Orifices in Light

Details of Zalán Szakács's Lichtspiel during the FIBER Festival 2024 opening concert at Orgelpark.
Photo credit: Sabine van Nistelrooij

When choosing to write about Szakács's work I was initially uncertain about what I would be able to articulate. I would struggle to say that I saw the work Lichtspiel: Catoptric Theatre, much rather that I have come to experience it. 

Lichtspiel literally translates to ‘light games’ and one way to read the work would be simply to argue that it was akin to the games children play with their hands by forming shapes in front of a light source and having the shadows look like a bird, dog or a bull. This phenomenon is known to occur from around campfires to childhood beds during sleepovers. 

We have become so used to being enveloped in light even when it is dark and even when we are outside. Being in light means being safe and the shadows help with the myth-making but now everything is lit and there is nowhere to hide. Behind bars, shops on the street will keep their lights on to prevent people from stealing, parking lots will always have the faint glow of a green emergency exit sign above the doors and when walking down a street, entering the sight of a streetlamp, a passerby will do a double-take at their own shadow stretched across a building. We work like moths to a flame. 

That was not the case with the third iteration of Lichtspiel. It worked in inverse. Light needs the material to be seen and material, the building of the Orgelpark, needs light to be seen. They needed each other. Things in light are creeped on by shadows yet now I saw the structure as moving; sometimes the overhanging balcony, the edge of the organ and the corners. There are tricks that light plays on us and there was something about not seeing the original source of light but its spectral reflections from the mirrors of Szakács's mechanism move across the space of the Orgelpark that made it experiential– it worked like scaffolding. No, it was an organism.