wanted the building to look as if it were about to burst under the pressure of all the plastic accumulated inside. At night, illuminated from within, the bags transformed the windows into enormous plastic stained-glass windows: attractive from a distance, and considerably less beautiful once you thought about what they were made of.

The piece later travelled and evolved through different versions in Croatia, Essen, Mumbai and Buenos Aires, adapting each time to the architecture and context of the place. Thousands of used plastic bags and other discarded plastic materials occupied façades, windows and public spaces, always illuminated from within and always locally collected. Different cities, different landscapes, but the same uncomfortable abundance of plastic.

Almost ten years later, laws are finally beginning to place limits on some of these uses. We are glad. But all it takes is walking into a supermarket, receiving a parcel or looking at our rubbish at the end of the day to realise that The Plastic We Live With is still, unfortunately, a very literal title.

Hopefully, one day this piece will no longer make sense.

We would love to have to retire it.

The Plastic We Live With
2017–2026

https://www.luzinterruptus.com/?s=El+plástico+con+el+que+vivimos


Pictures: ABRAZO Ujwal Puri

In Spain, new measures are beginning to come into force aimed at reducing packaging waste and progressively limiting certain single-use plastics. After decades of wrapping, packaging and protecting practically everything in plastic, it seems we are finally beginning to accept that perhaps using an almost indestructible material for objects designed to last only a few minutes was not such a good idea.

And, as has been happening lately with far too many environmental stories, we immediately thought of one of our pieces.

The Plastic We Live With was created in 2017 precisely from that feeling of literally living surrounded by plastic.

In its first version, we filled the windows of a building in Bordeaux with more than 6,000 used plastic bags. We wanted the building to look as if it were about to burst under the pressure of all the plastic accumulated inside. At night, illuminated from within, the bags transformed the windows into enormous plastic stained-glass windows: attractive from a distance, and considerably less beautiful once you thought about what they were made of.

The piece later travelled and evolved through different versions in Croatia, Essen, Mumbai and Buenos Aires, adapting each time to the architecture and context of the place. Thousands of used plastic bags and other discarded plastic materials occupied façades, windows and public spaces, always illuminated from within and always locally collected. Different cities, different landscapes, but the same uncomfortable abundance of plastic.

Almost ten years later, laws are finally beginning to place limits on some of these uses. We are glad. But all it takes is walking into a supermarket, receiving a parcel or looking at our rubbish at the end of the day to realise that The Plastic We Live With is still, unfortunately, a very literal title.

Hopefully, one day this piece will no longer make sense.

We would love to have to retire it.

The Plastic We Live With
2017–2026

https://www.luzinterruptus.com/?s=El+plástico+con+el+que+vivimos


Pictures: Lola Martínez

These days in Spain, we have been looking a lot at the Sun and the Moon. After months of waiting for the total solar eclipse, it was impossible not to think of our own particular moon: the one we imagined made from the plastic waste that overwhelms us and is beginning to decorate, in a rather unpoetic way, all our landscapes.

Plastic Full Moon speaks of a perhaps not-so-distant future in which, after filling our seas, rivers, fields and cities with plastic, we no longer know what to do with everything we continue to produce and discard.

So we imagined that, when we finally run out of places to hide all that plastic, some bright spark might come up with the brilliant idea of sending it to the Moon.

Our moon was built from thousands of pieces of used and recovered plastic — bags, bottles, toys, packaging and all kinds of discarded objects — collected with the help of the local community. Lit from within and suspended in the air, they formed an enormous multicoloured celestial body that remained floating above the water for months and, surely, at some point also came between the Sun and those looking at it.

And so, while others decide where to put all our excess plastic, we will keep wearing our eclipse glasses to avoid looking directly at what is already dazzling us and causing harm.

Plastic Full Moon
Brunswick, Germany, 2024


Luzinterruptus