COLLAGES

beforelight

 

Beforelight - workshop interior while collecting the lights

 

Dimitra Sotirchos is a trendwatcher specializing in fashion, arts & culture. With an MA in Innovation for Trend forecasting, she is currently developing a visual arts practice studying Environmental Art at The Glasgow School of Art. She has contributed to AnOther magazine and Dazed Digital and is also involved with the electronic dance music In London and loves yoga, currently training in Ariel yoga.

 

 

Beforelight is a Greek-based collective experimenting artistically with light. Staging urban interventions with innovative lighting design, their experiential projects provoke community interaction in public spaces, encouraging human encounters with artificial light.

 

Opportunities for artists to make work in and for other contexts and places are increasing. Through my interest in environmental art I contacted the group to find out more about their practice.

 

How do you feel light affects the community?

Light is very important in order to create atmosphere, mood and make a space inviting or hostile. In urban spaces, it is usually hard to change public lighting, thus you feel unable to have any saying in the way our cities are lit.However, we must not forget that public space lighting is a very recent commodity and there is a long way to go in developing it further, either in terms of technology or of artistic expression. We feel light is a very important factor on how we perceive space and it is also a “playful” element that should be more accessible to citizens.

What project have you created that you believe most reflects a hybrid between organic and digital materials?

“I see no sea” is the most hybrid, we believe. The visitor finds a wooden jetty inside an exhibition room. A wooden structure stands elevated over a thin layer of salt, tinted bleu by fluorescent lights. The installation is escorted by the multiplied sound of the visitors’ footsteps. The organic materials of wood, and salt create the platform for an outlandish environment, enhanced by the digitally reproduced and processed sound of footsteps.

 

 

Their latest project is installation ‘Under a different light’. The inventive public art happening is a collaborative initiative between Beforelight and Imagine the City, a cluster for regeneration. Local community members were invited to participate in the creation of the work, donating quirky lighting fixtures that were restored and hung in a small street in Athens. The space is redefined with celebratory spirit creating a warm and homely place to explore.

 

Dimitra Sotirchos

 

 

www.beforelight.gr

 

dimitra ‘s blog 

 

before the light

 

before the light