“Only when standing in a pitch-dark room do you realize that you actually start to see. Even in the perfect darkness, there is always some kind of light.” — John Duncan
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Darkness — true darkness — isn’t something I expect to see as a city traveler, in gothic cathedrals built to lift worshipers’ eyes to the heavens, or along club-lined streets at night, where cafés and dance halls glow beneath their neon marquees, and music pulses a bright night into morning. In a world obsessed with light, capturing the dance of sunlight on water in the smears of impressionist paintings, lighting glass buildings so they glow like lamps, or offering candles as tributes to its deities, we tend to forget what darkness is.
© junku-newcleus
We were in Stockholm on a whim; a long weekend and a game of airfare roulette with Germanwings had taken us from Berlin’s grey to Sweden’s shivering damp. At the last minute, our plans were vague. We had sketched ideas from a Lonely Planet guide to Europe and a few quick internet searches. It was a whirlwind tour, a city-break; it wouldn’t be a deep visit.
The one must-see stop on our list, the Färgfabriken, an avant-garde contemporary art gallery, was outside of the tourist centre of Stockholm, in an industrial area. To reach it, we trudged through the snow and ankle-deep puddles of slush, past chain-link fences and seeping brick walls, along a narrow, icy, and at that time of day, poorly lit alleyway. It seemed remote, tucked away in an alcove of industry, a paint factory built in 1889, lacking the ostentatious signs that lead to more mainstream museums, like a secret that everyone knows.
The building intrigued us as much as whatever it might be exhibiting. The Färgfabriken is a space David Byrne once turned into a musical instrument, inviting visitors to ‘play the building’, using the acoustics of the space to create music. The installation which opened when we were in the city was another musical experiment, but one of a different sort. John Duncan, a controversial American artist whose works skirt the boundaries of human fear, was exhibiting ‘The Gauntlet,’ a piece which rather than creating harmonies from the sounds of the building, interacts with the visitors’ own reactions to the sound of seven-motion triggered burglar alarms, blending in a pitch dark space.
© Mayr
A bar table outside the door to Duncan’s exhibit offered a table of flashlights, to navigate the space within. We tried one after another, never eliciting more than a flicker of light which faded as quickly as it appeared. Finally, we ducked through the curtain, armed with the plastic flashlights to defend ourselves against whatever we might find inside, rather than to light the way.
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and even then, the supporting poles were more obscure than shadows on shadows, invisible until I was upon them. Along the walls, I could feel the cold roughness of the brick, but I couldn’t see it. My friends called to one another, to me, looking for one another in the dark, but other than that, the only sound was cloth brushing against brick, bodies bumping into hard surfaces, fingers feeling the way. Where the darkness was deepest, I could see nothing at all, and rather than straining to catch a tiny point of light, closed my eyes.
Then the alarms began, startling, loud, then louder and louder as more were triggered. If you stopped moving, the alarms would stop, but people moved toward the exit, where the darkness wasn’t so full, to get away from the noise, making it louder with each miss-step. It was terrifying, in the darkness, to be assaulted by sound. Rather than running, I paused to think about sound, and as it washed over me, a sense of exhilaration mingled with my fear.
The experience was inward, as much a display of reactions and feelings — mine, and those of the others wading through the darkness — as much as the sensory experience of the installation. I lay down on my back on the floor, and as the sound rolled over me, my grasping sense of fear drifted away. The cold of a floor, the roar of sirens, a shade of black I’d never seen; in Stockholm in February, in a 100-year-old factory, I learned darkness.