Stockholm, December 6, 2025

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Vernissage multiscreen installation darkness Matters at the Museum of Performing Arts / Scenkonst Museet

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​​The Museum of Performing Arts in collaboration with Fellonica Film AB, the Stockholm University of the Arts and the Royal Institute of Technology / NAVET presents Darkness Matters.

Darkness Matters by filmmaker, artist and educator Costanza Julia Bani – is a WIP of a multimediaproject dealing with reappropriation of the night sky. Deliberately slowing down the viewing pace, it is an invitation to physically interact with distilled natural phenomena. In the 24 minutes piece the audience is invited to an exercise in resilience, patience and meditation. An ideal movement from one altitudinal zonation to the other guides the observer from olive groves to forests, alpine meadows and mountain profiles by night to rediscover fireflies and the nocturnal vault with its milky way. 

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Darkness Matters is a film and sensory immersive audio-visual experience, almost and rather meditative, to invite the one watching and listening to readapt their eyes and ears to an environment farer and farer from anthropic activities and consequently rethink how to shape anthropized areas when it comes to the pervasive presence of the human species. 

Visitors arriving to the installation will be first conducted in a pre-room, free from the artificially lighten up surrounding. Their cones and rods – the photoreceptors used to adapt to light or darkness in the eye and their ears, will rest from the light and sounds outside and prepare to enter a larger room. 

 

In this room the visitors will be surrounded by moving images and sounds of a natural dark environment – olive groves and a wood, forests – while slowly adapting more to darkness. 

A play and experiment with resilience and patience begins, guiding the observer and listener through long takes and almost static images and these ambiences by night. 

The following settings suggest altitudinal zonation. The takes are more or less the same lengths and divided into three sessions, with a caesura between the different elevation zones. 

The movement will in fact be vertical, ideally bringing the audience from the foothill and hills zone with the men constructed terraces, a cultural landscape with the olive groves, to a montane zone with woods and forests, to pre-alpine and alpine meadows, a natural landscape, later following mountain profiles, tilting up into the sky above the horizon into the Milky Way, allowing a 5 minutes contemplation of our cosmological past, listening to interstellar sonification of satellite data.

 

25 minutes is the average time – according to ophthalmologist’s – the eyes need to have “full control” in the dark. 

The human eye can function from very dark to very bright levels of light; its sensing capabilities reach across nine orders of magnitude. This means that the brightest and the darkest light signal that the eye can sense are a factor of roughly 1.000.000.000 apart. However, in any given moment of time, the eye can only sense a contrast ratio of 1.000. What enables the wider reach is that the eye adapts its definition of what is black.

The eye takes approximately 20–30 minutes to fully adapt from bright sunlight to complete darkness and becomes 10.000 to 1.000.000 times more sensitive than at full daylight. Conversely, it takes approximately five minutes for the eye to adapt from darkness to bright sunlight. This is due to cones obtaining more sensitivity when first entering the dark for the first five minutes but the rods taking over after five or more minutes. Cone cells are able to regain maximum retinal sensitivity in 9–10 minutes of darkness whereas rods require 30–45 minutes to do so. 

In response to varying ambient light levels, rods and cones of eye function both in isolation and in tandem to adjust the visual system. Changes in the sensitivity of photoreceptors in the eye are the major contributors to dark adaptation. Above a certain luminance level, the cone mechanism is involved in mediating vision: photopic vision. Below this level, the rod mechanism comes into play providing scoptopic (night) vision. The range where two mechanisms are working together is called the mesopic range, as there is not an abrupt transition between the two mechanism.

 

In my installation the eyes of the audience will slowly start to meet fireflies and even the flash of a light house and a thunderstorm in the distance of an actually clear and starry night. 

The visitors can enjoy the marvel of the fireflies for approximately 5 minutes as well as 5 minutes of Milky Way filmed on the Gardetta Plateau in the Italian Maritime Alps – one of a few places in densely populated Europe where there is still a pristine sky, according to the Bortle Scale. They will have a fruition of site specific sounds, creatively designed together.

 

Humans “invade” eco-systems to satisfy their needs, building homes, lighting up their homes, historic monuments and creating sounds through any type of instrument that serves a duty or a pleasure, noises caused by industry and commerce, music in any form.

 

Starting from the artist’s reflection on disappearing fireflies in the country-side in her home-town, and ending up in the contemplation of the Milky Way, Costanza Julia Bani wants to provoke a thought about how we relate to darkness. 

A huge set of stars is mainly visible only where the sky is not permeated by skyglow and the city lights are far away enough to provide a dark surrounding. An orchestra of sounds from insects and animals, wind and vegetation, even rocks in more anthropized areas by olive groves terraces and alpine environments is inviting us to listen more carefully into soundscapes by night.

 

Although mediated through the cinematic device the purpose of Darkness Matters is to give back an experience as close as possible to “authenticity”, in the Greek sense of the word: pertaining to, in the manner of oneself.

 

Day needs night, light needs dark. Let's marvel at the incredible power of light and consequently of darkness and how living creatures dance among trees or the Milky Way describes its arc on the celestial nocturnal vault. 

Throughout the ages, light has fostered scientific discovery and technological innovation, and inspired creativity. Light shapes our world in profound ways. So darkness does. And the sonic evidence of acoustic memories as well.

 

As an artist, film-maker and producer Costanza Julia Bani feels that there is not much public awareness of what can be done in daily life and there is too little that becomes practice and gets executed. 

Illumination has always served both to enhance the beauty of buildings at night and to ensure visibility and safety in the street, functions that remain relevant today.

Since their introduction, light infrastructures have been managed by public authorities, with control increasing with the popularity of ornamental illumination during the 18th and 19th centuries. 

 

This installation would like to remind about how darkness can also be a comfortable place to be and we can walk on dark streets and look up at the sky to be face to face with the Universe. 

 

With Darkness Matters Costanza and her partners want to create a piece, that can be implemented in similar venues as well, to invite the audience and visitors to reflect on the unjustified fear of darkness, commonly used as an excuse in urban and extra-urban design of cities and rural areas to intervene with lighting systems that are actually not needed and indeed might on the contrary endanger present eco-systems or diminish human’s capacities to observe and make use of the benefits of an intact night sky. In the past many have observed the sky and studied nocturnal creatures, from petroglyph carvers, to astronomers, scientists and artists of all sorts, biologists, painters, novelists, poets.

 

This installation as shown at Scenkonstmuseet is a spin off, easier to distribute and use as a communication tool of artistic research in certain alternative distribution channels. It serves as a proof of concept for a larger multimedia project, that comprises a larger full-dome video.