Darkness Matters

Darkness Matters is a multimedia project about nocturnal environments and light pollution. Artist, filmmaker and documentary producer, Costanza Julia Bani is interested in the reception and experience of darkness. Appealing to sensory experiences, she aims to debunk the ordinary fear of darkness and remind us of the starry nights we can hardly see anymore.

Darkness Matters is a multiscreen installation blending scientific insight with poetic storytelling, offering a layered, sensory narrative that asks us to slow down, look closer, and reimagine our place in the night. The narrative arc is built along altitudinal zonation. The journey begins in the Tuscan foothills, among olive groves in a cultural landscape, where memory, landscape and nightfall converge. By directly engaging our senses and combining auditory-sensory connections, the installation offers a visual experience around darknesses and light pollution. Previously presented in The Nordic Journal of Artistic Research and as a virtual exhibition, Darkness Matters is evolving into a collective artistic research project exploring speculative audio-visual methodologies using specialised hardware and generative AI to pre-visualise and pre-sonify potential future landscapes. In collaboration with Tekniska Museet and Vetenskapens Hus, the project will be presented in venues and schools, expanding interdisciplinary discourse at the intersection of science, technology, and the arts.